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Aug 18, 2008 - 05:06 PM |
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What's New in My Life (or: How To Work at Home and Get Away With It) |
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Well, I've moved to San Francisco. Specifically, a district known as the Mission. It's really nice here, and living in a city definitely has advantages. Like the awesome American Chinese place half a block from my house.
Aside from wanting to escape the Suburban Wastes the main reason for moving up here was to move in with my lovely girlfriend Anne. It's been roughly six months now and it's awesome. Having someone special in my life is a great feeling. I've found that I always undergo a lot of personal growth during a relationship especially at the beginning. I want to improve myself, to be a better person.
Speaking of being a better person, I know I wrote about this before but since this is a recap journal entry anyway I'll mention it again. I no longer work at Mozilla. I left there in January under less than ideal circumstances. I doubt I'll be contributing much back to the community after leaving, which is probably a good idea anyway -- doing something for free that you used to get paid to do is a weird and unsettling feeling, and thinking about it seems to only dredge up bad memories of my time there.
Don't worry though, I'm not jobless. The 6 months or so I was contracting at another Silicon Valley company on an iPhone client for them. NOw that I'm free from that entanglement I'm in the process of setting up my own consulting business. For those who aren't in the computer industry, a software consultant does the same job as a normal software engineer, but instead of being essentially at the mercy of your employer for job security, you can work with multiple companies at once, keeping your income stream secure. Also, because of the way tax law works, companies cannot tell an independent contractor (another name for a consultant) how to do their job -- only what to do. They can't control when or where you work or really anything else about how you get the job done. This is obviously pretty nice, because I can work from home and work pretty much whenever I want.
There are downsides to all this though. Because I'm self employed, I don't get health insurance through my job, I need to go out and find it. There are some resources for that, but all that's really boring, complicated and expensive so I'll spare you. Being self employed also makes filing your taxes crazy difficult. Finding a good accountant is a must. The other problem with this arrangement is that writing and negotiating contracts is both really annoying and really time consuming. You have to expend a significant amount of time and energy determining what a client needs and estimating (roughly) how long you'll need to complete it. It's boring and tedious work that you don't get paid a red cent for.
I think it's worth it though. I've had a lot of clashes in the past with my employers over things like work hours and other scheduling decisions. It's nice to be able to say "Fuck off, don't tell me how to do my job," but in a nice way, where I remind them about the part where there are big penalties for claiming an employee is an independent contractor on your tax forms (they don't handle any of my deductions or tax preparation, so they'd owe all that money, for starters). I'm hoping this will be a good fit for me. Plus, getting better at estimating how long a task will take me as well as scheduling my time will be a good thing. It's sink or swim time.
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