Hacker News Reader

I don’t use any of those sites and I do freelancing via brokers mainly.

can you tell more about this? What exactly do you mean by "brokers"?

There are middlemen not unlike recruiters but for freelancers. They serve the same purpose as sites like Upwork but at a smaller scale.

How can i find such people?

Usually, they find you ;-) I’m only slightly kidding here.

This is a very crowded market and if you can avoid working with them it’s probably best to do so (for pretty much the same reasons as is avoiding working with Upwork).

There are a few really good ones but most of them just try to sell developer hours as a commodity.

Where you can find the good ones depends a lot on where you’re located. There are freelancer forums (on LinkedIn, for example) where recruiters usually advertise new projects.

I found a good one who has contacts with some big companies. Usually the contracts are between 3 months and 1 year. I worked with them on and off since 2006.

But I agree. It’s a crowded market. I stopped answering people who contact me on LinkedIn - usually they can’t help me.

I would say this is the most effective way for me to get jobs since I don’t have a sales department to sell my services to big companies. I kind of out sourced the sales part, you could say.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com