so a somewhat unexpected thing happened last week. a civil engineering firm reached out to me through linkedin (i barely even use that thing) and asked if id be interested in a full time staff position doing survey support and site documentation. steady salary, benefits, the whole thing. which honestly sounds kind of amazing compared to chasing invoices.

but im also worried about giving up the flexibility i have now. right now i pick my clients, set my own schedule mostly, and ive been slowly growing things. the in house role would obviously mean working their hours, their projects, probably using their equipment which i dont know anything about yet. they mentioned lidar stuff which im not really experienced with.

has anyone gone from freelance to in-house? or the other way around? i genuinely dont know which path makes more sense long term and my wife thinks i should just take the stability but my gut is sort of torn

took an in-house role at a utility company about two years back after 4 years freelancing and i dont regret it at all, but im also a person who finds the variability of freelance kind of exhausting after a while. the pay was actually slightly less than my best freelance months but the consistency made budgeting so much easier and honestly i sleep better. plus they sent me for thermal and lidar training which i never would have invested in myself - that stuff opened up a lot.

the thing i miss is variety. you end up doing basically the same types of flights over and over which can get monotonous. but for where i am in life right now it works. i think it really depends on whether you have a good client base thats growing or whether youre still hustling to find work, because if its the latter the stability of in-house is really hard to argue with

wait they found you on linkedin from drone work? did you have a portfolio on there or something? im asking because ive been trying to figure out how people actually land these kind of oppertunities and i feel like nobody talks about the how, just the what. congrats btw that sounds like a real legitmate offer