Freelance writing can be a tough career. Even with lots of experience and stable clients, it can be stressful to not have a consistent, predictable income or work schedule. Maybe you’re feeling lonely working all by yourself, maybe you’re sick of being your own accountant, or maybe you’re just ready for a change. 

There are plenty of pros and cons to going back to an office job, so make sure you take everything into account before you decide to take that job or delete that recruitment email. 

Pro: Flexible Work 

It used to be that the only way you could get a flexible work schedule was to be your own boss. Many freelancers cite a resistance to remote work as the main reason they switched to freelance. 

But post-2020, it’s increasingly more common for workplaces to offer remote work and flexible scheduling options. Workers across the economy are standing up for themselves and demanding that employers take a more results-centric approach, allowing people to get the job done in whatever way works for them. 

Even in offices that aren’t fully remote, you might find that your freelance career offers plenty of leverage to keep your flexibility. Your freelance experience is proof that you can manage your time and meet deadlines. So as long as you come into the office for important things, like meetings that really can’t be emails, it’s reasonable to ask that anything else gets done on your own time. 

Con: Bad Managers 

Writing is often a freelance career. Marketing, especially in the age of social media, also lends itself well to professionals who take on jobs with different companies. However, now that the journalism field is increasingly short on full-time opportunities, professional writers across the board are very often freelancers by necessity, not by choice. 

But if you’re considering taking on an opportunity with a traditional employer, you’ll want to consider what you’ll do if you run across the biggest impetus behind the freelance ecosystem: bad managers. Even if you’ve been a freelancer your whole career, being your own boss is only a benefit of contract work if having an actual boss is terrible. 

It’s a real problem in the workplace that one of the only ways to step up the ladder is to be promoted into a management position. Not everyone is good at managing people, and not everyone wants to either. Very often people are put into management positions without any substantial training on how to be a good boss. Look on any work-related advice column, and you’ll see scores of people with horror stories about bosses doing everything from illegally exploiting workers to being just plain mean. 

If you’re worried about your new gig getting ruined by a bad boss, you should ask the right questions during your interview. Ask how the chain of command in your new position works, ask about company cultures around management style, and make sure you’ll have access to an HR department. 

Pro: Actual Benefits

People who don’t work as freelancers love to crow about how easy it must be. You can go on vacation whenever you want! However, while control over your schedule is a huge plus to going freelance, it’s not as simple as that. Most full-time jobs offer paid vacation as a benefit. When you’re a freelance writer, if you aren’t working, you aren’t getting paid. 

If you’re a savvy freelancer, you’re hopefully already taking into account things like fielding client emails, seasonal ebbs and flows in business, and holidays and vacation time into your project rates. But it can be hard to feel comfortable taking off work when it means you’re essentially losing dollars to do so. Lots of companies are stingy with paid vacation days, but you may find that a structured paid vacation incentivizes you to actually take time off more than when you were freelancing. 

But the most important and arguably best benefits of all? You already know them: health insurance and retirement plans.

There’s nothing more brutal than the American health insurance marketplace. The plans are terrible, and they can still cost more than your mortgage. After paying for that, you won’t have much left over to even put away for your retirement. 

A 401(k) and health plan might be enough for you to ditch the freelance life for good. 

Con: Restricted Workloads

Depending on your industry, there can be a lot of variations in workload and typical weekly hours for a freelancer. It’s entirely possible that making the switch to a full-time job will increase your income and reduce your workload. 

But working whenever you want isn’t the only way that freelancing offers you more options. As a freelancer, it’s easier to expand your experience, discover new niches, and build a track record with new types of content. In a full-time position, you might only be writing customer-facing email copy, and you’ll usually only be focusing on whatever industry your company is in. 

If you’re feeling caged in by the type of content a prospective job offers you, there are a few ways to get around it. First, ask more about writing workflow within the company. Will the people who write social media copy also be on your team, or will they be in an entirely different department? Is it a big company where everyone hired to write white papers or newsletters is a specialist in that type of writing, or is it a small company that might want someone who can branch out? Is it OK to pick up some freelance gigs here and there for extra money, as long as it’s not for one of your competitors? 

Remember, employers will like that you’re ambitious and want opportunities to gain new skills. Just be honest about your desire for a varied workload or your hopes to continue learning how to apply your writing skills to different kinds of work. 

Find the Best Fit

Whether freelancing no longer suits your life, or you’ve received a job offer you can’t turn down, making the switch into traditional employment is a big change. Make sure you give yourself a lot of time and space to adjust, and don’t be afraid to ask your employer for support if you need it. 

As an experienced freelancer, you know how to make a living on your own, so that means you can be really picky about finding a good fit with a traditional employer. Be honest about what you need and give the new schedule a fair chance, but do what you need to do for you if it doesn’t work out. 

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.