Today is my last day at work. I’ve been here just shy of a year now and will certainly be sad to leave, but at the same time, I’m overwhelmingly excited to begin working for myself and, man, am I desperate to regain my creative freedom.
Let me preface this: my story isn’t really that bad. I mean, after all, customizing web portal implementations for insurance carriers is a pretty glamorous job. But I felt I was missing something. And I was. I had no creative freedom. I always felt bound by the fact that I worked for a company that wasn’t much more than a professional services shop. Not only was it expected that my hours be billable to the max, but halfway through the project we made the mistake of switching to a fixed price deal. Fixed price deals are almost always lose-lose situations. It’s like some customers walking into a restaurant, opting for the prix fixe, and after finishing their meal, demanding the chef provide them with a metric ton of baked Alaska. Well not exactly, but certainly the customer feels they should try to squeeze more features into the release (since they’re no longer paying per feature) and we end up just trying to hack the thing together and get it out the door (so we don’t lose money on the deal). And when you’re constantly in a rush to bang out code, there’s not much time for creative thinking.
That being said, I’m ecstatic to once again be able to design and innovate. And I’m damn excited to be building a business from the ground up, especially a business that I think will really help a lot of people. As cliché as this all sounds, it’s how I really feel.
Time for one last beer with the Irish intern,
Brendan
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