Jaded by Job Security
I've been working for 4 years, and it feels like I've been working 2 jobs the entire time. One job that actually pays me, and the other job that guarantees that I will always have a backup plan.
I'm uniquely positioned by working in tech consulting, which if you don't know, gives you the opportunity to exist in the microcosm of a job market. The business lives off finding people to help clients scale and succeed through contracts defining a scope of work. The way I felt going through my first 2-3 years of my career in that ecosystem was feeling the stress of constantly wondering where my next opportunity would come from and whether it would be interesting. If I was on the bench for too long, and wasting the business money, then it would be a risk to me.
However, there is a silver lining here. Early in my career, I'm more affordable to the business. I'm still discovering my skills and figuring out my interests, so there's a bit more slack given. Which I gratefully took advantage of when I was on the bench for ~4 months while I received my first promotion. (I was trying to find a role that would allow me to code in a language that wasn't Java... I ended up going back to the same client in a full-stack role working with Java.)
The more time I spent understanding the business model of consulting firms and hearing leaders say they stuck around because it felt like "entrepreneurship without the risk", the more I realized that I needed to define what I wanted my work to look like. What were the problems I wanted to solve? What were the skills I needed to solve those problems?
As I sat watching each wave of layoffs in the tech industry, I didn't feel like the grass was any greener on any side of the fence. On one side, you have higher total comp, but potentially shorter tenures. On the other side, you're constantly at the mercy of client demand. What I ended up realizing was that this entire experience taught me to redefine my relationship to work.
I've always had a list of personal projects I wanted to work on and things I wanted to learn. I took classes and read books on product design and human-computer interaction. I spent time consuming leadership podcasts. It was this outside-of-work time that I spent adding skills to my toolkit, that I was ultimately able to excel at my current role– one that finally let me think about and influence product.
No job is going to make me feel like I have job security. The only thing that will is working with people I like working with who are making good decisions about investment tradeoffs and making sure the right problems are being solved. Your career is what you make of it, and mine right now is making the conscious decision to juggle 2 projects at work and 2 projects outside of work. I have paths forward with all 4 of these. I have found that the only way I stay engaged "at work" is if the skills I have are aligned with the problems I want to solve. Am I learning something? If yes, I'll stick around. If my growth is capped in one environment, I start divesting my time into other projects.
My life isn't a work-life split. My life is work-life integration. I didn't set out to be an entrepreneur– I just realized that having ownership and control over my income would be the safest option. Whether that means being employed or stepping out to do a side quest, the most realistic path I've found is to diversify my time and efforts.