Thinking about working for yourself? I made the move four years ago and don’t regret it, though working for yourself isn’t easy, it’s just a lot more free. Not as in free beer, but more like free to choose.
If you’re thinking about working on your own, my first recommendation is Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation. Though it’s US-focused, it gives several perspectives on the ups and downs of free-agentry.
There are many blogs that you can start reading in order to check out life as an independent. If you are working in an office and want to get out of the rat race, check out Escape from Cubicle Nation. You may also want to consider Become a Consutant, if that’s where your inclinations lie. Finally, there’s a new blog from down under, Freelance Switch, that posted this comprehensive article on 101 Essential Freelancing Resources.
The main benefit I found from going solo was that I started to learn again. As a manager of 70-odd people at Epic, I was several levels away from the interesting stuff of design and development. I’ve learned masses by having to do it myself and rediscovered all my creative leanings. I would never go back to management.
I think that management was necessary in a time when information couldn’t flow freely. That is no longer the case in many workplaces.
Just made sure you can deal with gaps and open space – think of it as skydiving with reasonable expectation of a reserve parachute
I worked for an upscale British consultancy a few months ago and said to myself “I should work here.” The project manager was dysfunctional by any standards that I know and demeaning to her staff – methinks this was an aberration that would be addressed by the system only to find out that the system could not care less and everyone just took this like good Brits – the reason why Under the Looking Glass was published in England!