Category: career

Hustling

Instagram is full of people pushing products and trying to show complete strangers how amazing their lives are, but there are some nuggets of wisdom on the platform. I don’t post myself, I just have a sock puppet account I use for OSINT purposes, which if I’m honest I may also use just to browse.. on occasion.

One thing I’ve learned from Insta is how much some people really hustle. By hustle I mean work hard at promoting their brand, their products, their whole reason for being.

For example just look at The Rock or Mark Wahlberg. They both post multiple times a day pushing their products and movies. If you didn’t have Insta you may only hear about their occasional movie and catch a snippet of news about them and probably think they have it easy, make a movie, collect the millions, repeat, right? With thanks to Insta you can actually see how much they are hustling. Up in the early hours each day hitting the gym, then promoting their clothing / alcohol / sports nutrition products, then doing interviews and photoshoots, followed by attending events for further networking opportunities. It looks exhausting!

These two are constantly hustling. And they are not the only ones. Check out Arnold and Stallone. Both in their 70s still hustling like crazy. Like a duck swimming we have this picture of these celebrities in our minds that everything is easy for them on the surface, but Insta pulls back the curtain and shows us how crazy active these people are underneath, working at maintaining their image and brand.

Take a look at sports personalities and fitness models. In the gym multiple times a day, promoting their classes or courses, doing photo shoots and training videos, attending events and working hard to promote both their image and what they are selling.

It may be full of cat videos but there are still nuggets of wisdom on Insta.

The loneliness of contracting

You probably don’t think of contracting as a lonely profession. The truth is you can be lonely even when surrounded by people. Lots of people, day in and day out. From the moment you leave your home to the moment you return.

I’ve contracted for the best part of three decades, and while it has been a profitable and rewarding experience, you make friends with loneliness. With each new contract comes a new location, building, and people. You say hi, maybe chat by the water cooler or coffee point. No conversation is too deep and no friendship too real. Eventually you will move on. Your contract has an end date.

After a while you get used to it. With each new contract comes a new location and new people. You start spotting personality types, management styles, office politics. You spot patterns. It becomes a game. You find the best places to eat or get coffee, and for a while you become a regular and are recognised. But it’s fleeting. Eventually you move on to the next contract and your face is forgotten.

Maybe you’ll return to a previous role on the recommendation of someone and the people there may even recall your name and ask how you’ve been. Sometimes you return to find the only constant is you. Same building, same office, same desk, different project, different manager, different team. It’s a strange feeling but after a while you can get used to anything. Like ending up working on every floor of a particular building over a ten year period, working for different companies on different floors. It felt like I’d completed a weird goal when I was hired by a company occupying the only floor I had yet to work on. Reward unlocked! Set complete!

Contracting can be a lonely profession. You leave your home, commute to a location, put in the hours, commute home, and repeat. The location changes often so even the people you see on your daily commute change. Variety can be fun and you are certainly never bored. But you rarely make any real connections.

Thoughts on LinkedIn

Musings on LinkedIn.

I’ve been using LinkedIn for many years and I keep changing how I use it. Below are just a few of my notes on how I’ve made use of the social network for work and networking.

– You don’t need to get to 500+ connections. There’s no game or points that you win if you do.


– You don’t have to connect to everyone you meet. Quality over quantity!


– If you’ve connected to someone and the only way you can contact them is through LinkedIn and they don’t respond to any messages over a period of 3 months, remove them as a connection. If you can’t communicate with them or introduce them to anyone then what use are they? Unless you want to follow their posts that is. Quality over quantity.


– People change jobs. Sometimes often. If you are using LinkedIn to connect to people in a certain field or industry and a connection changes to something you have no interest in, consider dropping the connection. It may sound mercenary but this is LinkedIn not Facebook.


– If you want certain people to reach out to you or be reminded of your existence without appearing to reach out first, look at their profile. LinkedIn will tell them you looked and your name will appear in their notifications list.


– You can silence spammy connections.


– You can subscribe to interesting newsletters and unsubscribe when they become boring.


– You can follow interesting people and companies and unfollow when they cease to provide whatever made you follow in the first place.


– LinkedIn is not for stalking but it is useful for OSINT.


– People post too much information. People leak sensitive data!

How do you use LinkedIn? Any tips?

Time and Travel

When looking for work I look at the location and have to factor in the time to get there, and back, plus the cost of travelling.

If it’s not too far then I generally travel by car and factor in fuel, insurance, and parking. Further away and I look at trains, which in the UK are very expensive.

If the role is very far away and requires a long train journey, maybe with one or more changes, then I need to factor in both the cost of the tickets and my time spent travelling as this is lost time that must be compensated for. After all, employment is you selling your time to someone, including your time getting to and from the work.

What tends to happen IMO is that the company looking to hire you only factors in the salary as they assume the individual they hire will either live locally or pay to get there themselves. This is fine as long as the salary reflects this, which often it does not.

Companies want to hire from a larger pool of candidates but often do not want to pay the higher cost in bringing in someone from further afield. They either do not want a remote or hybrid worker, or wish to compensate for the commuting costs, either as expenses or within the salary.

Agents have gotten angry with me when I won’t entertain a role that is far away on the grounds that the rate being offered is too low after factoring in the commuting costs and lost time.

When recruiting from the wider market you need to consider both the costs in terms of time and travel.

With age comes experience

I’ve been thinking about experience vs age.

Whilst looking for work I find myself reading a great many job adverts, and I find it amusing that companies looking for skilled individuals will list a lot of desired skills with the minimum number of years experience against each one, followed by words such as ‘junior’ or ‘graduate-level’. In other words they want someone young and cheap, but they are not legally allowed to say that.

The problem is that in order to obtain these required skills and experience another dimension must be taken into consideration: time. You see, what generally happens as you acquire 5+ years in a given skill is that you age. And given that some skills are linear whereby you progress from one set of skills to another, you tend to age more.

So with age comes experience and the longer that you are in the game acquiring skills and experience the older you get. So if you want someone that is highly skilled with lots of experience, you have to accept the fact that they will not be young nor ‘junior’.

Acting Contractor

I’ve worked as a contractor in the IT industry for several decades and I’ve often noted the parallels between the contracting world and the acting world. Even more so since IR35 started to affect actors and TV presenters as well as those of us in the IT industry.

As a contractor you are recruited to work on a project with other contractors and it may be for a month or a year, or longer. You become good friends working together but eventually the project comes to an end and you move on. You may meet up again with one or two of your colleagues on a future project, or you may never see them again. If you do conferences and speaking engagements you may run into someone you worked with once, or not.

With acting you are hired for a TV show or movie and you work on it until it is complete, cancelled, or your role comes to an end. You move on to other shows or movies and may run into other actors that you have worked with before, or you may never work with them again. If you do conventions you may run into other actors that you’ve worked with before, or not.

Under and over qualified

I’ve been applying for jobs recently and I’ve received several “Sorry but you are over / under qualified for this position” responses. That is if I do get a response at all.

I recently applied for a role where several friends worked and were encouraging me to apply. The work looked interesting but the rate was far lower than what I usually command and I could do the work in my sleep as I was way over-qualified for the position IMO. Imagine my surprise when I heard back “Sorry but you are not qualified enough for this position”. My first thought was, wow, really? WTF? My second was to become somewhat irritated by this. If I was honest with myself I didn’t really want the position but I still put in the effort when applying.

I dwelled on this (for far too long IMO) and it wasn’t until I spoke to a recruiter friend that I was finally able to let it go. They said that telling the candidate that they are under or over qualified has become a standard response where the client has provided no feedback or has given this statement as their standard response. Some sugar-coat it by saying something like “Unfortunately you have not been short-listed at this time as we felt there were other candidates with more relevant experience”. Whereas the truth is usually something like “There were other candidates with the skills and experience we needed that were willing to work for less money”.

Just remember it’s just a game. Try not to take it personally. If you do get feedback, chances are it’s all BS anyway.

The work-life balance

Having a work-life balance is very important. You don’t live to work, you work to live. You work to pay the bills and have a comfortable life.

I’ve previously mentioned that it’s worth knowing how much it costs to fund your lifestyle. This is very important so you know how much you need to earn in order to keep a roof over your head and food on the table. If you can work smarter, not harder, all the better. It’s a great feeling to know that you only need to work three to  six months a year to pay the bills for the whole year. You can then take time off or have long breaks between employments.

When I first started dating my wife (to-be), she was an employee with an annual holiday allowance of 25-days. We would look at the calendar for the upcoming year and note all the bank holidays and take those 25-days and use them to make weekends longer here and there and bank-holiday weekends even longer. We worked out that we could have short breaks every month. We would plan out where we were going next, somewhere in our home country or maybe abroad. Both the holiday itself and the anticipation of the upcoming holiday helped maintain a great work-life balance. We would often have 12 holidays a year. One year we had 14!

Another thing I like to do is to take “me days”. These are days when I know that no one is going to be home during the day. My wife will be out and the kids will be at school and I’ll have the place to myself. I’ll book it a month in advance so both my clients and family are ok with the date. Then I’ll start planning what food I’ll have. Maybe pizza or a takeaway. What snacks I’ll have and what beer I’ll be drinking. Not the large packs of beer but a carefully chosen selection of real ales from independent breweries. Then I’ll choose what video game I’ll be playing or movies I’ll watch. It may sound strange to you but this is heaven to me. I’ll get up, have my favourite breakfast and I’ll probably stay in my PJs all day long. I’ll play my video games and watch TV with no interruptions. After lunch I’ll open my first beer and continue gaming until the family comes home. Sometimes they’ll just leave me gaming till bedtime. Bliss!

Your “me day” may be different. Maybe you prefer a spa day or a day at the golf course or racetrack. Whatever your preference, the key is to just take a me day every once in a while to unwind, chill-out and enjoy yourself.

I had a colleague once to whom I explained the concept of ‘me days’ and who informed me that he couldn’t do it as he’ll be leaving money on the table. His thinking was that a day off meant a day’s money lost. Going from contract to contract working every day to earn as much money as you can is no way to live. Would you not rather enjoy what you do and be able to afford to take time off whenever you wanted?

Another rule of mine is that I don’t work my birthday. It’s the biggest ‘me day’ of the year so no way am I working that day. I’m far too busy celebrating me.

One other thing I’d like to point out about a good work-life balance is that the power people have over you is an illusion. Think about that for a second. When you are interviewing and are negotiating terms, at no point in the conversation does your new client say “..and I will have the right to berate you, to talk down at you, to shout at you when I feel like it, and generally treat you badly”, yet this happens. I’ve had clients shout at me as if they own me. They don’t. If you let them treat you this way then you are giving them the illusion of power and they will continue and this can lead to stress, anxiety and other mental health issues developing. The trick is to nip this in the bud quickly. Do it calmly and professionally but make sure that they understand that this is not acceptable and that if they cannot continue to be professional then you are prepared to walk away from the contract.

So remember that your health and well-being comes first. You are working so that you and your family can have a good life. You are not working just to work or just to earn money. You want a great life and you need money to do that, but not at the expense of your well-being.

Family and health come first!

Job security is a myth

In the past, many people would leave education and commit to a single company for their entire career, retiring after decades of service. Those days are behind us. Today, both freelancers and employees can expect to work for more than five companies over their careers.

Gaining experience across different companies provides valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t. Each role offers lessons, whether positive or negative. You’ll observe various approaches to solving common problems and may even bring your past experiences to the table, helping to address challenges in new ways.

Diversity in your career can be both enriching and enjoyable. Working across different sectors can broaden your skill set and expose you to unique experiences. For instance, I once found myself back in an office where I had previously worked, but with a different client, project manager, and team—only I was the constant. In another instance, I jokingly noted in a meeting that, if awarded the contract, I would have worked on every floor of the building, having already tackled projects on four out of five floors for various clients. I got the contract and completed the set!

Embrace new opportunities and don’t shy away from stepping outside your comfort zone—but always manage the associated risks.

Whenever I join a new company, I often encounter employees who express admiration for freelancing but deem it too risky. Even after discussing risk mitigation strategies, they often cling to the notion of job security. I once had a conversation with two managers in the company canteen. When I asked them what they meant by “job security,” they replied, “We are both managers here, so the company must give us three months’ notice.”

I then pointed out, “So you’re saying you have three months of job security?” To which they said yes. I responded, “I’ve just signed a one-year contract with your employer that neither side can terminate. By your definition, I actually have more job security than you do.” That made them reconsider their perspective.

To me, the concept of job security is a myth—largely a construct employers use to retain key talent. In my experience, companies prioritise their shareholders and profit margins. If you lack a vested interest, you may find yourself expendable. Look around: businesses are sold, and loyal employees are let go to boost profits. Ultimately, your primary loyalty should be to yourself and your family’s financial well-being.

Never stop learning

One time I was asked to take a junior tester under my wing and show him the ropes. One day he says to me “It must be hard for you to learn new things at your age”. He wasn’t being funny or anything. He genuinely believed that the older you get the harder it is for you to learn new things. I corrected him on that.

This thinking is supported in our culture. We’ve all heard people say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, or that it’s better to learn a new language at a young age. I’ve thought about this a lot and my thinking is this: that you can learn something new at any age, but as you get older you become more stubborn and resistant to learning something unless you absolutely need to know it or you find it interesting.

As I write this and look over at my bookshelf I see books on finance and investing that I’ve been reading recently as I’ve been fascinated by how the world of money works. And because I’m interested in this subject I’ve been devouring books and other media on the subject and I now know a lot more on the subject than I did a few months earlier.

You will also find that on occasion a client will ask you to learn or master a new tool or technique in order to be able to complete the work for them. Not learning in this scenario can cost you both money and reputation. I’ve met people who will say things like “I’m a tester I don’t write code”. What they really mean is that they are afraid to try. Don’t be afraid to leave your comfort zone but do manage the risks!

Never stop learning. Whether it’s new tools and techniques being developed for your profession or subjects you are interested in like finance, business, the economy, coaching or consulting. We should all never stop learning.

A good tip I’ve learned is to never be the smartest person in a room or on a team. It might boost your ego but that’s the only thing that will grow. Everyone else will have you to learn from but you won’t have anyone. I like to work with smart people so I learn something from them.

So remember:

You can teach an old dog new tricks!
Don’t be the smartest person in the room, understand your client’s business, and learn from other people’s mistakes (it’s cheaper).