> I have an interesting niche for contracting too: I'm pretty good at UI & back-end at the same time.
Don't mean to piss on your fireworks but any company that's going to be able to pay you worthwhile contractor fees is going to have budget to hire a UI guy and a backend guy, and probably a product manager in between them to manage communication.
If you were on the other hand a usability expert with blog posts, conference speeches having invented practices that are now 'best practices' (e.g. you were advocating CSS when tables were the norm) then you're the kind of thing the OP is talking about.
Likewise for security experts, SEO experts, front end performance experts etc. I can recall experts in those fields by name as the de facto canonical resource in their given fields, but I can't think of anyone who is known for being a jack of all trades, renaissance man type character.
Though to be fair, it is a lot of fun to dabble in lots of different technologies and fields, and is more or less a requirement for working as a full-time web developer.
Its ok, I wasn't really trying to set off fireworks... just to offer a little of my experience :)
I've found that there are quite a few companies that can pay me worthwhile contractor fees yet cannot budget to have a UI guy, a backend guy, and a product manager as employees.
I know the perspective of the post was from a specialist perspective, I'm just pointing out that there are also plenty of smaller companies that cannot afford 3 full-time employees, or perhaps don't even have enough work to keep 3 full-time employees busy.
This is typically handled by an "agency" of some sort (design agency, development house, etc.), but there is also a large market of small companies that prefer to just interact with one person for simplicity's sake.
Its kind of like serving the "long tail" of companies wanting some sort of software services but can't afford IBM's consulting fees, or a full-time employee to do what they need.
I agree totally that there is a big market for your friendly, do-it-all web developer for small businesses. And you're right in that they probably don't have the budget for hiring specialists in their respective fields. The vast majority of my freelance clients are in this market, so its one I know well.
The part where I have a difference of a opinion is here:
> I've found that there are quite a few companies that can pay me worthwhile contractor fees yet cannot budget to have a UI guy, a backend guy, and a product manager as employees.
Specifically, the definition of 'worthwhile contractor fee'.
The average ho-hum web developer with a few years of experience, the LAMP stack, JS/HTML/CSS who can tell the difference between an abstract factory and an anonymous function in London can easily pick up a £250-£350 ($380-$540) per day contract. I would fall (just about) into this category. This however is not the type of engagement I believe the OP was talking about, and not what I was referring to when I said 'worthwhile contractor fee'.
The sort of fees I was referring (and I believe the OP is referring to also) to are going to be about one order of magnitude higher than the amounts mentioned above. Hypothetically, imagine what sort of fees you'd be paying John Resig or David Crockford to consult on your organizations frontend code, or DHH to consult on Rails, or Steve Souders to consult on frontend performance, or Chris Shiflett to harden your PHP apps security.
While the examples I've given their sound like special cases of internet celebrities, there are really real people making a happy living doing this sort of work at very high (i.e. 'worthwhile') rates. I personally know of technical contractors who are paid more than £1k/day (specifically in database performance, and website conversion), and thats just within my immediate circle.
On the other side of the fence, at one one of my previous companies (which wasn't that big, 30-40 staff) we had a team of developers with QA, a separation between front/back/sysadmins, but no one with dedicated database performance experience/skills. We had budget for (and would have gladly paid) something like £10k for a database performance specialist with good references to come in for a week or two, show us what we could do to make our db perform better at scale and establish some best practices for doing things right going forward.
Ah, ok. Yes, you're right then I'm probably not making "worthwhile contractor fees" then. We're pretty frugal considering we're a family of four living in a very nice part of our city.
However we also live in one of the cheapest areas of the U.S. So my rates would probably be seen as a pittance in any globally relevant metropolitan area.
Also this is certainly not the type of engagement the OP was talking about, I just thought I'd offer up a counter-point that you can also make a decent living contracting and not have a niche.
Or rather, make a living in an economic niche instead of a technical one (but still with technical skills).
Having multiple developers and a manager means the project is going to get bogged down in meetings and communication.
Sure, he may be slightly cheaper than hiring a UI guy and a backend guy and a product manager, but I bet he's actually faster, too (at least in some situations).
Not applicable. The Mythical Man-Month says that if you have a library of 10 functions, getting 10 people to work on it will not get it done 10x faster than having one person work on it. If you have a team of three where one person does A/B UI testing, the second fixes memory leaks in the data storage backend, and the third sends bills to the customers and goes golfing with potential clients, well... that's not what the Mythical Man-Month is talking about. That's simply a well-run business.
Don't mean to piss on your fireworks but any company that's going to be able to pay you worthwhile contractor fees is going to have budget to hire a UI guy and a backend guy, and probably a product manager in between them to manage communication.
If you were on the other hand a usability expert with blog posts, conference speeches having invented practices that are now 'best practices' (e.g. you were advocating CSS when tables were the norm) then you're the kind of thing the OP is talking about.
Likewise for security experts, SEO experts, front end performance experts etc. I can recall experts in those fields by name as the de facto canonical resource in their given fields, but I can't think of anyone who is known for being a jack of all trades, renaissance man type character.
Though to be fair, it is a lot of fun to dabble in lots of different technologies and fields, and is more or less a requirement for working as a full-time web developer.