Congratz

Awesome news from the Red Shoe VP lady! Really glad to hear she found a much better job. Her post is a great read too. The part about it that really resonated with me was her reaction to hearing her job was gone.

I enjoy consulting because it gives me a bit of a feeling of not being dependent on a job. I really woke up to the fact that this is all a lie though around the recession of 2000. In some ways it was good and caused me to grow up and realize responsibility is more important than enjoyment of my work. Although in some ways the death of freedom is sad.

When the recession hit I was working for the most evil person you could ever meet. The average day involved him blowing smoke in your face, screaming and shouting people down in front of the whole office. The best part about the shouting was that he was ALWAYS wrong. People would put in long hours helping keep a client happy and he would scream at them. It was by far the worst job I ever had. I felt like I could not leave the contract though because the economy was in the toilet and I was making good money. Finally it came to a head when he stopped paying several people. It turns out he had been holding back money from the contracting companies and eventually they stopped paying us. He then fired a bunch of people for no real reason and told the consulting companies he was not paying them. I was included in this group.

The tech sector was hit hard during that time and between luck, networking, and awesome mad skillz I was able to keep working that entire time. I figured out that no matter how free you think you are. How "fast track" your career is, or how stable your nineteen years at the GM plant feels you really are stuck enslaved to one boss or another. I now feel that the best success in the work place is becoming rich enough that you are beholden to nobody or running off to live in the woods. The later would probably end up killing me faster than the prior. Of course I have not reached that level yet and likely will not in my lifetime unless one of my hair brained ideas actually takes off. It would be nice though. I would guess most of us are looking for that kind of security in one way or another.