On Tuesday I had a job.
By Friday I had signed a consulting agreement.
By Saturday I had decided not to proceed with it.
I’d been thinking about independent work for a long time. I wanted more room to build things, work across different kinds of projects and eventually create something of my own. It had come up in conversations at work too, and there had been support for me moving in that direction.
So when the conversation turned to moving me from an employee role into an independent contractor relationship, it felt aligned with something I’d already been working toward.
I just hadn’t expected to walk through it quite like that.
And I definitely didn’t understand everything that was waiting on the other side.
Same work, very different setup
I’d joined the company a few months earlier in a technical role that was still taking shape.
A lot of my work and the conversations around it involved AI, automation, systems, integrations and figuring out where new technology could be useful rather than adding another shiny object to the pile.
That kind of role suited me because my career has never been particularly tidy.
I’ve worked in QA automation, IT operations, cloud, identity, security and integrations. Before all of that I was a professional musician. I still make music.
I’m happiest when there is something complicated to figure out. So when it was proposed moving me from an employee role into an independent consulting arrangement while continuing the technical work, my first reaction wasn’t that the work itself scared me.
I knew I could do the work.
What I hadn’t really considered was everything surrounding it.
Contracts.
Insurance.
Using my own equipment.
System access.
Credentials.
Billing.
Estimates.
Taxes.
No guaranteed minimum amount of work.
Suddenly there were a lot of things that had previously existed somewhere in the background of my working life, handled by payroll departments, managers, IT departments or simply by virtue of being an employee.
Now I had to understand them myself.
That turned out to be a pretty useful education.
Then there was the $140 an hour thing
This was probably one of my first mental recalibrations.
If you’ve spent most of your career earning a salary, $140 an hour looks like a ridiculous amount of money.
Your brain wants to do this:
$140 × 40 hours × 52 weeks.
And then your brain thinks you’ve cracked capitalism.
Unfortunately, your brain has skipped a few steps.
There may not be 40 hours of work.
There might be five.
There might be none the following week.
There’s no paid vacation. No paid sick time. You may need your own equipment, insurance, accounting, bookkeeping and software. You have taxes to deal with. You have to invoice. You need to find clients.
And there are hours of work that don’t fit neatly into the little box labelled billable.
Technical work has a lot of those.
Before you integrate two systems, for example, you need to know what you’re dealing with.
You need access.
You need credentials.
You need documentation, if documentation exists.
You need to understand the business logic, the edge cases and why someone made a strange decision six years ago that everybody has quietly learned to live with.
Sometimes you open something expecting a straightforward integration and discover a whole haunted house behind it.
This is normal.
It’s also much easier to think about when you’re getting paid a salary while you investigate the haunted house.
Independent work changes that calculation.
That was when I started understanding why comparing an hourly consulting rate directly to a salaried hourly rate doesn’t make much sense.
You’re not only pricing the hour when you’re sitting there building something.
You’re building a small structure around your ability to do that work at all.
I still love ambiguity
This experience didn’t change one thing about me: I love technical problems.
Give me an API doing something weird.
Give me two systems that claim to integrate but seem to have stopped speaking to each other.
Give me some logs, half a workflow and a problem nobody can quite explain.
I’ll probably have fun.
What I discovered is that I feel very differently about ambiguity in the business arrangement surrounding the problem.
If I don’t have access yet, can I realistically estimate the work?
If the requirements change, what happens?
If I need something from the client before I can continue, how does that time work?
What am I responsible for?
What is the client responsible for?
What happens after this project?
Those aren’t especially exciting questions.
I would much rather be looking at an API.
But ignoring them doesn’t make them disappear.
I think I had spent so many years getting good at solving the technical problem in front of me that my instinct was still:
Can I figure this out?
Usually the answer is yes.
The harder question became:
Does the arrangement around figuring it out make sense?
Those are not the same question.
I moved quickly
This is the part where I have to own some of it.
I wanted the transition to work.
Independent consulting had been a long-term goal, the opportunity was right there, and I was trying to keep moving forward during a pretty sudden change in my employment.
So I moved fast.
I was thinking like someone who wanted to keep doing the work.
I wasn’t fully thinking like someone running an independent business.
There’s a difference.
As an employee, if you don’t have access to a system, that’s usually a work problem.
Someone provisions it.
If a tool is required, the company provides it.
If there’s an administrative problem, you keep working while somebody somewhere untangles it.
When you’re independent, those little details start connecting directly to time, cost, liability and whether you can deliver what you’ve agreed to deliver.
Deciding not to proceed
Eventually I decided I wasn’t comfortable continuing with that particular arrangement.
That decision sucked.
I needed the money.
There’s no clever way around that part.
When you need income, turning down possible income feels completely backwards.
You can make a spreadsheet explaining risk and opportunity cost all day long and there is still a small voice going:
yes, but money.
I spent a lot of time listening to that voice.
But the more questions I asked, the more I realized I wasn’t comfortable beginning the work until I understood the setup around it.
So I decided not to proceed.
There was no dramatic ending.
Mostly I closed my laptop and found myself in a much stranger position.
I still wanted to work independently.
I just didn’t have a client anymore.
Which is kind of where things get interesting
I’ve spent a lot of my career trying to figure out what I’m supposed to call myself.
Musician was easy.
Then I got deeper into technology and the answer became increasingly ridiculous.
QA.
Automation.
IT operations.
Cloud.
Identity.
Security.
AI.
Systems.
Solutions.
Creative technology.
At a certain point the job title starts looking like somebody spilled a bag of Scrabble tiles.
Independent work appeals to me partly because I don’t particularly want to choose one tiny square anymore.
I like solving problems across those areas.
I like building automation that removes stupid repetitive work.
I like finding things that are broken.
I like experimenting with AI without pretending every problem requires AI.
I like creative technology.
I like making music.
And lately I’ve been building more things of my own and wondering whether some of those experiments can become useful products rather than living forever in a GitHub repository with seventeen people watching them.
I’m also looking for work.
Those things aren’t contradictory to me.
I don’t know yet whether the next chapter is another technical role, consulting, a small independent practice, products, creative work or some combination I haven’t found a name for.
I’m trying not to force an answer just because job titles are easier to put on LinkedIn.
What those four days gave me wasn’t my consulting career.
I’ve wanted that possibility for years.
They gave me my first serious look at what independence requires beyond being good at the work.
There’s a business around the work.
There’s risk around the work.
There are boundaries around the work.
And knowing when you don’t understand something yet might be just as important as knowing how to solve it.
I’m still figuring that part out.
Which, to be fair, is usually where I do my best work.