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Today I want to comment on the pros and cons to working on your own (self-employment).
The best part about being self-employed is that you’re in charge of everything. No boss to blame, no investors to botch up your vision… just you and your opinion of how to run your life.
The bad part about being self-employed however (and this is primarily for one person shops such as my own) is that you are every resource you have for the most part. Need to get a website up? Unless you have the capital guess who’s going to learn HTML/CSS/Javascript among other things? The other negative side is that since you’re self-employed and solo you’ll have little chance to turn to any co-workers for assistance or maybe just to vent or get input. The worst part however is time management. If you’re lucky enough to be located far away from all friends and family then you’ll have little choice but to focus on your project (though I would have to ask how in the world you’re funding yourself) and if you’re not then chances are that someone is helping to take care of you and therefore knows you’re “free” and the unless they’re uncommonly generous enough to understand where you’re coming from they will try to employ you in some mundane task that they could use a hand with. Good luck hoping they’ll remember that you are actually looking down the barrel of the biggest and possibly the most important undertaking of your life! Don’t even get me started with medical insurance to which I’ve taken an analogy of medical care being like the best ice cream ever and insurance the necessary spoon to taste it with. Then I think of the Matrix and say, “There is no spoon.”
And now for working under an employer.
The best part about working for someone is that you’re getting paid and there’s a good chance you have insurance. You also have little issues explaining to people why you can’t help them. If fact you can even miss parties and affairs with no heads up and then be immediately excused by most with the magic words, “Work called me in last minute” or something of that nature.
Here’s the rub though. If you had any vision of doing something your way then just forget it. If you’re at the bottom you can just learn to be happy knowing that your part was at least handled by you but forget about any notion of creative control. Maybe they might take a suggestion but that’s not exactly free reign. Even if you’re the main producer of the game, it doesn’t mean you don’t take orders from a publisher or some other investor of some time. Also, you’ll have to come to grips that not only are you possibly going to have to deal with the fact that you’re possibly underpaid but you will also have to learn to take the occasional figurative “take it in the ass” which is basically when management decides to put their hand up your ass and control you like a puppet because they know you would be damned before you decided to happily do the task yourself. Things like this include making decisions on how to treat your employees or taking your perfect plan and replacing it with a pile of blood and urine topped with a spoon (you cringe to ask what the spoon is for in favor of a Matrix, “there is no spoon” approach to the question).
So there it is, both sides have their ups and downs and if you want to be happy just remember: “There is no spoon”.
