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.
Tag: commuting
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.