Inasmuch as the last twelve months of on-site contracting has been more remunerative than any twelve month period of my usual mix of mostly-off-site consulting and on-site training, it’s time to consider what’s next for Mentea and what I’ll be doing come September: will I be a consultant, a contractor, or (gasp) even an employee?
I have enjoyed the work and the company of my co-workers, but there’s a few points to note:
- Going “across the water” to England to work may be almost an Irish tradition, yet it has shown the undesirability of living away from home for extended periods
- Since I’ve not known what I’ll be doing after the contract ends, I’ve kept doing work for some of my consulting clients at nights and weekends, but that hasn’t always got them results as quickly as they would like and, frankly, it made a very poor lifestyle choice
- There’s been little time left for side projects (or, you may have noticed, for blog posts), yet I have many side projects related to XML, XSLT, and XSL-FO and would have more if I had the time – I don’t aspire to it, but I was interested to see that the .net awards has elevated side projects to being an award category of their own
- As a contractor rather than an employee, I don’t get sick leave or holiday pay, so catching a cold can (and did) cost me money, but I’m able once the contract ends to have a long break visiting family on the other side of the world and then going to Balisage
- As a contractor, I’ve also had the freedom to go to XML Prague and to the MultilingualWeb workshop in Rome without having to fret about departmental training budgets, how the events align with corporate goals, or using precious holiday days and my own money (though in a sense it was) if I did out of my own pocket, though I did miss the W3C “eBooks and I18n” workshop last week in Tokyo because of pressures of work, so to be a contractor isn’t to be a completely free agent, and if I was still or again a member of an active W3C WG, then multiple face-to-face meetings a year would strain my finances more than they would a large corporation’s
So what am I looking for? Firstly, a good, long break before I address the question for real after Balisage in August. Secondly, to be based back in Ireland, at least most of the time. Beyond that, it’s undecided. I’m not running away from consulting nor running towards either employment or more contracting. Consulting has been good to me, and been good for me since I can use a wide range of skills with different clients, but the difficulty has always been getting the right amount of work to arrive at just the right intervals so that I’m neither swamped nor starved for work.
