I don't know... I've met some absolutely maniacal contractors too.
I met one guy once who didn't seem to understand that projects sometimes started before he'd arrived, and often continued after he'd left; the concept that maybe a load of code was written to satisfy some business requirements a year ago, but those requirements had now been dramatically changed, seemed impossible for him to understand - "Why wasn't this just done the same as the other thing in the first place? Code re-use is supremely important! This is lazy programming!" "We get that, but these two things used to be totally different, but now we've decided to merge them." "Well that's stupid! Obviously anyone who understood OOP would've subclassed this thing in order to..." lead developer loses it and pushes the contractor off the balcony
Yeah, I've seen contractors walk into the PM's office on day one and tell them how they should be running their project to be fired an hour later. I never get that attitude. Then again I do get extensions on a regular basis ;)
Yes, I agree not all contractors can see the bigger picture, and some of them can be pretty opinionated. I met one just recently. I guess that's the flip-side.
But most good contractors in my experience are acutely aware of the restrictions and realities of dealing with living, evolving codebases.
I met one guy once who didn't seem to understand that projects sometimes started before he'd arrived, and often continued after he'd left; the concept that maybe a load of code was written to satisfy some business requirements a year ago, but those requirements had now been dramatically changed, seemed impossible for him to understand - "Why wasn't this just done the same as the other thing in the first place? Code re-use is supremely important! This is lazy programming!" "We get that, but these two things used to be totally different, but now we've decided to merge them." "Well that's stupid! Obviously anyone who understood OOP would've subclassed this thing in order to..." lead developer loses it and pushes the contractor off the balcony