Was this still true after all the taxes, insurance, and stability factors are considered, or was this just your hourly rate?
I was in London working in web & finance at the time, so it was a fairly distorted market. I did get bitten by the dot com crash, but even so I was only out of work for about 6 months or so and that was a pretty extreme event. Realistically in the current environment job stability in a major IT centre like London is so good that contracting is pretty safe. In a more unstable market there would be a higher element of risk, for sure.
In the UK you would normally expect 3x for a short 6 month contract.
I suspect IT contractors are not seen as real professionals in the British class structure
Curious if that is actually true when comparing to tier 1 banks/hedge funds full time employee salaries+bonus+retirement+healthcare.
Assume 600 GBP/day * 22 day/month * 10 months (realistically) full time work, that's 132k/yr.
From that take out accounting, illness, insurance, healthcare, retirement, travel, possibly more.
All things considered, once you get above 100k base as employee contracting becomes less attractive. Strictly as a money move that is, there's other dimensions for sure.
Ie. 900+GBP/day is listed rarely and for very specific/niche things.
Then, the more niche it is the more likely it is that the downtime between contracts becomes longer I imagine.
Curious what your anecdotal experience has been, to the extent that it can be shared.