Ask HN: What tech has more demand on freelancing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What tech has more demand on freelancing?

1 pointAxvi5 comments

Hello all.

I've a mix profile: senior Data Scientist on my day job, self-tought web dev on my spare time. Now, after many years being employed I'd love to start freelancing but I feel I need to specialize on something to become more sellable.

My skillset looks like this: - Data analysis (high) - Data visualization (high) - Data engineering (mid) - Machine learning (mid) - Frontend (low) - Backend (low)

I'm more experienced on the data part but also I believe it's more challenging to create a healthy client funnel.

Options I see:

A) Data Science track - discarded for freelancing

B) Data engineering track - get some certifications on Big Query or Looker to become an expert

C) Front-end - what has more demand as a freelance?

D) Back-end - what has more demand as a freelance?

I'm really open to learn anything until mastering, but I don't know what.

I'm currently valued at my day job and quiting to start as an entry-freelance on something that I'm not proficient (yet) scares me. But at the same time I'm not sure I'd enjoy a data analysis job as a freelance.

Another thing that scare me about the "web track" is the amount of different technologies out there. How can I compete agains other freelancers with a huge list of libraries and APIs? Is that critical to land a freelance job?

What would you do in my situation? Where there is more demand?

whats your time zone? I also want to get some freelance jobs and i have a similar (1 year) experience in data engineering/analytics, customer support, bigquery, datastudio etc. would be nice to discuss, I'm willing to coop maybe gather efforts would be nice to leave my snobish douchey egocentric toxic boss

You should have begun the write up with WHY you'd "love to start freelancing". Depending on the reasons advice will be very different.

Fair point :)

Some reasons I don't like being an employee:

- Schedule constrains

- Politics and certain dynamics within/between teams. I'm getting tired of those.

- Money. I'm close to the ceiling (for my location and role) unless I pivot into management

- I'm a bit disconnected about what delivers real value within the company, I feel I'm just a small piece of a big machinery. It's a bit abstract the work I do

- I can influence but I don't own my career path

What I believe a freelance route could give me:

- I can pivot until finding what I enjoy doing

- More flexible schedule

- Feeling that I'm providing tangible value

- Money ceiling

- My efforts would give me a sense of investing in "my own business"

- Freedom. Choose who to work with or not (ideal scenario of course)

- Learning new tech

You need to stick those reasons somewhere you see them everyday cause they will be a much more useful compass than whats in demand. Whats in demand is always changing.

The way it worked out for me was contacting someone senior at a startup incubator and telling them I wanted some kind of consulting role (few hours a week) to explore more flexible work. They are always hard up for experienced people. That put me in touch with a bunch of startups and I picked one where they had a small project but no one free to work on. That was the door opener and being in a setting with multiple companies all around, it was easy to make contacts, hear what issues different companies had etc. Whenever it aligned with something I knew or was interested in techwise I would try to get involved or help them out.

If you are not a big networker like me the key is to put yourself in environments where you are constantly bumping into people who are telling you their problems :)

Good luck!

That's a great advice. Thanks a lot

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