It might be easier to think of $200k as -only- $100 an hour. That is not a very high rate for a contractor. Anyone here who has been through a contracting compa

It might be easier to think of $200k as -only- $100 an hour. That is not a very high rate for a contractor. Anyone here who has been through a contracting company has probably been billed at that rate. The most successful that I've seen has always been one of three things. All of these can be traced back to people I know making over $200k in the software industry. #1) Knowing a niche technology and/or industry, finding a company that needs to staff and going in as a self-employed contractor instead of an employee. I had friends making $200 an hour in 1999 because of this. I'd like to say they were working in Lotus at the time, but I don't really remember. Find a company and say "I live right down the street, you need X and it is hard to find, you can either have me show up every day or have someone a few thousand miles work on it" - for some companies it is easily worth the extra $40-$60k to have someone local. #2) Working on a well known technology but having something important on your resume - and still going in as a self-employed contractor. Being able to say that you are a major Spring contributor will open doors. Being able to point to your name on the list of authors of Hibernate opens more doors. It doesn't even matter if all you did was help update the docs. It's just a selling point, and it works. Most enterprise shops will think about it like this; "Either we hire Bob who did some spring work for x-corp, or we pay an additional 40k and we get Lisa who helped write Spring. If you ask me it's worth it to get Lisa". #3) Biting the Enterprise Application Architecture Bullet - and going in as a self-employed contractor Can you confidently whiteboard the entire Oracle Enterprise Suite? Can you talk about JMS queues, BI managers, the E-Business Suite and all that, ahem, stuff? There's plenty of companies who have built very complex solutions to simple problems and they need someone that knows how the wiring is supposed to work. ...that's the extent of how I've seen it work. All three share the same trait; find a company in need and pitch yourself as a contractor. So I missed the whole advice thing. Here's what I'd say: If all you want to do is make money then get yourself in as a contractor for a specific industry. Let's say that is shipping, or distribution, or something along those lines. The more time you spend doing X work for X industry the more valuable you become. If you can walk into X-Shipping-Corp and you can name-drop things like "Parcel Size Distribution" you'll probably be fast-tracked into compensation discussions. To give you a real world example, I did lots of travel software work years ago, just being able to walk in and say "I worked with Sabre Worldspan and Galileo" was enough to get me to an offer. Hell, I didn't even need to explain what I knew about them (which wasn't much!). That's really if you just want to make money. It isn't glamorous work, and it pushes you into a very specific bucket, but you will most-likely be well compensated.