The Contract Position
by Remy Porter
in Feature Articles
on 2021-01-05
Mandi didn't plan to take a staff job at a university. To the contrary, she'd heard some bad things: loads of office politics, budgets so thin you need quantum mechanics to describe their position, and bureaucracy thick enough to drown any project.
But one day, she met her old colleague Scot for lunch, and they got to chatting about his university job. "Oh, yeah, that's common enough," he said, "which is why my team isn't structured that way. We're doing in-house development of educational solutions, which is a fancy way of saying 'nobody understands what we do, so they leave us alone'."