The most stable job is the unstable one. I wrote that before I had either.

March 2024, still at university, worrying about the thing every Vietnamese student is taught to worry about:

There's no such thing as Job. Job is Just some experience and skills that particularly used in that kind of work. So Don't Just focus on Job, don't Just aim to have a decent "stable" Job. As it is said: "The most stable Job is The unstable ones". The Reasons behind this is that Those who have unstable ones must possess many certain common and popular skills that every Job requires, which helps them have the capability of doing every kind of jobs.

What the argument actually says

Not stable jobs are bad. The argument is narrower and better than that.

A job is a bundle: some transferable skills, plus a lot of context that only works in that one place. A stable job lets the second part grow and the first part sit still, because nothing forces you to prove the transferable half anywhere else.

Unstable work does the opposite. Every new client is a cold start. You have to be able to walk in, understand a business you have never seen, decide what matters, and ship something that survives contact with their actual staff. The skills that let you do that are the ones that work everywhere — and they only stay sharp because you keep being made to use them.

So the stability isn't in the contract. It's in what you can do without one.

Where I was wrong

I wrote that with zero experience of either kind of work. Two years later, two corrections.

Unstable work does not automatically build transferable skill. It can also build a habit of doing the same small job for forty different people. Freelancing badly is just an unstable job with worse benefits. The generalisation has to be deliberate: after each project, what did I learn that has nothing to do with this client?

The cold start is expensive and nobody pays for it. Understanding a new business takes real days, and those days are usually unbilled. That cost is the actual price of the flexibility. It's worth paying, and it is a price, and student-me did not know it existed.

What I do about it now

I keep a list — literally in the notebook — of the parts of every project that were not specific to that client. Reading a business's real data before believing its description of itself. Writing the rule, then the test that keeps the rule honest. Handing over in a way that survives me leaving.

That list is the actual asset. The projects are how I pay for building it.

Why this matters if you're hiring me

You are not hiring someone who has done your exact thing forty times. You are hiring someone whose whole working life has been walking into unfamiliar businesses, working out what actually matters, and shipping something the staff will still be using next quarter.

That is either exactly what you need, or it isn't. It's worth knowing which one before we talk.

From a handwritten notebook kept since 2024. This is post four of five.