Going Full-Time

December 22, 2020 John Blanco Uncategorized

If I’ve been quiet for quite a long time it’s because I’ve been busy, busy, busy…but what’s changed even more is that I am now a full-time employee with Aetna working on their Design Systems team.

I had spent 8 years as a full-time freelance consultant absolutely dedicated to mobile development. Eight AMAZING years! That was such an adventure and I learned and grew so much from it. You can work at a company for your entire life, but being on your own, generating your own business, maintaining relationships with your customers all by yourself (maybe without much business acumen, cough cough…), that’s an entire skill altogether.

When I started consulting full time I had the luxury of having done side work for years before that. I had a handful of clients I’d already worked with, some more successfully than others, and I was able to take those lessons right into my own business starting with a long-term contract as a jumping off point.

And now, for the last 14 months, I haven’t needed to do that. It’s strange. I still do side work, but at my main work I’m just a developer. Developer #48194732. A guy in the corner. Writing code. I barely know or interact with our stakeholders and our customers are ultimately people who use Aetna health insurance.

That’s a loooooot of customers.

Do I miss it?

I do.

There are still a lot of perks to being an FTE, though. For instance, this week I am starting an 11-day Christmas vacation. I cannot remember the last time I was able to do that, but I do know taking 7 business days off in a row before was stressful. Unpaid. No backup. Always taking my laptop with me on road trips. Often starting the clock on an hour of work here or there…never fully disconnected.

Did I mention how much I love PTO?!

Health insurance is another nicety. You see, I wasn’t able to even launch Rapture In Venice until the Affordable Care Act was passed and started mostly going into effect in 2010. My wife and newborn son were not eligible for private insurance…a travesty if you ask me…but once my son’s pre-existing conditions were immediately covered by the ACA is when I could seriously launch on my own LLC.

So why did you stop?

I’ll be honest, I didn’t stop consulting work voluntarily. Over the last couple years prior to hiring on at Aetna, I was having a lot of trouble finding good work. The first signs of trouble came at the end of Fall 2017. It was when my client pipeline wasn’t just running thin…it was completely empty.

My project workload had been ending and I was unable to generate new leads. It had really been the first time in nearly 7 years that happened. Not only was there no work, the holidays were fast approaching, one of the hardest times of year to find anything. Managers are planning vacations and budgets and nobody’s interested in interviews or ramping up someone new. Like a squirrel, I hoard acorns as winter approaches, but my tree trunk was empty now and at the worst time!

Miraculously, a cold lead came in and within 2 days I had interviewed and signed paperwork to join a 3-month effort to finish out an app. Literally, the message I had gotten was “My client is desperate for iOS devs, I can have you signed up this week, what’s your rate?”

It was great work, too…I was hired along with 6 other consultants to work on a pair of apps together. In all those 8 years, it’s the most team-centric environment I had been in, but as the contract began to wind down I faced a familiar problem…once again, I had no leads.

What was I going to do next? How did I end up here…again?!

I’ll always remember what happened next, too. That team of 6 consultants was whittling away. The guy who sat next to me saw his contract end and he was gone. Then another…and another…until finally I was the last contractor left. It was like Survivor! Their resource needs were lessening, their budget was tightening, and they were choosing who would stay and who would go.

And I was the last one left on the island.

Each week they’d ask if I could stay one more week and I would. I never told them, “Well, ya see, the funny thing is that I don’t have anywhere else to go!” Every week I thought I was up a creek without a paddle and then I’d get to come home to my wife and say, “They extended me again!”

I didn’t know when I would find work, but I knew I’d have one less week of no income at the very least.

And on that last week, when I was all but sure there’d be no more extensions…and there were no more extensions…I found work! Once again, it happened fast, from contact to signed papers in 3 days, and it was perfect! Work from home, good rate, and fun stuff.

And the conga line moved a little bit further.

I had acquired new work less than 24 hours before being completely screwed.

Did it get better after that?

Nope.

Finding work continued to be a struggle. In the next year or so, panic became a recurring theme. I rarely had my next gig lined up. Fortunately, one of my favorite projects occurred in this timeframe, but yeah, I knew the end was coming. I’ve never been a business expert…I’m a coder…but the consulting market had become more difficult to navigate and I had seen plenty of consulting friends go full-time. More companies hiring than contracting. Less entrepreneurs hell bent on making a fortune on the App Store…a dream that was dying, if not completely dead already.

It ended in the summer of 2019

That summer, again at the end of my chain, I desperately reached out to an interesting contact of mine. He was a Manager at Schwab, a person that I had been in contact with a year earlier at that week-to-week gig. While the potential of interviewing with them loomed, that’s when I had finally found my next contract, but here we were again…coming off my favorite project but nothing to do.

And then it turned out that a former iOS developer and co-worker actually ran the team there and I was in. And consulting, too, not an employee. The streak was still alive! I worked at Schwab for 5 months and, while the work was one of my least favorite parts of that job, I loved the team. And it’s a good thing, because I knew it was likely to be my last contract.

As my long commutes to the DTC wore on along with the fundamental truth that I didn’t want to work there long term (a transition to FTE was likely going to be broached any day), the question became: what could possibly be next?

That’s when a friend recommended me for a job at Aetna. A full-time job. Over the next month, between interviews and salary negotiation and many panic attacks (a story for another day that will be a hard one to tell), I transitioned to my new normal.

An employee again.

Wow.

Going forward in the new normal…

Oh, don’t be so dramatic, I’m as busy as ever with Rapture In Venice! I have three clients right now and I can see going back to full-time consulting in the future as a possibility…albeit only if I’m confident in it again. For right now, I am also very happy being an employee. A tiny little cog in a huge company. In my role, I feel like I have a lot of responsibility and many days feel more stressful and urgent than as a consultant, honestly!

But I don’t have to stress about finding work all the time. It’s here and waiting for me.

And with paid holidays and PTO. :-)

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