From Bryan Merchant at The Los Angeles Times
“I think it’s waking people up to some realities of what the industry is really like,” Alejandra Beatty said. “We are workers. Even though we have benefits and we are highly trained — we’re still workers. We can still arbitrarily lose our jobs like anyone else.”
I’m approaching my second decade of running a freelance business now and it still baffles me when colleagues wonder how I deal with not having “job security”. If there is one big thing that the recent layoffs in tech have shown us, it’s that job security is a dream in the tech industry.
Just two years ago I took a full-time contract with a company. They were happy with my performance on Friday and then on Monday I was told my contract was over. I didn’t do anything, another department had overspent (or sales wasn’t closing contracts) and I was let go because it was easy.
The conversation on Friday was all about how I was family and how the boss wanted to be working with me in 10-years and how he was going to build a team around me leading the technical end of things. The hardest part for me was that I bought into it and trusted that the boss/company was really looking out for me.
I’m into the 2nd year of another long term contract now and I like the people I’m working for. I also don’t forget that on Tuesday they could decide to end my contract and I’d just be done. I remember that it’s just a job and that doesn’t mean I should be online all Saturday just in case. I walk away from work at the end of the day and don’t look back.