Be creative and flexible, and don't give up.
I have no intention of giving up... but I am certainly taking stock of the current paradigm that reduces a man to a 'least common denominator' serf.
An economic whirlwind is coming, and I only hope that marxism doesn't win because the capitalists got too damn greedy.
The middle class can only be squeezed so far... Then they break out with the guillotine.
I worked for a billionaire (they still want me). He's Chinese, with $30 million in petty cash in various stock broker accounts. They couldn't keep track of the money, so I said I'd start a database/accounting packge to track the transactions. I explained that there could be very large savings and profits in automating the whole buy/sell/accounting process. Because I was flat broke, I said $2500 to get this started.
200 hours later (one man month), I had a near working program. Including monthly office rent of $700, some outside database consulting expense of $300, my potential profit is $1500. They refused to pay the last $600, even though originally I had told them I was doing this on the cheap to get over a cash flow hump.
It gets better. I put in another 300 hours developing most of the rest of the automated trading/accounting system. I tell the CFO they could save hundreds of thousands of dollars, and have a new business if they fund me. I tell them I know of SAP installations that have ballooned from $10 million to $20 million. The CFO tells me they bankrupted a company the same way, went from $20 million estimate to $30 million for software, but he can't give me the last $600 because it just wouldn't be right. He says if I finish the last little bit, we can put this on a proprietary mainframe that a subsidiary owns (I figure, poof, my code is off to China the minute I do that).
Questions for Freepers: Guess who still owns the software? By the way, I am not making any of this up, the CFO called me up just Thursday. I have been in other situations like this too. IT people get dumped on, I am sooo tired of it. Real Estate, here I come.
what other industries?