But in my experience, if you only worked on things for which you were already hot shit, you …

25 years ago or so, I got a contract doing Word Basic to update a bunch of code to maintain an ISO 9001 handbook using MS Help files. I had.no experience with any of those things. But as you say, you get the tasks nobody internally want, so I learned all of them, and still finished the work faster than the client expected and was hired back for another project later. I also had a brief contract to teach Excel where I stayed a chapter ahead of my students in class , and similarly got great feedback... So much contract work has a really low bar. But then on the other side of the difficulty, I also delivered a library to provide a reliable data transfer layer on top of GSM data for use between two ships in motion (just adding some retries and automated redial etc. the only hard-ish part was minimizing the time to catch up after a redial where you might be suddenly lagging 40+ seconds behind…

>you can get away with tap-dancing for a while Spits out coffee. Beautiful. If you made that you deserve a prize.