When I joined edgeofmyseat.com a year last September, I found that as well as being the web developer I always was, I was also now a businessman. I was very much looking forward to picking up my black bowler hat, umbrella and briefcase but that hasn’t happened yet. Maybe I have to pass two years first.
Being involved in running a business is a great thing. I think if I’ve learned one thing about being an employee all these years it’s that no job is essentially stable. There are all sorts of myths surrounding financial stability. For a long time I stayed away from contracting, thinking that a full time job was more stable. Although I enjoyed working for small companies, I always believed that the risk of my job going away was higher. In practise, in the web industry, these turned out not to be true.
If you’re a good contractor, you’ll quickly build demand for your services. Should a contract suddenly end, you’re all set up and ready to quickly move onto something else. Whilst small companies do fail, big companies fail too. Just look at what’s been happening with Yahoo (my old employer) recently.
In a world where no job offers stability, all we have is instability. Our number one weapon for fighting instability is knowledge of your financial situation – and that’s something you don’t get when you’re an employee. In a small business, the first thing you know about the company going down is that you don’t get paid at the end of the month.
With a big company, an accountant runs down a list and decides that the required savings could be made by making 30% redundancies, and that may or may not include your position, regardless of the quality of your work or your longstanding within a company. Either way, there’s no way to see it coming. It’s a binary process – one day everything’s fine, the next it’s all gone tits up.
If you run your own business the stability (or rather, instability) of the company may be better or it may even be worse, but at least you know what’s ahead. You can do the projections and know what work is on the horizon and how much is stored up in the bank. If the money’s not coming in you get the chance to make adjustments for that before it’s a real problem. No alarms and no surprises. That’s about as close to stability as you can get.
Photo by Flickr user What What
Comments
Totally agree with you, this is something I’ve often talked about with others at Creative Assembly. Right now I’d much rather be ‘self employed / running a small business’ than employed by a business which gives me no real insight into it’s financial state!
I couldn’t agree more. 2009 will see me celebrating ten years as a contractor (not counting one year employed by somebody else at the tail end of the dotcom slump) and while it hasn’t all been plain sailing, the knowledge that my future is in my hands, and mine alone, is actually liberating rather than unnerving.
I (and many other people) learned in the Eighties that there’s no such thing as stable employment. I’m still not sure why it took me so long to follow this fact to its logical conclusion and take control for myself. One thing I do know is that it’s extremely unlikely I’ll ever be somebody else’s employee again.
Oh, and happy new year :-)
Don’t think the rest of the world ticks just as the US does, when it comes to employment and job security. There’s a much higher job security in other countries and you can’t simply fire a full employee without a very, very good reason in e.g. Germany or even Japan.
So I’d say as long as you are in the US, you’re right, but once you go to Europe a job at a company usually is more secure than being self employed, because the law protects the “worker” better than the entrepreneur (which you become if you start your own business).