The chains within / BWE

In which our Hero recalls that in the Game of Grasshoppers, you win or you make hay.

I haven’t looked for a job since before I graduated from university. Even my start came as a referral, a friend saying “Got a resume?” This is my third job, and again, my start as a contractor came about less as strategy and more as “Hey, want to do this?” and away I went. But now I’m an independent contractor and the downsides are starting to show. I’ve been generally unshy about calling out stupidity because I’d always been aware that even if the client fires me, I still have my job.

Now I have my client, and if I get thrown out on my ear, then I’m out on my ear with no recourse. And my year-long contract can be ended with just 30 days of notice, so the security of a contract is not what it seems. So I work, day in and day out, with a tremendous sense of fragility. I am working because of skill, certainly, but as much luck. The client appreciates my ineffable talent for genius and so retains me to just kind of generally be smart, and they have the money to pay for that even when they can’t define it, and it’s good.

But that’s today and I’m still I’m 30 days from unemployed. I could manipulate that into 6 weeks but in the end, that’s when the bank account starts rolling down instead of up. I can afford to be unemployed, because I’m a guy with interests that don’t have to be expensive. My cost of living beyond a place to stay is largely internet. I don’t care about eating out, I don’t need to see shows, I don’t drink for relief or release. This is where my boringness pays off. I’ve got money saved. I couldn’t retire today, but I could take a year or three off if I needed to.

It’s just that it’s a waste. I have plans for what happens if I am unemployed, so that I wouldn’t waste the time, but my reserve is the result of years of hard and patient work. It’s a capability, a blessing, almost a superpower, that I can use, and that I need to use well. Job hunting is a crappy use of my savings. To be endured if necessary but avoided if possible because it’s *always* better if someone else is paying you to get a job.

I think of myself as unconcerned with money, generally. I don’t keep score that way, beyond making sure that I have enough money to pay my bills and achieve my goals. More money is good, less money is not automatically bad, and mostly the rule of thumb is don’t waste it. Don’t waste it. Spend for survival, spend for experience, spend for care of loved ones, but don’t waste it. My parents and I have always differed in that regard because they come from a poorer world that drives them to save, to work, so hard, and indulge themselves so little. Here, though, I find my parents’s spend-never perspective overlapping with my spend-efficiently world view.

In the end, there is work, right now, and there can easily be none later.

The client has two priorities, keeping the lights on for existing stuff and building new stuff, and I’m paid for out of the “lights-on” budget but I always work on the leading edge of their programs. Now there is only one new thing eclipsing everything else and blotting out the prospects of other future work. The little bit they’ve told me about doesn’t make much use of someone like me, and if I’m only keeping the lights on, they’re paying too much for that service. I have a contract to the end of the year. I don’t know what happens next year. Too much is in flux to make a guess about the years after, except that in general it’s the sunset of this department.

So today I have a job, and tomorrow I may not. As good as I am, I’m also not 20, prone to asking for more money, less likely to work absurd amounts out of sheer ignorance. More likely to be inflexible and obsolete. Each time I take on a job, it will be harder to get the same kind of flexibility and pay. Statistically, I’ve hit my career peak, and after this if I were not exceptional, I should expect to cruise at my current level for most of the rest of my career. On the other hand, interviewers will respond to the grey in my hair and the lines in my face before they get to see my hard work and high skill. All of which means that I can’t really use the averages since I’m not typical, and I can’t ignore the averages because they are averages for a reason.

My contract has a cap to protect their budget, and I cheerfully reminded them that I hit my cap at the end of November so have a nice December. Well, now they came back and said actually, we’ve budgeted you through to the end of the year, the cap was just to give us an option, so you’re free to work to the end of the year. Not, “We need you to” just “you’re free to.” Which means now I have a rather painful problem. I was looking forward to circumstances forcing me to take time off. I was quite okay with having a few weeks to relax at home. Instead, now it’s essentially my choice. I can take the time off, not knowing if I have a contract for next year, and knowing that even if I have one, it can go away a month later. I can take the time off to sleep in and work on other contracts and clean.

Or I take the money and work.