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Some company heads hoped return-to-office mandates would make people quit, survey says
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Joke's on them, I quit my 11-year job with a company enacting RTO and it fucked them over because I had no backups and very little cross training my entire time there. Ex-employees have told me things went to shit after I left. Good. π
Offer to come back as a consultant for 2x your previous pay
With work-from-home as a non-negotiable condition.
As a contractor, your client isnβt allowed to dictate your work methods. Itβs one of the things the IRS looks at when identifying misclassified employees.
While true, it's a bit more nuanced than that. They can absolutely have requirements in the contract that will put you on site. For instance, they can have you being the one to set up the conference room for the morning meeting. They can also categorically say that their VPN access is only for FTEs.
But as an independent business negotiating a contract, you just haggle these terms away. It's still a good idea to document expectations, including work hours and locations.
Funnily enough I heard that internally they were talking about asking to have me come back as a contractor (with insane pay) but I was so much enjoying my time away from such a toxic company that nothing could make me return. I took a 7-month staycation after quitting just to unfuck how much they fucked up my brain, self-worth, and anxiety
i dunno, grinding for a few years on contractors income and funneling it all into a pension sounds like a pretty good way of retiring early.
5x pay. Independent LLCs have all sorts of expenses, including taxes/marketing/accounting/etc.
Health insurance...
So much this. Health insurance is the primary reason I have a salaried position.
Yep. I've done exactly that. Something overlooked a lot of places is to actually start an LLC (it does cost a bit, especially if you're strapped) if you can because that protects you. If you screw something up by accident a company can either come after you personally or the business that employs you.
Simply having an LLC isn't enough- it's the separation of personal and business that enables protection. Until you have other employees, this is really hard to do/show.
If you're going to go this route, you should probably talk to an attorney anyway.
And an accountant, but yeah this is solid advice. It was definitely something I knew but didn't realize that it's harder than it looks back when I did it.
Yeah, I love my teammates but when I leave I'm gonna do like zero "knowledge transfer". Not my fault you haven't expanded my team in 5 years or that you keep giving us more and more responsibilities from roles you removed because they were "obsolete" or that you spread us so thin we can't naturally transfer knowledge as we go.
That's something, lol. I'm not irreplaceable but it would be an absolute clusterfuck if I left, at least for a while.
I do a good job of documenting everything but so much of my work relies on scripts that I wrote and never properly deployed - a mix of python and VBA, and all my reporting relies on an API connection that nobody else maintains and other than a handful of queries I shared, nobody really knows how to use it.
I'm not trying to be shitty but it's job security.
Not shitty at all! Cross training and backups are your employer's problem, not yours. It may hurt you if you go on vacation or are sick, but it hurts them even more when you leave. Job security is job security and I'll take it lol
Ah man, living the dream!
I could walk away from my job today and the only thing people would notice is the email daemon. Going to keep cruising as far beneath the surface as I can and get that paycheck. Probably get some free AI training too.