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The Braintrust journey.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
That’s a quote from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland written by Lewis Carroll. It’s also a part of Garth Boyd’s talent profile bio on Braintrust. As a Senior Application Security Architect, part of his job is to help leading enterprises like IBM do the impossible by coming up with new ways to build more securely.
Garth first started freelancing in 1996 but he’s also taken on his fair share of full-time employment opportunities. In 2020, he decided to give it up for good and go back to the one thing that consistently gives him the freedom to do what he wants: freelancing.
“Organizations like to pigeonhole you. ‘You can only do this. You can only do that.’ But as a freelancer, you get to do things you actually want to do”, says Garth. “I got tired of the full time employee scene, especially when it came to dealing with HR, and decided I might as well go freelance.”
That’s when Garth discovered Braintrust, the world’s first user-owned Talent network.
“One of the things I love about Braintrust is that you get paid Net30. And because they intermediate so well with enterprises, there’s less bureaucracy I have to deal with. They even put me in direct contact with the head honcho so that we could work directly with each other rather than going through a middleman.”
Highlights along the way.
Garth primarily focuses on security work for Nestlé, a Braintrust client that he’s been working for for the past year. “I train their team and skill them up by helping them develop their container technology and creating standards that I can then teach their teams how to use. You can say I’m on a skunkworks team that’s setting an example for the rest of the organization.”
Garth knows first-hand how hard it can be for freelancers to get connected to top enterprises. But that’s one of the reasons he chose Braintrust over other talent platforms out there. He saw that clients like Nestlé, Nike, Taskrabbit, and other enterprise leaders were already on the platform. “Seeing who was on the platform instantly gave Braintrust credibility,” says Garth.
“Working with Nestlé has been great. They’re keen to learn and always responsive when you need them.”
Why Garth loves what he does.
As a freelancer, Garth gets access to a world of opportunities–opportunities that can’t be found when you’re full-time with a single company.
“Braintrust gives me access to a ton of different projects,” says Garth. “It helps me stay nimble but more importantly, it gives me what I want most and that’s freedom.”
Instead of an employer calling all the shots, micromanaging his work days, and giving the bare minimum when it comes to PTO and other benefits, Garth has the freedom to work from wherever he wants, whenever he wants. He also gets to take on new projects and challenges that are exciting to him.
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