February 03, 2026
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Tech teams hire contractors for two things: expertise and speed.
Yet, as a software engineering contractor, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve sat idle for days, sometimes weeks, unable to proceed with my tasks because someone forgot to grant access to a Slack channel or an API key.
The irony is expensive: managers pay premium rates for immediate impact, then block that impact with preventable onboarding failures.
As a contractor for more than seven years, working across small startup teams to large enterprises, I saw this pattern everywhere: engineering managers treating contractors as if they were full-time employees.
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February 03, 2026
