How does your self-employed career compare to a parallel salaried career in your industry across 20 years? (In terms of year-averaged income, hours worked, etc.)
I've had periods being the sole operator at my company where I've had to work through family holidays and endured extreme stress. My earnings are absolutely famine and feast; had times without paying myself for months and months.
However (and it's a massive however), the freedom has been priceless and I suspect I could never work for someone else in a typical job. I had a typical job once when I was about 20 and not since (I'm 43 now); I don't expect I will have a CV or an employer again in my life. I quit uni/college and have no degree. I don't think I'm very good at what I do.
I've had years earning less than $15k. But I've also had a year where I went around the world through 20+ countries, and many other years where I travelled 3+ months out of the year. Last year I gutted a bus overseas, renovated it (shubbo.com), and travelled with wife and three kids twice across a continent over three months - it was the greatest experience of my life and I don't think I could've done it as an employee.
I currently have a mixture of income streams including one where I photograph/film while travelling (serio.com.au); it barely feels like work. I wouldn't change it for a thing.
Congratulations on your successful gig career that gives you great freedom and the means to support yourself. However, not everyone can freelance. They may have skills which have zero demand right now, they are unable to work remotely, or they have mortgages or health/family situations which prevent them relocating or doing gig work.
There's a lot of sentiment on this thread that these people losing their jobs at LinkedIn are deadweight but in my experience the people let go in the midst of a great economic crisis include superstars who have the floor vanish beneath them, through no fault of their own.
There was no single massive layoff. Instead there was a 6 month period of people slowly fading away. The most bizarre experience of my professional life. Then one Monday, with zero warning, I was brought into a meeting with my supervisor and HR and was told I was being let go. There was an extremely flimsy excuse related to performance; when I asked why it wasn't reflected in my reviews they had no answer.
So from feeling like I had good job stability and support to out of work in about 1 hour flat. I obviously saw the writing on the wall in general but never would have expected me to be one that was asked to leave. My only guess is the promotion made me a target due to higher salary. Luckily I took that as a sign from the universe that it was finally time to attempt the career switch to software dev that I had been planning and working towards for 4 years, and I made it, so for me it was oddly a net positive.
Now I'm not claiming I was some legal superstar. But there were a lot of very good workers that were let go. And the legal job market is brutal. The vast majority of lawyers in this country do not fit your TV view of lawyers. Most of them are your standard 9-5 types working for well under 6 figures with astronomical loan burdens. And good luck telling a lawyer to freelance.
So yes, I agree with you.
Someone with a mortgage losing a job has to cover for the downtime, sure. I've had to cover for the peaks and troughs for 20 years. At no point have I had the safety of a predictable pay cheque.
If superstars were let go, wouldn't they often be in a position to capitalise? Or have the intelligence to up-skill or diversify skill set? My line of work has been savaged by platforms. What was once "We have a $10k budget to build a site" has become "So I've done 99% of my site on [platform] but I can't work out the last bit. My budget for the most annoying and least predictable remaining bit of the job is $100."
An employee is at the mercy of their employer just like I am at the mercy of my clients. Any individual has some responsibility to maintain their skills or diversify (against platforms) or stockpile for hard times. I absolutely have sympathy for someone losing their job but I don't have any particular sympathy given it's the flipside of a coin that sees them get a regular wage for a given period.
It's starting to feel like getting rich is overrated when it requires so much of your life to make it happen. Hearing from someone who ended up with similar freedoms (working for yourself is no small one!) would be cool.
One thing that really made the decision easier for me when I left my job to do my own thing was that I could have been in many different situations around the world where I would not have even HAD the opportunity to do my own thing - and by NOT doing it I felt it was disrespectful to all those who would take the chance if given the opportunity to be in my place.
If you’re savvy, good at networking and self motivated, you can make money which is comparable to most full time jobs. Just gotta be careful about the taxes and make sure you save for the lean times.
(Thank you!)
I'm in the US, and use a payroll service to pay myself a regular salary. The payroll service deducts and pays appropriate taxes and paperwork. I then also make estimated quarterly tax payments as well, to deal with any estimated overage I may earn/owe. I then pay a tax professional to reconcile everything at the start of the tax season.
Meet with a tax professional. Meet with 2 or 3. Find someone you're comfortable with who has clients like you. Or... find people like you and get referrals as to who they use.
I am not rich compared to my peers but I wouldn't ever trade my life for any of their lives. I couldn't handle having to ask for leave. I get by with less and travel more (which is something very, very important to me). A lot of the best things in life like being outdoors, hanging out with friends and family, are effectively free.
That said, if I were having to buy into the housing market now rather than 15+ years ago, the mortgage stress might be completely different, and doing it without a regular pay cheque could be a serious challenge.
I make more than many salaried programmers I know, less than quite a few. I work 4 hrs/day, 5 days/wk on average, so by hourly income I do about as well as my friends at Google and Apple.
My freelance practice mainly involves taking over web applications that the original developer didn't finish or abandoned, leaving the customer holding the bag. There's plenty of this kind of work, lots of development relationships go sour, but the software is salvageable. Fixing a few problems without complaining that I have to rewrite it from scratch in Rust gives me long-term clients who trust me, and my 40 years of expertise in multiple business domains gives me consulting work.
That's my niche now that I'm too old to get hired at a cool company, and too cranky to submit myself to a bullshit interview.
Most of the time I work with PHP, MySQL, some WordPress, Zendesk, Shopify, Hubspot. I get some Go, Ruby, Python, other stuff once in a while. I can learn pretty much any "stack" because I have done web dev since web development started (ASP, ColdFusion, Perl back then). I also do a lot of system admin on AWS, Google Cloud, etc.