[vidarh]

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), one of which was tracking an unmanned submersible. That certainly involved taking in their stress - they were demoing the system for US Navy brass, and my part was what'd relay the demo data from the tracking ship to the workstation they'd show it on, and it was clear a large part of the pay was so there was someone to shift blame to if needed (thankfully everything went smoothly).

But that variety was fun. I much preferred the short contracts like that - didn't appreciate the stress of finding new ones which came with the short projects though.