Why I Freelance

Here is why I freelance. Growing up, my grandmother thought I was very talented at whatever I put my attention on, and my mother and stepdad gave me a tremendous amount of independence to do come and go as I please, do what I want. In the 1970's, I would walk or ride my bike about 10 miles on a regular basis, while today I couldn't even think of my kids doing that. At the age of 9, I wanted my stepdad to take me to the library downtown, about 25 miles away, and he was mowing the lawn. So he said, here, take this $15, and head down to the bus stop at the end of the road and get there yourself. And sure enough, I did it. It wasn't easy and I had to learn a lot in that process, but I pulled it off. Reading was my passion and I learned so much by looking at old newspapers and grabbing books on any topic in practically every section there. As I went to that library, I discovered secret underground passages around that town that led to other buildings, found a closed off WWI and WWII museum that no one hardly knew about, met and spoke to Ronald Reagan in an empty hallway before he even thought about running for president, and learned how to feed myself on very little money during these low-funded library bus trips.

In school many years ago, I was the first one in my county to use a computer at my age. A math department chair had like the 10th Apple II computer ever made and he shared it with me in junior high. Programming came naturally to me, and then eventually web development. I knew Bill Gates from articles I read -- back when he was selling the Altair MITS computer and all it could do was simple math with lights. That's how far back I went. In college, I remember doing some programs even with a teletype data entry system that would communicate with the mainframe and send a response back on rolls of paper -- and I was programming in very simple Assembler. So, computers became my life. I achieved an inner peace with my computer. It was like my second life.

When asked in high school what I wanted to do with my life, I told others that I wanted to start my own business selling computer software. Well, reality hit, and bills needed paying, and so that dream kind of went away for awhile. But then I learned web development and was inspired by the dot com boom, and I quit my job then to become my own software company.

That first software company was a dumb idea, but at least I made $40K off of it in very short time before bailing on the concept.

But once you get your first taste of mild success, it's in your blood and you can't shake it. So for 10 long years that seemed like an eternity, I did the daily commute cubicle office job thing again, constantly admonishing myself that I didn't get right back into the race again with my own business.

However, let me share with you how crazy things have been over the years in those cubicle jobs:

• All company emails were read by security teams.
• All online chatting was curtailed and had to go through a new chat system that was read by security teams.
• All our desks were opened and I was told to take a pocket knife home. I used that pocket knife for opening shipping boxes, but okay, home it went.
• All our phone conversations were randomly intercepted and heard by security teams.
• All our computer screens were randomly intercepted and viewed by security teams, recording video and keystrokes.
• All our web browsing was intercepted as well as sent through a proxy that would keep percentages on how bad we were or how much time we wasted on the web.
• I used to use Linux to VPN from home, but they were going to force me to use Windows to VPN and then fire up a VM if I wanted to do Linux tasks.
• We were told not to use our own home PCs to connect on VPN and switch to using company-issued laptops that, of course, were intercepted and checked out.
• Our smart managers were replaced with dumb ones.
• Lunch time was pure hell if you were on a diet. Everyone came in with expensive, delicious lunches. This blew my diet all to hell and caused me to practically fall asleep around 3pm every day from a diabetic coma or something.
  
• We had to work near a smelly, noisy copier that was an OSHA experiment on wheels with that toxic paper and toner powder dust floating around, just waiting for someone to get cancer. We also had to enter a server room so loud that even when you shouted you still couldn't understand what people were saying.
• Our smart ideas in our backend systems were replaced with ridiculously stupid new ones that lacked all kind of proper planning, speed, efficiency, intuitiveness, and innovation.
• The office was one hour away. When I first worked there, it was 30 minutes away, but then they moved it completely on the other side of town through heavy traffic, adding another 30 minutes to my commute.
• They kept moving my desk further and further into a noisier area, without window view, without a door, and then switched all our desks into half-wall cubicles because they thought we weren't communicating enough. (Programmers don't need half-wall cubicles to communicate more -- it's a distraction.)
• We kept being told to do a bunch of paperwork online that our supervisors or HR should have been doing for us. They should have gotten off their fat asses to do that.
• We kept having to go to required workshops on leadership and other pep talks, and if you didn't play along, you would get a bad performance review, and then if that kept up, you'd be fired.
• My new stupid supervisor misheard the instructions from HR regarding performance reviews. (I know, because before I switched from supervision into a senior tech position, I used to have those same training sessions with HR.) Anyway, what they misheard was that we had to be given something negative on every performance review or it wouldn't be accepted. And that was entirely not the case at all. So I kept getting dinged on like the stupidest shit. When upper management read that and curtailed a bonus I was expecting, I hit the roof in anger.
• The people in HR were complete morons. They were even worse than sales people.
• We were judged more on punctuality than quality, attention to detail, or really clever hack fixes or fast repairs of things. It was all about what time you made it into the office and whether you put in those extra free hours for them each week.
• I was told a 40 hour week when I signed on, but in order to get all the impossible shit accomplished each week, we had to work 75 hour weeks. At one point on a Sunday morning, I had worked all Friday night and weekend long, sleeping over in a hotel room on Friday and Saturday before having to work another 8 hours on Sunday. I then had to drive home an hour away on Sunday and I found myself driving while sleeping. I almost wrecked before I found myself in the opposite lane while driving, swerved over safely before anyone came up, and got my act together before arriving at home safely.
  
• We kept being given demeaning jobs that were not even in our job category.
• Our new managers no longer defended our technical reasons to upper management, making us look like idiots.
• I was given sloths to work with who only got smarter by the things I taught them. I had one coworker who could barely spell or type an English sentence, making him useless for doing any kind of reliable paperwork or emails with me. Another one, no matter how many times you asked him to pay attention to detail, would forget Linux commands or try TO TYPE EVERYTHING IN UPPERCASE, not understanding the case-sensitive nature of Linux commands.
• We were asked to do 3x as much work with the same pay. As a freelancer, I would later find out that I could work 3x as hard and make 3x as much cash.
• I was tired of feeling like I arrived at work to be lorded over and babysat every day, that my opinions no longer mattered, that common sense went out the window, and that, by the way, there was no way I was going to see a window ever because all the window offices went to the upper upper managers.
• And sadly, this sort of company was the norm these days, if you wanted to make a decent salary.

So that's why I quit. I quit to save my life, to help me see more of my children again before they grew up and moved out on me, leaving me to weep in how stupid I was to let this happen to me. I quit to keep me from falling asleep at the wheel. I quit to get my hours under control. I quit to stop being babysat and to manage myself. I quit to give me an office with a window and a door, to have a 5 second commute from bed to desk, and to wear the kind of office attire I want.

In the end, it was a lot of hard work, but I would never go back. Never in a million years. I am my own destiny. And now that gas is inching up to $5 a gallon and gas stations are looking like ghost towns, with perhaps $6 or $7 a gallon right after that, well -- all the old cubicle jobs out there can rot in hell for all I'm concerned.