bit of a weird situation. ive been freelancing for about 18 months, mostly construction progress shoots and some ag stuff. out of nowhere a mid-size engineering firm reached out and offered me a full time staff position. they do a lot of infrastructure work and apparently want someone dedicated to aerial surveys and inspections on their projects.

the salary they mentioned is decent, not amazing, and obviously id lose the flexibility i have now. but freelancing is feast or famine and im honestly a little tired of chasing invoices. the job would probably mean flying more interesting stuff than the usual real estate and events circuit though, like actual lidar work and thermal inspections.

anyone done the in-house route? is it actually more boring day to day or does it depend on the company

i did exactly this about two years ago, went in-house for a utility company. pros: steady paycheck, they paid for all my equipment upgrades including getting me on a Matrice 300 with a zenmuse, and i genuinely learned way more than i would have bouncing between random freelance gigs. cons: some weeks are super slow and you're kind of just waiting around, and you lose the variety of freelance. for me the trade was worth it because i wanted to get deep into thermal and inspection work specifically and it's hard to do that at scale without consistent access to the right gear and data workflows. if the engineering firm does real infrastructure stuff id probably take it honestly, that experience is hard to get otherwise

the invoice chasing thing is so real, that part of freelance nobody talks about enough. had a client take four months to pay once and it nearly wrecked my cash flow for the quarter. staff job sounds pretty appealing from that angle alone tbh. lidar experience would also look really good if you ever went back to freelance later or wanted to move into GIS or something adjacent