Stability – freelance vs full-time

When did "stable job" stop meaning what we thought it meant? I've done both – full-time twice, freelance the whole time in between and alongside – and the thing that surprised me most wasn't the income difference (okay, the income difference was also surprising, but we'll get to that). It was realizing that stability looks completely different depending on which side of the table you're sitting on.

The version of stability we're sold

You know the feeling – you land a full-time offer, and suddenly everything feels like it clicked into place, like you've finally arrived somewhere safe and predictable where you know what's coming in every month and you stop lying awake wondering where the next project is coming from.

And in some ways, it genuinely is that. I don't want to pretend otherwise, because full-time gave me real things – experience, skills, structure, a team – that I still use every single day in my freelance work now.

But there's a version of this story that nobody talks about until it happens to them personally…

"You're the most valuable. We'd never let you go."

Yeah. I heard this. More than once, actually (and each time I nodded and internally filed it under "things people say").

I worked full-time twice – both times in IT companies, both times as a marketing designer and illustrator – and both times I kept my freelance going on the side, after hours, on weekends, posting, maintaining clients, keeping everything moving because I knew, even then, that full-time wasn't the whole plan.

Everyone around me thought I was overcomplicating things – you have a job now, why are you still doing all this? But I also knew something that most people don't want to think about until they have to.

The second full-time ended with layoffs, and right before it happened, I was pulled aside and told I was the most valued person on the team, that they'd cut everyone else before they'd cut me (spoiler: they cut me 🙃).

And honestly? My first reaction was stress (obviously) – because when someone tells you repeatedly that you're the most valued person on the team, the most irreplaceable, the one they'd never let go, you start to actually believe it (the noodles were very convincing). So when it happened, there was real disappointment, anxiety, and that immediate "wait, now I don't have a stable income anymore" panic that hits before your brain has time to catch up with reality.

And then I remembered – I never stopped. My freelance was still there, my clients were still there, my presence was still there, and I had a business cushion that most of my colleagues didn't because they'd traded one for the other and I hadn't.

Full-time vs freelance: what both actually give you

This isn't a "full-time is bad" post, because that's not the honest version of the story – it's more complicated than that, and I think pretending otherwise doesn't actually help anyone.

Full-time gives you real things. Predictable income, structure, a team around you, and the kind of experience that's genuinely hard to get any other way, especially early in your career – the briefs, the feedback, the exposure to how different companies think and operate. You also clock out at the end of the day and the guilt ends with working hours, which is something I did not fully appreciate until I no longer had it (more on that in a minute).

But it also takes things. Your growth depends on someone else's decision about your role, your income has a ceiling that was set by someone in a room you weren't in, and the security you feel is completely real right up until the day it isn't – and you rarely see it coming.

Freelance is the opposite in almost every way. Income is variable but scalable, growth is entirely yours, and there's no asking permission to take a Tuesday afternoon off because the sun finally came out (very important in Canada, we don't have many of those). You decide when, how, and with whom you work, and what you put in comes back to you directly.

But it takes things too. The guilt doesn't clock out when you do, because there is no clock – you're the boss, which sounds ideal until you realize that this particular boss has very high standards, doesn't believe in sick or vacation days, and has a habit of working late (hi, it's me, I'm the problem 👋).

What both have in common: neither is "safe." They just carry different kinds of risk, and the sooner you make peace with that, the better your decisions get.

What happened when I went all in

After the layoff, I went fully freelance, and something shifted pretty quickly – not magically, not without hard work, but the ceiling I had in full-time simply stopped existing.

When you're not splitting your energy between someone else's priorities and your own, you can actually build something with compounding results, and busy months start to cover quiet ones in a way that eventually becomes predictable in its own way. Since going fully independent, my income has grown 6x compared to when I was employed (that’s also an argument for never letting go of your freelance even when you have a "stable" job).

If you're navigating your own transition or want to work through your business strategy, positioning, or where to focus next – I do 1:1 coaching calls and would be happy to help. Details and booking here →

The part nobody warns you about

Here's the thing about being your own boss that sounds great in every LinkedIn post about freedom and flexibility and never having a commute again – it's real, and it's also genuinely hard in ways that don't make it into those posts.

In full-time, the guilt ends at 5pm, you worked your hours, you're done, you can rest without that quiet background noise asking whether you should be doing something more productive with this time.

In freelance, that voice doesn't stop – you rest and feel like you should be working, you work weekends and feel like it's fine because technically you chose this, and you take a vacation and spend part of it mentally calculating whether you can afford to actually switch off (the answer is not always yes).

It gets better over time, but it doesn't fully disappear, and I think it's important to say that honestly because the "freedom of freelance" narrative tends to skip this part entirely – the freedom is real, and the weight that comes with it is also real.

So which is more stable?

Depends entirely on what you mean by stable.

If stable means a predictable paycheck every month regardless of what you did that week – full-time, for now, until it isn't, which is a sentence that sounds harsh but is just the statistical reality of employment in 2024-2025 (look around, layoffs are everywhere).

If stable means building something that belongs to you, that doesn't disappear when a company decides to restructure, that grows in direct proportion to how much you invest in it, and that nobody can take away in a meeting you weren't invited to – that's freelance, and it takes years to build but it's yours.

For me personally, stability is knowing that what I put in will come back to me – that if I work on my business, it pays off, that I'm not one bad quarter away from losing everything because someone made a decision I had no part in.

One thing I'd tell anyone on the fence

Don't trade one for the other if you can help it – keep both for as long as you can, because the freelance you build on the side while you have a job is exactly the cushion you'll be grateful for the day the job disappears, and it always disappears eventually, whether you choose to leave or someone chooses for you.

And a big part of that "thing you're building on the side" is your portfolio – which needs to actually attract clients, not just document your work. Wrote a whole guide on this if you need it → Code PORTFOLIO25 gives you 25% off for the next 7 days.

The people I know who made the smoothest transitions to full freelance never actually stopped building their own thing, even when they had a salary coming in every month – and that's not a coincidence.

Have you ever tried keeping both at the same time? Or been through a layoff that changed how you think about stability? I'd love to hear in the comments.

As always, thank you for reading,