On a Friday afternoon in late August, I had just come back from lunch with workmates, and was sitting at my desk configuring a new database and looking forward to the weekend. I’m often kind of chill on Fridays, so I was being a bit lazy about it and chatting with friends online at the same time.
One friend said that he was at Workspace, a shared office for the local self-employed set, and I commented that I’d like to someday work for myself and have an excuse to spend time there. The friend then asked if I thought I would be able to live off consulting work, and I said, probably not, but it’s something to strive for.
Right then I got called in to an unexpected meeting. And got the “we’re terminating your position” talk.
On the bus home I texted that friend and said I’d been sacked. He thought I was kidding, because the timing was, um, rather coincidental.
The end of February will mark 6 months since I was involuntarily thrust into the self-employment lifestyle. Be careful what you wish for!
Back in October/November I was up for a few full-time jobs. There was one where I wrote several hours-long tests and had 3 or 4 phone interviews and was told they were putting together a job offer for me… only to hear a week or two later that their parent company put on a hiring freeze, until further notice. Nearly 3 months later, I’m still hoping for Further Notice Day to occur, because I really want that job, but I’m not holding my breath.
In the meantime, however, I’ve been working off and on doing contracts, which fell upon my lap because I guess God does love me a bit and while He wants me to suffer, He obviously doesn’t want me to be bored. I can’t remember when I was nice enough to people that they would recommend me to their colleagues for database/coding work, but maybe they have low standards. Then again, I hear all these stories about mean DBAs whose response to someone asking for help with a query is “FUCK OFF!”. And I’m the one who’s unemployed? I love optimizing queries. Sometimes workmates pay me in chocolates for it.
What’s maybe even cooler than friends getting me contracts is the fact that both clients from my contracts last fall asked me to do more work for them. Ego++.
I’m talking to a few potential clients this week, but for the moment it looks like I’ve got a lull coming up, though it would be the first lull in two months of working up to 7 days a week, so I’m not going to complain (yet).
Contract work has been good, for the most part. I’ve learned far more in the last 6 months than I did at my last job of 9 months, where I felt I was stagnating anyways (it turns out I missed coding, as bad as I am at it). And it’s nice to be able to say that I might have been wrong 6 months ago in thinking that I couldn’t do this. Despite all the other crap going on, I feel fortunate that I’m having this experience, because there’s no way I would’ve gotten into it on purpose.
I’m still seeing very few job ads in Vancouver for MySQL-specializing DBAs (one every 1-2 months, as I’ve complained before), so there’s little point in applying for jobs all that often. Therefore my plan for the moment is to hopefully continue working contracts until which time the company I mentioned above is finally allowed to hire me, or if something else decent comes along. I’m not sure that I want to be self-employed indefinitely, as I crave the security of a permanent position, but it’s nice to think that maybe this could be my career if I wanted it.
As someone who has been on the job market (here in Vancouver) I can completely relate. I’m in a similar position right now. Glad to hear the contracts are flowing!