Speaking as Oracle consultant, very often you have no clue how much work is going to be there until you are there. We are very lucky if management actually listens to what you need. Which is often very simple things such as fix reoccuring errors, upgrade components that keep crashing, put decent monitoring in place, make sure the backup strategy makes sense and test the backups.

I've been in situations where I was contracted for 30 hours to "just help us deploy X", discovered what the database looks like and have been able to upgrade my contract to 300 hours of upgrades, monitors, automation, backup verifications, etc.

I can see how this looks like a contractor trying to create lots of work, but all this work did have good reasons behind it.

I have to sell my rationale for extra work to the customer and it is not always trivial. Often it is easier to say "well, its your data, its not like its my problem that your backups are untested", but I wouldn't be in this business if I didn't care about data being safe.

I completely agree that contractors are more focused than employees on getting the job done well.

Once I've overheard two developers talk about me: "Well, of course Gwen is always cheerful and always happily does what we ask, she's a contractor - thats how they do their marketing.". I'm proud of cheerfully and competently doing my job. I'm always wondering why many full-time DBAs act like they are doing you a favor when they create indexes, clone production to development and generally do what they were hired to do.