Why companies hire me, and why I could never go back to nine to five

The question, and the assumption inside it

There is a question I get asked more often than you might expect. Usually over a drink, usually by someone who has just watched me disappear into a project for a week and come out looking like I have been living in a cave: why do companies hire you instead of just employing someone?

The question comes with an assumption baked in. The assumption is that contractors exist because people like me are easier to get rid of. Hire for a project, wave goodbye when it is done, no redundancy packages, no awkward conversations, no HR paperwork. And fair enough, that is part of it. But it is not the interesting part.

The interesting part is something most people do not talk about, because it makes everyone slightly uncomfortable. It is about time. Specifically, it is about how much of it I am willing to give when the situation demands it, and how employment law limits that arrangement the moment you put me on payroll.

The convenient explanation is true, and incomplete

Let me get the obvious part out of the way. Yes, contractors are easier to engage and disengage. If a project ends, the contract ends. If the budget disappears, so do I. There is a cleanness to it that employment lacks. Employees come with notice periods, redundancy calculations, potential claims at the Workplace Relations Commission, and the general sense that once someone is on your payroll, parting ways is an emotional and administrative ordeal.

But here is the thing: most of my projects are not short. I have worked with clients for years. The paperwork might technically be a contract with an end date, but the relationship is as stable as any employment. Some of my longest professional relationships are with companies that could have employed me a dozen times over. They chose not to. And when I ask them why, the answer is never about the flexibility to end things. It is about the flexibility to work.

The real reason is time, and the law around it

Employment law is built on a reasonable and humane premise: workers should not be exploited. In Ireland there are limits on how many hours someone can work on average, and rights to rest between working days and during them. These protections exist because, without them, employers historically ground people down for profit.

I have no quarrel with these laws. They protect people who need protecting. But they also create an interesting asymmetry.

If you employ someone in Ireland, the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997 sets the rules.¹ An employer may not let an employee work more than an average of 48 hours a week, calculated over a reference period that is normally four months, six in some cases, and up to 12 under a collective agreement approved by the Labour Court.² The section gives the employee no way to sign that average away in writing. An employee is entitled to at least 11 consecutive hours of rest in every 24 hour period in which they work for their employer,³ and to a break of at least 15 minutes after four and a half hours and of 30 minutes after six.⁴ There are listed exceptions, such as the change of shift in shift work, work spread out over the day, activities the Minister exempts by regulation, and emergencies or unforeseeable circumstances beyond the employer's control,⁵⁶ and even then the employer must make sure the employee gets an equivalent rest afterwards.⁷

These are not suggestions. They are law, and an employer who ignores them takes on the liability.

Worked example: which rule actually stops the marathon

The weekly limit is more forgiving than it sounds, because it is an average. An example, with invented numbers. Averaged over a four month reference period, roughly 17 weeks, 48 hours a week allows $48 \times 17 = 816$ hours in total. If a launch week takes 80 hours, the other 16 weeks share what is left, $(816 - 80) \div 16 = 736 \div 16 = 46$ hours a week. So one heavy week fits inside the average, as long as the weeks around it are normal.

The daily rest is the rule that bites. If 11 of every 24 hours belong to rest, the longest stretch of work inside a 24 hour period is $24 - 11 = 13$ hours. A 38 hour session is nearly three times that. An employer cannot make that the plan for an employee, the exceptions only move the rest to later, and no responsible employer would ask.

Now consider a startup with a product launch in 72 hours. Or an agency that just won a pitch and promised delivery on a timeline that seemed reasonable until everyone did the maths. Or a retailer whose whole eCommerce platform has fallen over on the first day of its biggest sale. These situations exist. They happen more often than anyone in a boardroom likes to admit. And when they happen, someone needs to work in ways that an employment contract does not allow.

That someone is me. The Act protects employees, meaning people who work under a contract of employment.⁸ Someone who runs their own business and takes responsibility for its success or failure is self employed and has no such contract, because they are their own boss. Even among employees, the part of the Act that holds the rest periods, the breaks and the weekly average does not apply to a person who decides the length of their own working time,⁹ which is where a company director who sets their own hours usually sits. Either way, the rules that protect an employee from a 38 hour day do not stop me from choosing one.

What a 38 hour day actually looks like

I have worked 38 hours without stopping. Not regularly. Not as a lifestyle. But when it was necessary, when the deadline was real and the stakes were high and there was genuinely no other way. I have done it, and I will probably do it again.

Let me tell you what that looks like for me, because the number sounds absurd until you have lived it.

It starts normally enough. I open my laptop, at a client's office or at home, coffee in hand, to do list in mind. The first eight hours pass like any working day. Then the evening arrives and I keep going, because the work is flowing and the deadline is not going to move. Around midnight, I hit a wall. My body wants sleep. My brain feels like wet cement. I push through with caffeine, with movement, with sheer stubbornness. And then something strange happens.

Around hour 16 or 18, a second wind arrives. My body has accepted that sleep is not coming, and it stops complaining. I enter a state of focus that is almost meditative. The code flows. Problems that seemed intractable at hour 10 suddenly have obvious solutions. I am not quite hallucinating, but reality takes on a slightly dreamlike quality. The edges are soft. Distractions do not register. It is just me and the work.

By hour 24, I am running on something beyond caffeine. There is a momentum to it, a strange euphoria that comes from knowing I am doing something most people cannot or will not do. The work is getting done. The impossible deadline is becoming possible. I can feel the finish line.

Hours 30 to 38 are a blur in memory. I know I was working because the commits are there, the deploys happened, the thing shipped. But I cannot tell you what I was thinking, because by that point I was not thinking in words. I was thinking in shapes and patterns, in flows of logic that bypassed the verbal parts of my brain entirely.

And then it is done. I close the laptop. I sleep for 14 hours. I wake up feeling like I have been hit by a lorry, but also like I have done something remarkable. Because I have.

The clients who need this

I am not going to pretend that every client needs marathon sessions. Most do not. Most projects proceed at a sensible pace with reasonable hours, and everyone goes home at a civilised time. That is the default. That is what the contract assumes.

But some projects are different. Some projects arrive already on fire.

I have worked with food delivery platforms rebuilding payment systems while orders were still flowing through the old one. Every minute of downtime was real money lost, real customers frustrated, real competitors gaining ground. The work had to happen fast, it had to happen right, and it had to happen in a window no employment lawyer would sign off.

I have worked with major retailers launching eCommerce platforms for Black Friday, where the deadline was not negotiable. The advertising was already booked, the stock was already in the warehouses, and a million customers were already planning to visit. The site would go live on that date or careers would end. We made it live. I do not remember much of the final 48 hours, but I remember the champagne.

I have worked with startups preparing for investor demonstrations where the product had to work, had to look polished and had to not embarrass anyone, and the demo was in 36 hours. The features were half built. The design was not finalised. The founder was panicking. We shipped something that looked like months of work. It had been a day and a half.

These clients do not hire me because I am easier to let go. They hire me because, when the situation demands it, I will work in ways an employee legally cannot be asked to. I work until the work is done, however long that takes, without anyone worrying about working time compliance or duty of care on my hours. I am a grown adult making a choice about how to spend my time. That choice is mine to make.

Focus is the other half

There is something else that makes the marathon sessions possible, something beyond stubbornness and caffeine. It is the ability to focus for long periods without distraction.

I do not know if this is a skill I developed or a trait I was born with. Probably both. But I can enter a state of concentration that blocks out everything else. Hunger, fatigue, the passage of time, background noise, the existence of my phone, all of it fades until there is nothing but the problem and the solution taking shape under my fingers.

This sounds mystical when I describe it, but it feels mechanical when I experience it. It is not an elevated spiritual state. It is that everything else has been switched off. The part of my brain that would normally interrupt me with thoughts about lunch, or that email I need to send, or whether I paid the electricity bill, just goes quiet. What remains is the work.

I can hold a lot of complexity in my head at once in this state. The architecture of a system, the dependencies between components, the edge cases that might break things, the order in which operations need to happen. I can see all of it together, like a three dimensional diagram floating in my mind. Change one piece and I can trace the ripples through the whole structure.

That is why I work in long sessions rather than short ones. The setup cost is high. Getting into the state takes time. If I work for two hours and then break for a meeting, I lose the state and have to rebuild it from scratch.

Worked example: why long blocks win

Take my own rough figure of one hour to get into the state, and assume, for the example, that the hour is the same every time I start.

A 12 hour block pays the setup once, so the productive share is $(12 - 1) \div 12 = 11 \div 12 \approx 92\%$. A day broken into two hour blocks between meetings pays the setup every time, so each block gives $(2 - 1) \div 2 = 50\%$. Same day, same person, nearly twice the useful share of hours in the long block. The maths favours long blocks.

Employment law does not let an employer build a plan on blocks that long. But I am not an employee. I choose this because it is how I work best.

The trade is chaos for freedom

Now here is the part where I tell you the price, and I do not mean what I charge.

The price of being able to work 38 hours when necessary is being able to take a random Tuesday off when I feel like it. The price of being available for a crisis at 3am is being unavailable entirely when I decide to disappear. The price of intensity is freedom.

I have lost count of the times I have finished a brutal project, closed my laptop, booked a flight leaving in four hours, and been on a beach or a mountain or wandering through a foreign city by the next morning. No notice period. No covering my shifts. No explaining to HR why I need the time off. Just: the work is done, I am tired, I am going somewhere else now.

This is the balance. Not balance in the sense of sensible hours every day. Balance in the sense of intense compression followed by total release. Weeks of 60 hour effort followed by weeks of doing absolutely nothing productive. A rhythm that would make any corporate HR department twitch, and that suits me perfectly.

I cannot do this as an employee. Even with a generous leave policy, even with an understanding manager, the structure of employment assumes regularity. It assumes I will be there on Monday. It assumes I will attend the weekly standup. It assumes I will be reachable during business hours. The whole system is built around predictable presence.

Contractor life lets me be unpredictable. I can give you all of my attention for a week, and then none of it for a month. I can be the most available person you have ever worked with, and then be completely unreachable. The relationship is transactional in the best sense: when there is work to be done, I am there. When there is not, I am not. Nobody owes anyone anything beyond what was agreed.

On pricing and value

I should address the elephant in the room. My rates are not the lowest you will find, not by a considerable margin. If you are shopping for the lowest priced developer, I am not the right person.

But I am also not the most expensive. I know what the market looks like. I know what the big consultancies charge. My rates are fair for what I deliver, which is not just hours worked but problems solved under conditions that would break most engagements. The published prices and hourly rates are on the site, for anyone who wants the numbers before the conversation.

Here is how I think about pricing. You are not paying for my time. You are paying for my ability to compress time. A problem that would take an average developer a month might take me a week. Not because I am smarter, but because I can focus longer, I have seen similar problems before, and I am willing to work in ways that employment law would not permit if you put me on payroll.

When you hire me for a crisis, you are paying for the fact that I can be in a room with your panicking stakeholders at 9pm and still be in that room at 9am the following day, with the problem solved, while everyone else went home to sleep. You are paying for the fact that I have done this before and I will not panic. You are paying for certainty in a situation that feels chaotic.

Is that worth a premium? I think so. The clients who hire me repeatedly seem to think so too. The ones who balk at the rate usually come back later, after they have tried the lower priced option and discovered why it cost less.

Why I could never go back

Sometimes people ask if I have ever considered just taking a job. A proper job. Salary, benefits, pension, predictable income, the whole package. The question usually comes with a tone that suggests I am missing something obvious, that contractor life is a phase I should eventually grow out of.

I understand the appeal of employment. I really do. The security of knowing that money arrives in your account every month, whether or not you found new work. The comfort of a permanent team around you. The benefits that come with scale: healthcare plans, office snacks, someone else handling your taxes. These are not nothing.

But every time I seriously consider it, I think about what I would lose.

I would lose the ability to work the way I work. To disappear into a project for a week, and then disappear from work for a week. To set my own hours, my own priorities, my own pace.

I would lose the ability to say no. An employee cannot easily decline a meeting because it breaks their flow. An employee cannot turn down a project because it does not interest them. During working hours, their time belongs to someone else.

I would lose the ability to travel on a whim. To wake up on a Wednesday, decide I am going to Portugal, and be in Portugal by dinner. To take a month off because I want to, not because I have built up enough leave days.

I would lose the ability to earn without a ceiling. An employee's salary is negotiated once a year. A contractor's income is, in theory, limited only by how much work exists and how much of it you can handle. Good years can be very good.

And I would lose the identity. This is harder to put into words, but it matters. Being a contractor is not just how I work. It is who I am. I am someone who trades security for freedom, who bets on himself, who takes the risk that there might not be work next month in exchange for controlling how the work gets done. That identity would not survive an employment contract.

The type of person who does this

Not everyone is built for this life. I want to be clear about that. The rhythm I have described, intense work followed by total freedom, would wear many people down completely. They need predictability. They need boundaries between work and life that I do not have. They need to know what next Tuesday looks like.

There is nothing wrong with needing those things. Most people need them. Employment exists because most people work better within structure. The protections that employment law provides are not unnecessary. They are essential for the majority of workers, who would otherwise be exploited.

But some of us are wired differently. Some of us find structure suffocating rather than supportive. Some of us would rather have chaos with freedom than order with constraint. Some of us are happier working 60 hours one week and none the next than working 40 hours every week forever.

I do not know why I am this way. Maybe it is personality. Maybe it is the particular mix of traits that also makes me good at focusing for long periods and bad at tolerating meetings. Maybe it is a preference that grew out of experience. The origin does not matter much. What matters is that I know myself well enough to know what works.

Contractor life works. Employment would not.

The freedom at the end of the tunnel

Let me leave you with an image.

It is the end of a brutal project. The one where we worked around the clock for the final three days. The site launched, the systems held, the client is happy, the invoices are sent. I am exhausted in that complete way where even my bones feel tired.

I open a flight booking site. I look for somewhere warm, somewhere with nothing to do, somewhere my email will not reach. I find a flight leaving in five hours. I book it. I pack a bag. I get a taxi to the airport.

Somewhere over the Mediterranean, the exhaustion turns into something else. Satisfaction. Pride. And underneath it, a bubbling joy that comes from knowing I am free. No one expects me anywhere. No one is waiting for a status update. No one owns my time for the next two weeks.

I land. I find a hotel. I sleep for 14 hours. I wake up and have breakfast at a cafe overlooking the water. I have nothing to do except exist.

This is the payoff. This is what the 38 hour days buy. Not just money, though the money is good. Freedom. The genuine, unmistakable freedom of a life where work is intense but temporary, where deadlines are real but so are the spaces between them, where no one owns me except myself.

I could not trade this for a pension plan. I could not trade it for dental insurance. I could not trade it for the feeling of security that employment provides while it takes your best hours for someone else's benefit.

This is why companies hire me. And this is why I will never be an employee again.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Organisation of Working Time Act 1997 (No. 20 of 1997), Irish Statute Book, Office of the Attorney General, 1997, https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1997/act/20/enacted/en/print.html

2. Organisation of Working Time Act 1997, section 15, weekly working hours, Irish Statute Book, Office of the Attorney General, https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1997/act/20/section/15/enacted/en/html

3. Organisation of Working Time Act 1997, section 11, daily rest period, Irish Statute Book, Office of the Attorney General, https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1997/act/20/section/11/enacted/en/html

4. Organisation of Working Time Act 1997, section 12, rests and intervals at work, Irish Statute Book, Office of the Attorney General, https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1997/act/20/section/12/enacted/en/html

5. Organisation of Working Time Act 1997, section 4, exemptions for shift work and other activities, Irish Statute Book, Office of the Attorney General, https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1997/act/20/section/4/enacted/en/html

6. Organisation of Working Time Act 1997, section 5, exceptional circumstances or emergencies, Irish Statute Book, Office of the Attorney General, https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1997/act/20/section/5/enacted/en/html

7. Organisation of Working Time Act 1997, section 6, equivalent compensatory rest, Irish Statute Book, Office of the Attorney General, https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1997/act/20/section/6/enacted/en/html

8. Organisation of Working Time Act 1997, section 2, definitions of employee and contract of employment, Irish Statute Book, Office of the Attorney General, https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1997/act/20/section/2/enacted/en/html

9. Organisation of Working Time Act 1997, section 3(2)(c), people who decide the length of their own working time, Irish Statute Book, Office of the Attorney General, https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1997/act/20/section/3/enacted/en/html