Whats rustling your jimmies?

My billable rate at work is just below our principal engineers and xxxxx scientist III. Unlike them, a portion of my billable rate includes my UAS and survey equipment, and also the software I use (ie: it's not just 3x hourly wage like a lot of people).

Because of this, I'm being gently pressured to spend less time doing field work whenever a big wig calls me with a short notice request and finds out that I'm knee deep in mud out in the boonies. They basically want the junior staff to take over my field work so I'm available in the office when needed, or so I can keep going on my R&D projects.

It's irritating because I love my field work AND office work, but I'd hate either of them if that's all I did every day.

What they're saying makes sense for most people, but usually if I'm doing field work (other than UAS), it's because I'm helping out a project manager thats in a tight spot. Either they don't have enough staff to finish something and I'm filling in (at 2x their staff's rate), or more commonly it's because I volunteered to do some field work because it's a perfect opportunity to test out something I've been working on. I'll test something out on a few projects and make sure it works well, then I'll get the rest of our field staff setup to do it the same way and let them handle it from there on out.

Example:




We're doing surveys on these 2x vineyard/orchard properties before a property sale. There's a dispute on how many plants are currently on site, so we're doing a manual count (which the client is paying a stupid amount of money for, happily). It's literally just walking up and down rows and counting plants. Since I'm right in the middle of developing workflows for this for our other departments and because this one is kind of a unique workflow (we're updating existing features/data instead of just collecting new features/data), I volunteered to do it. It's 25 miles worth of vineyard rows and I had one person helping out to do it the "traditional" way on the first day so I could see how our field time + office time compares for both approaches. Besides, it's nice to walk up and down rows on a vineyard at the base of the mountains, listening to music and podcasts.

So, it's mainly just 3 or 4 people that kind of bust my balls about working in the field when they were hoping I could help them out with something in the office. All of these guys are basically cheerleaders for the R&D stuff I'm working on for field staff and they know that testing it in the field is part of the process, but they still think I should just sit at the desk just in case someone calls me and needs help with something. I'm not in IT....almost nothing about my job normally requires some kind of rapid response, quick turnaround or being on-call. Anything that comes my way that's urgent is only because of 1. poor planning on their part or 2. software/technical help. And the only one that's kind of a dick about it is the former CEO of a company we acquired. I've told him twice now that nothing in my job description even implies that I need to sit at my desk and wait for his phone call. Last time, I told him that he either needs to accept that I have a well-structured schedule of project work and to practice better planning if he wants to involve me in his projects, OR add someone to his team with the same skillset I have OR to develop the skills himself. I expected a phone call from our President or my supervisor shortly after that call, but this guy is despised by so many people at the company that I assume any complaint towards me was just shrugged off. He's not a horrible dude, just an absolute asshole to work with.

tl:dr - They want me to essentially stop doing field work, but I like doing field work.