Open Thread: Work You Hate
August 12th, 2008 (11:00am) Mike Gunderloy 6 CommentsTweet This
Like many another independent web worker, I’m a jack of all (or at least many) trades. Putting together a career on the web often involves pulling together disparate skills to keep customers happy and keep bread on the table. The problem is that unless you’re very lucky, not everything you do for your web working job is going to be something you love.
Don’t get me wrong – on the whole, I thrive on web work, and I’ll never willingly go back to an office. But my morning, for instance, was entirely devoted to configuring an Apache server for a client – something I detest doing. Still, happy clients mean doing more work I love, so it’s worth putting up with.
What about you? What part of your web work job would you just as soon never see cross your virtual desk again? Do you have a strategy for doing less of it? Let us know!
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
I hate when a client will harp me for 3 months about sentences that need to be changed on their website, after I have spent hundreds of hours on converting, designing and coding their website to be run on a CMS, which I spend another 15 hours training 8 members of their organization to use. It will almost always be one or all of those 8 people who hold up me getting my second half of the bill paid, because they absolutely refuse, under any circumstance, to log in to the site’s front or back end and click the EDIT icon on top of the page they wish to change.
Easy – anything and everything having to do with working inside the financial services, banking, investment, etc. worlds. I will never put myself in a position where I see “cusips” or “morningstar” cross my path … blech. Ever.
Another one is dealing with huge bloated CMS’s. As @RJ said – CMS’s that noone bothers to use in the first place. As a matter of fact, tonight I’ll be copying and pasting code into a textarea ad nauseum … and the thought of throwing myself out a window will probably cross my mind.
Hi!
Actually, I like pretty much all web work. I don’t care for freelancing solo (all of the customer handling) so I don’t do that unless something special comes up. But one of your comments struck a chord: “Putting together a career on the web often involves pulling together disparate skills to keep customers happy and keep bread on the table.”
The part I dislike about web work is the constant dance to actually get work, especially when folks look at my disparate skills and say I’m either too overqualified or don’t have enough depth in something. Since I work with agencies for contract work and apply for perm opportunities now and again, I find too much of my time is spent trying to get the representation or interview opportunity. The work itself is a welcome piece of cake after that!
Printers are punishment. I use Kinkos whenever possible.
Copywriting. The one thing I have to outsource – definitely.
I dread the (thankfully rare) times I have to spark up Visio.