kradeelav | (no subject)

absolutely fucked job market when three of my former art directors are all hitting me up for potential leads.... (one of them's currently working under me as a contractor which still is so wild to me. treat your contractors well, y'all. that kid you give a contract job out of college might be your boss one day.). all three have significantly good networks, the cards stacked in their favor demographic wise, a good 15+ years experience, really valuable kinds of design experience, like these are not fresh out of college idealists by any means.... just dads who got bored of corporate life and made the calculated decision they could probably make it building their own agency. i think they would have actually made it had uh. [gestures at world events in the last 3 years] not happened.

i vividly remember when all three were trying to convince me to go indie/agency at one point (for big bux) and they looked at me really oddly for actually choosing to stay with $boringsafecorporation for so long. (listen as somebody who ain't quite as comfortable demographics wise in some areas, reasonably good health insurance is just too hard to pass up lightly.)

anyway workplace is back down to (imo) 10% likely of shutting down (normal baseline for Interesting Times); things are Better compared to how they looked in May which i'm grateful for but i'm just looking at all of these xbox layoffs with the very real realization that things are so fragile now in a way that they never were. urk.

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What you mentioned about indie/agency is roughly how I feel about tech startups at this point in my life - have had a lot of colleagues get into them, and have seen the very attractive rates they pay for my skill set, but I got into stable boring corporate and haven't looked back - there's downsides, but having steady benefits, a reliable paycheck, having actual printed, reviewed-by-lawyers policies, actual PTO, a formal job description! It's worth it to me these days. I don't have the energy anymore to do a 60+ hour week and be informally on call all the time and just do whatever needs doing. Leaving my last job, I got an actual severance package. With the state of the world, I'm no shill, but I'm on the ship that I'll be more likely to have some advanced warning before it sinks rather than being caught off guard by a capsize.

It really does suck that everything has been thrown in a blender so many times in a row because there's a lot of potential out there, but this isn't a fantastic time for risk-taking. That health insurance... Yeah. For real.

oh god the actual printed and reviewed-by-lawyers policies is so REAL... given the sheer amount of shady stuff that goes into startup tech and what strings they try to pull before aquisitions/IPO's is legit some horror stories. it may be one thing to somebody in their early 20's / without dependents / without medical stuff, but the energy in monitoring shizz so you don't get scammed policy-wise is a legitimate thing.

the economy is fucked in every industry, huh?

i am currently nervous about my job; while my company's actual clients agree that real people still produce much better results, it's the higher-ups who contract my employer, and many of those contract-signers are pivoting to AI. none of us are currently losing jobs, because this company is designed to employ students and expects high turnover, but i'll be surprised if they haven't already dramatically cut back on hiring and expansion.

i cannot emphasize enough how much i would like to be working for a $boringsafecorporation right now. considering going back to school so i have better odds of getting into something stable, but... what even counts as "stable" right now?

maybe i'll try for compsci for medical. they always need compsci in medical

nodnods at all of that... pessimistically think this will affect every industry except maybe the ones that have a lot of litgation safety already written in blood (maybe the hands-on-healthcare, baby industry, etc) -- since nobody wants to be sued for like, actual direct murder.

sending affection to you and yours in hope the threat fizzles out~