i left the staffing agency, not the job

for about two years i worked insurance data through an IT consultancy: they placed me, they invoiced the client, i showed up and did the work. it's a normal arrangement in this market. it's also a little precarious, because your actual employer is not the place you spend your days.

that changed this month. i moved to a direct contract with the insurance company itself.

what didn't change

the work is the same shape: SSIS pipelines, staging layers, a data warehouse that has opinions about how insurance products should be modeled. same domain knowledge, same systems, mostly the same people around me day to day.

what did change

the contract line goes straight from the company to me now, no consultancy sitting in between. that sounds small. it isn't. it means the review process, the pay cadence, and who actually owns the decision to keep me around all collapsed into one relationship instead of two.

it also forced a numbers conversation i'd been avoiding. staffing-agency contracts tend to undercount what the work is actually worth, because the agency takes a cut before it reaches you. going direct meant renegotiating from a number that reflected the work, not the number that reflected two years of accepting whatever the agency's rate card said.

the part nobody warns you about

the timesheet system changed. the onboarding paperwork changed. the small procedural stuff ate more of the first week than the actual technical handover did. if you've ever switched from a staffing-agency contract to a direct one, you already know: the code doesn't change, the bureaucracy does.

worth it. still insurance data. still suspicious of every column that claims to be clean.