Yes, but. Good advice! I’m actually working at a company where my time is invoiced by the hour, and I still prefer pulling salary to being a freelance consultant.
Why?
Two words: Sales work. In meagre times, i’d have to spend uncontrollable amounts of non-invoiceable time on sales work. If you’re in a good company and puill a good salary, that’s a more stable scenario.
Who has had the worst work environment experience? - since we’re all overentitled /sarcasm
My first tech gig was a start-up doing contract work for the USAF building PTT’s for pilot training on the (then) new glass cockpits. I worked out of Centennial Airport and consulted with McConnell AFB and once flew a Cessna 170B there and back (I completed ground school as part of my OTJ training).
Sounds great right? That part of it was.
My “office”, however, was a converted storage closet - and by “converted” I mean, there was a flat space for a KVM and a chair. It was the standard work til you drop schedule, but the kicker, and why I submit it to the list of “worst working conditions” is that every afternoon beginning at 2:30/3 Care Flight and the local News choppers all got refueled and I shared a wall with the refueling station. The fumes from the AVGas made their way into the ventilation system and it got so toxic in there one afternoon I almost passed out before I realized I was being poisoned. I was used to the smell of aviation fuel, so smelling it didn’t strike me as odd - but when I started to lose focus and went to stand up but collapsed like a sack of potatoes - that, yea, knew there was something wrong.
What’s the worst place you worked? Keeping in mind that excessive hours for excessive periods of time for sub-par pay is typically the entry fee for the privilege of having a bad work experience in the tech sector.
Catholic hospital as a temp hardware monkey. They were $8 million overbudget and 6 months behind schedule on upgrading their medical records system, which included a full hardware refresh. They hired me and 40 other people on, didn’t give us any direction, and expected us to pay our own way for mandatory TB tests and vaccinations. I don’t mind that they required said test and vaccines, but for fuck sake, if you’re requiring it, and you’re a hospital, then you can pay for it, and not the employee.
Anyway, the reason why this job sucked so badly, in my humble opinion, is that they had me spend three weeks in the hospital sanitation department, cleaning shit. You have to wear a bunny suit, and gloves, and eye-protection, and a fluids resistant mask down there at all times. It’s 90F down there at all times. There is 76dB of ambient noise down there at all times. It smells like a sewage plant down there. You can’t scratch your nose if it itches. I only had a 15 minute lunch break, because I guess I was too young and stupid to call them on it.
They also never sent my final paycheck when I was laid off.
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