Hello, my fellow workers. It's been a minute since I last posted on Hive but it's my first time sharing an article here. If you're in the Philippines and active in socmed platforms, chances are you've encountered this viral clip from a certain company.

I don't know what they thought this campaign would lead them but claiming that working from home makes you dumber every day is just simply unacceptable. This might be coming from their own personal experiences but generalizing your opinion on things is often not the best of ideas. This viral clip and their seemingly unapologetic stance towards the issue has led to a PR disaster for their company. But I hope their management releases a formal apology to settle the matter.

Now let's talk about my personal experience working from home. Ten years ago, I used to sell computers for an IT retail company. And occasionally, I would converse with clients who do freelancing gigs in the comfort of their homes. They say the pay was way better than being employed locally. And after contemplating about it for a while, I decided to quit my job and try my luck as a freelancer.

I was lucky enough to be hired by a startup company based in San Francisco on my first application. It was for a snippet writer position and the pay was indeed great and was incomparable to my former employment. Another positive is that I no longer had to fight my way through the daily commute in the metro. In my former job, out of the eight hours of work I was paid for, an additional four hours was wasted on preparation and travel time. And in a work from home setup, you have some flexibility on when you work depending on the tasks you were assigned with.

I was happy with my new career and enjoyed it for more than a year until I was hit with one of the harsh realities of freelancing, there was no security of tenure. Since I am an independent contractor and clients are outside the jurisdiction of the Philippines, I can be let go in any given time. This was the case for my former employer. Apparently, a sudden shift in the SEO metrics showed that snippet writing was no longer as effective and mass layoffs ensued. But I was still thankful that they gave me a separation pay when they were not obligated to do so.

So from there on, I was left in the dark as to what my next steps would be. After a while, I was able to build my reputation on Upwork and was hired by different clients for short to midterm projects such as transcription and content writing. I got a chance to be employed by a larger firm similar to my first company and had worked there for four years. But again, we were also displaced after a while and this time due to the emergence of artificial intelligence. And as they say, if you can't beat them, join them. Now most of the projects I am contracted with are aligned towards machine learning technology such as data annotation. And I'm hoping to develop more skills in the next few years in order to adapt to this ever-changing freelancing environment.