As someone on the other side of the coin (I've paid contractors on the order of 15-20k a week), your post couldn't be further from the truth. The reason I have

As someone on the other side of the coin (I've paid contractors on the order of 15-20k a week), your post couldn't be further from the truth. The reason I have to pay that much money is because that person's skills are in such high demand and the value they bring is incredibly high that the last thing I would ever do is piss them off and have them work elsewhere. That said contracts like that in my case were short term and tightly scoped, usually 6 months long and with very specific objectives. Areas of expertise I've hired people for were security/cryptography, custom database development/optimizations and network optimization (ie. Infiniband).