Comment by Roritharr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Roritharr | Hacker News Reader

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This, while not really being nuanced, strikes the most important point. Trust.

Building trust for a freelancer is hard, especially one working remote with little on-site. Transparency usually helps in these settings.

I've had to work on projects as a freelancer where there simply wasn't much progress for weeks because they were such monstrosities, that trust and a prose-documentation of my work was the only thing keeping me afloat. (think 5 different languages talking to each other via SOAP, consuming 3 different databases, all with encoding problems between every possible step)

Just being able to point at all the screenshots from the bazillion different debugging windows, log diffs, etc. would have made things much easier back then. Swapping me out for someone else two weeks into this project would have been a terrible mistake, but besides my assurances and some prose the manager had to trust me. Bad for him, bad for me.

If you're a company that commonly outsources, you should have good freelancing game. By that I mean you build a network of freelancers you've worked with before or have heard good feedback from trusted sources.

My girlfriend is a manager at a writing company. She has a group of about 30 freelancers she keeps in touch with on top of the 10 people who work directly under her at her company. When too much work comes in she leans on the freelancer that best fits what she needs. These are people she has worked with before, has had success with, and most of all trusts. She, of course, has to try new freelancers occasionally. But the bad ones get spit back out.

It sounds like the company you were working for doesn't have very good freelancing game.

The company actually had, that's why things worked out and I returned to more projects afterwards, but it was stressful and not a job they would have given someone else, because of the lack of trust inherent in any new freelancer.

If you want freelancing to stay mostly something for people great at selling themselves, managing customer relations etc. that model works well, but that's IMO not optimal for the company nor the majority of people who would enjoy being freelancers.

Hmmm, interesting. I wonder how important self advertising is in this case, though. I know that she usually posts content she can't get done with her normal freelancers on this writer's freelance site. Freelancers make bids, negotiate terms, etc, through the website. After she's worked with someone she likes through it she tends to keep their email and ask them directly next time.

I think you're right that this type of model benefits freelancers that manage their own group of clients rather than through an agency, however.

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