I spent 10+ years doing contract software work, and several of my friends work for contracting firms, and I have seen this pathology a lot.<p><i>Don&#x27;t</i> stay up until 2AM working on your contracting firm&#x27;s projects. <i>Don&#x27;t</i> personalize contract assignments. <i>Don&#x27;t</i> act for your firm&#x27;s clients like you&#x27;re their full-time employee: you aren&#x27;t. <i>Don&#x27;t</i> assume clients are OK with you coming in super late because that&#x27;s what programmers do: many aren&#x27;t OK with that.<p>There are some really great things about working for contracting firms: you get a W2 and benefits and mostly all the downside risk protection of an employee while getting exposed to all the random projects a consultancy gets. You get to dip your toes into lots of different projects. And when you get sick of a certain kind of project, often, you can easily no-harm no-foul switch to other projects. Contracting firms can be great.<p>But if you try to treat a contracting firm the way you would a startup or tech product company, things are going to suck for you. In particular: you <i>must</i> force yourself to deliver a day&#x27;s worth of work and then put things down. If you&#x27;re compulsive and need to work late into the night, <i>stop doing client work</i>, and switch to personal projects.<p>Contracting firms usually can&#x27;t bill for your 2AM binge coding session. Clients generally want to pay for work done during business hours on a well-defined schedule. It does not matter that you believe that&#x27;s not how software is delivered; it&#x27;s how software is bought. If you run yourself ragged refactoring things until late in the evening, your contracting firm isn&#x27;t going to be impressed with you: they&#x27;re going to see, from 1000 miles away, that you&#x27;re burning yourself out pointlessly in a manner that isn&#x27;t going to make them an extra penny, and they&#x27;re going to get pissed.