Working In The Nether World
You’re not permanent, nor are you a contractor, you’re trapped between dimensions!
I’ve touched on, several times, the benefits of working as a permanent employee, or as a contractor, in the Grand Game of Software Engineering.
Permanence offers a guaranteed salary, paid holidays, and even (in most cases) benefits such as healthcare and pension contributions¹, but has the downside of the enormous amount of bullshit in terms of office politics, dealing with HR, and, worst of all, the charade of regular performance reviews.
With permanence your life dangles in front of you like a tempting piece of bait on a fish hook where you have to swim to and fro, perform, and pretend to conform all in order to get that juicy bit of bait without being PIP’d, fired for defenestration of a management droid, or transgressing any one of a number of stringent HR rules and regulations regarding on which side of the corridor you can walk, how to open a door, or which way up your iPad should be during a conference call. You get the idea.
Contracting offers freedom to do what you want, when you want, higher pay, and peace of mind thanks to the sanity protection of not having to deal with the container loads of bullshit that a permanent employee has to deal with every day.
