Comment by InMice
8 hours ago
> I missed the month of May with my 2-year-old kid. My wife cared for a 2-year-old alone.
The weirdest part to me, receive a call and just get up and go? Priorities? Did you write this blog post from the doghouse?
8 hours ago
> I missed the month of May with my 2-year-old kid. My wife cared for a 2-year-old alone.
The weirdest part to me, receive a call and just get up and go? Priorities? Did you write this blog post from the doghouse?
> The weirdest part to me, receive a call and just get up and go? Priorities?
The author does contracting in niche topics. When your contracting domain is uncommon you have to go where the work is.
You can charge higher prices for niche work and therefore tolerate more time in between contracts. This person may be spending more time not working and with his family than the typical FTE in this arrangement, even if the jobs occasionally require them to fly somewhere for a month.
It sounds like he has a lot of general skills, too. I guess we all have different priorities, but I would work whatever job to not have to leave my kid for that long.
I used to have an uncle who did emergency oil well repair. He'd get a call from his boss, then he'd be on the next flight to whatever remote offshore drilling platform or exotic dictatorship had need of his services.
Apparently doing emergency repair work can be extremely well paid.
(His wife was fine with it, but when there's great inconvenience for the family balanced by great pay for the family, you've got to get paid)
You need a job to sustain a family. From the post it seems like author accepted the sacrifice for the amount he was supposed to be paid.
Reads to me like the author is trying to elicit some empathy. It just sounds like he was just fine leaving his family for a job. Not getting paid couldn’t have factored into that decision.
> It just sounds like he was just fine leaving his family for a job.
Or... maybe he needs income to exist.
He doesnt provide any context for that if so and if you look around the site, doesn't seem like the case at all. More like he just decided on the phone something interested him enough to bounce indefinitely.
The assumption with taking a contract is it's better than what your other options will be to get the same total income/time worked. Especially for specialized work like this, taking the contract means you can get multiples of the time back in the following months. When you don't get paid you end up without that time back the income was supposed to provide (and you're in 1 months less of savings to boot).
They work within a niche space, as others have said, they follow where the work is, So they are able to charge more which I hope is able for them to survive in modern economy and be able to give more time to their family.
atleast that's my interpretation of it of how logic might follow if they are working in niche space, many people seem to be applying the logic onto themselves into completely standard situation, but I don't suppose that is the case here.
Hope this helps in genuinely understanding their situation, from my reading/thinking about it.
Well and tactfully said, thank you.
Didn’t realize it needed saying but I left the child and did the work in exchange for money I needed (still need) to feed the child.
Many people do this every day. I do it when it makes sense or the conditions require, which is to say I am a WFH contractor who sometimes works on site occasionally.