The recession (if that's the right word) changed that landscape. It might work in niches or for established relationships when the principal and the hired telecommunter know and trust each other. In fact, I worked as an independent contractor for a long time in the 90s and rarely had to leave my house.
Today, contract work that is advertized, is all on site. The difference between conract and direct hire is that with direct hire the company looks for personality as well as for skill sets as they contemplate eventual promotions to leadership. Contract work is more narrowly focused on the skills. The wages are pretty much equalized, contract or W2.
The numbers that I have heard explain why the programmer has little leverage. A job posting generates hundreds of resumes that pass the initial automated screening for busswords. A job posting in a well-known company like Microsoft generates thousands. It is worse in California, where a lot of them are. Here, the hiring managers advertise everything and a kitchen sink as required skills, apparently in order to get precisely the profile they want.
Here's an example:
Skills:Basically, they want someone their direct competitor just laid off. They may get that, too as the big name companies shed employees by the thousand, often without regard for professional ability.
· Strong background in C coding, especially product coding, stack codes. Along with Block level data movement and Block to filesystem translation
· Strong demonstrated knowledge of multi-threading, socket programming, RPC, TCP/IP and interprocess communication is a must.
· Strong analytical and debugging skills for trouble shooting and root causing bugs and customer issues.
· Experience implementing for large scale Enterprise wide distributed systems
· In-depth demonstrated operating system knowledge of UNIX (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and Linux) and WINDOWS
· Experience with Filers and NAS devices technologies is a plus.
· Experience with Database technologies is a plus.
· Understanding of CIFS, NFS, SAN, DAS, NAS and Clustering, Storage devices, Disk.
· Knowledge of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAP, XML)
buzzwords.