13/05: I am an unemployed bum...
Yes, it's true - the other week I was told there was no more work available, and there for I no longer had a job (hurrah!)
To be honest I'm not really upset about it. Sure, I'm a bit pissed off because I know that what they said wasn't the whole truth, but if they want to lie then fine - game over, no skin off my nose - except I'm unemployed :P
So as expected I've been looking for work - I have to pay the bills somehow. Unfortunately, as my dad likes to remind me, I'm not great at saving up 'just in case' money - so I can survive for a few weeks without work, but after that it gets to the 'move into a cardboard box' stage (hey, so long as I have internet and power for my laptop - and my mattress :)
The funny thing is (or maybe not so funny) that the job market at the moment really stinks - especially for in Canberra, considering all the 'State of IT' crap that went around last year etc. So while I've applied for the few positions that I've found suitable and discussed things with a few agencies I've also been looking for alternative income sources.
Recently I got into action and set up my business things properly - you know, bank accounts, logo, cards, registrations, all the legality crap (its really quite exciting.... not...) - and so now I feel I'm in a better position to get my own kind of gig off the ground - you know, break free, no one to answer to except for myself :P
Unfortunately though building up your own product takes time - which I have a lot of, but what I dont have a lot of is the other thing you kind of need to survive in an economy driven world - money. As a result I've looked at freelancing online. There's heaps of sites available to do this through, Elance, Rent a Coder, ODesk etc etc, and then there's the good old 'do it your self' way. The problem with this freelancing gig is that the market is kind of saturated, which means everyone is undercutting each other, and as a result the expected rates are quite low (and by low I mean $20/hour for development work). There's pros and cons to it - you get to work at home on your own times, but $20 an hour isn't really much when you think about it :|
I think the best way to get around this issue is to look for fixed bid jobs - something worthwhile which you could theoretically set your self onto doing it as quickly and as best as possible, and that way if you can get a good enough turnover there's time to make money and time to work on your own things...
So I guess we'll see how this all goes - I guess in the long run I can really just resort to selling my body on the streets ;) Or working at the snow... Hrmmmmmm
