No one ever plans to come back down. Although it's no guarantee of the future, past experience shows that boom economies take breathers, quickly turning sellers' markets into buyers' markets. Rising Web talents who opt for contract status need to approach and present their work in a career context to remain competitive.

When jobs are plentiful, the ideal of working on one's own terms at top dollar becomes a have-it-all expectation. For example, one Web developer on contract, who earns his former executive VP of technology salary working "strictly nine to five," turns down two permanent job offers a month because the companies fail to meet his strategic and cultural standards.

A month ago, one 38-year-old man turned down the chance to make more than $10 million in four years heading technology for a solid E-commerce company. The reason: He already has a comfortable life with a big income-$4 million potential in four years-and the incremental opportunity isn't worth the risk. "It's just the times," my CEO client said with a shrug.

But contract workers have to be especially careful, because if the market tumbles, all they have is their resumęs. Already, smart hiring managers are applying a different metric to resumę evaluation, put-ting the emphasis on the individual's actual role and the ultimate result of a project.

For instance, if you say you wrote the application interfaces for a software product or database, you'll be asked for a demonstration along with a synopsis of how you and the rest of the team handled breakdowns during development.

When I was building a field sales team several years ago, we needed systems en-gineers who couldbuild rapid-application demos tied to customers' databases and security systems-and sell them. I assessed each candidate's social skills, handed him or her a box of software, then asked them to design a small application and come back to demonstrate it. Those who never came back only wasted $29 worth of software. Those who returned with a working application ended up showing me their technical as well as presentation skills. That collapsed the hiring cycle.

My colleagues thought I was crazy for using that technique. But we hired five engineers that way, and all succeeded because we knew what we were getting up front. One engineer took the form application home and created a run-time Oracle database on his notebook. Anybody who could do that could handle anything in the field; indeed, he became one of our top systems engineers.

If you're working on a contract basis, whether it's for $70,000 or $700,000, you need to pick projects according to career impact, not just challenge or skill development. Can the project win? Will you make a central, lasting contribution? Can you accurately represent that you were the reason the project won?

Highly skilled workers who make process-level contributions to products that end up languishing in the marketplace will increasingly be passed over because they're associated with failures. Similarly, people who do good work as part of a team for nine months, then move on, will not be viewed as the "drivers" for core efforts.

So target the A-player companies, recognizing that the leader board does change. And treat contract clients the way you would want to be treated. That means resisting the growing temptation to jump at higher-dollar offers and leave an employer in the lurch-a widespread abandonment syndrome that is jeopardizing companies at delicate junctures in Web and systems development.

After suddenly resigning during a make-or-break E-commerce ramp-up he controlled, one IT chief said: "When I leave, I leave." But this kind of personal independence can amount to career suicide; employers won't trust you.

The flip side is true for companies. The overlord mentality of traditional staffing, always a turnoff, is increasingly not tolerated by employees. Companies need to assess their strength as career platforms, let top performers set hiring standards, and proactively increase employees' return on effort.