I'm curious to explore if contracting makes sense as an alternative to full time employment. How do I start? How do I position and price myself?
Not going to lie: Most of my clients come from my network and their referrals. Most of my freelancer friends’ clients come from their network and their network referring clients to them. While it is possible to find clients organically through advertising, it’s much easier if you can build a network to pull from.
You can start by simply contacting people you know and asking if their companies need any help. Let them know you’re available. Then, when they ask, be available and solve their problems ASAP.
It’s actually quite a challenge to hold down a full-time job and to freelance at the same time. You might be lucky enough to find clients who don’t care much about how long it takes and are fine to communicate asynchronously through e-mail at your convenience. However, most clients will want to get on video calls throughout the day and will expect the work to be done quickly. Realistically, it will start competing with your day job at some point. You should decide now how you’re going to handle that.
Whatever you do, don’t use your work computer for any freelancing tasks. Neither party may ever find out, but if you get into a situation where it matters then it’s terrible to have intermingled the two.
Finally: Don’t underestimate how good a stable, big company job is right now. Freelancing isn’t really the easy money that some people make it out to be, especially if you’re not actually free during the day because you have a job. If you’re looking for something different, consider just getting a different job.
This, but also don't underestimate the personal satisfaction of "eating what you kill". I feel far less alienated from my labor than I did as an FTE. When I get a tough new task, I get excited thinking of those hours piling up. My reward is directly tied to my efforts and success in a way it never was before, and that has improved my quality of life tremendously.
I love that expression and mere words cannot describe the sense of satisfaction one gets when the sale is made and the checks are cashed. It’s not for everybody. Honestly, it’s not for most either. But if you do pull it off, the feeling is fantastic.
I have been working for 15+ years as consultant and contractor for a SP500 company and I have several friends that are FTE there. Over the years I realized I'm much more motivated and overall happier with the work I do than they are - at the same company and in similar positions.
I'm also much more productive because my only measure of success is the quality of the output of my work. If it isn't good, then my contract will not get renewed. So I have to produce something of value 100% of the time which keeps me in check at all times.
In their case there's politics, promotions, new roles, new bosses, performance reviews and so on.
The saying "eating what you kill" really resonates. Thanks for that.
Finally: Don’t underestimate how good a stable, big company job is right now. Freelancing isn’t really the easy money that some people make it out to be, especially if you’re not actually free during the day because you have a job.
I am acutely aware of how much more money I could be making if I chose to work at a big company at the moment. Much better benefits, too.
I've ended up taking the perspective that consulting is a route where I can trade earning more money for having more control over my time. My current clients don't care that I dedicate half of my working hours to building and marketing the job site I'm working on. I get their deliverables done on time, on budget, and (importantly) right the first time. That's something they've had a hard time finding, and it shows in their willingness to accept my (relatively high) hourly rate.
It seems like there was always some resentment toward the guy who leaves the office at 2:00 and take 30 days of vacation as an employee regardless of his salary or productivity.
But as a contractor they don't care.
This. Also don't underestimate how hard it is to get the money from a client if they decide not to pay you, even if you did a good job.
It's not too bad in my opinion. I've been freelancing for close to 20 years on my own with no 3rd party platforms. I've had assorted clients from around the world.
I've only been legit ripped off once out of issuing hundreds of invoices and working with a bunch of individuals and businesses.
The amount I got cheated out of was 2 hours of work where the client requested work, agreed to pay but didn't pay. Other than that one time it's been smooth sailing where mostly everyone pays on time without issues. I've only had a handful of cases where someone forgot to pay within 30 days and a single follow up email resulted in them apologizing and paying. In some cases they even gave an unrequested tip because they genuinely felt sorry for missing the first email. These were all cases of people being busy and forgetting by accident.
I'm also very lax with how I request payments too. I send out an invoice at the start of every month because it's more convenient for everyone involved. Sometimes with new clients this means doing let's say 5 hours of work on the 3rd of the month but not invoicing them until the following month.
The problems tend to happen if there's larger amounts of money involved. So it's important as a contractor not to enable a situation where they owe you a lot of money, especially if you have no leverage.
I've had lots of 100+ hour month contracts, some of which have spanned for years.
At some point you have to use your judgment to figure out what to do. If an individual with no registered business emails you asking you to put in 150 hours worth of work in a month, has a lot of grammar mistakes, seems weirdly aggressive over video calls or won't do video calls and tries to haggle down your prices then yeah it wouldn't be a good idea to wait until the end of the month to bill them.
But usually you'll have a chat or 2 with someone, get a good feel for them, propose a single page contract with a clear set of deliverables and compensation, then do the work and collect your money.
If you're doing project based billing with a new client it wouldn't hurt to ask for a decent chunk (33-50%) up front or at least earlier than your usual billing cycle for the first time.
One of the challenges of being professional is to know when to refuse clients and their work. Both for potential clients and on-going clients gone bad.
I did a bit of asking around last year and I found several opportunities where companies have small average quality engineering teams who need someone to lead an effort in something like a product manager and engineering architect role. Those sounded interesting, though I did not follow up.
My main fear is pay. Ideally, I'd like to be able to make at least $300/hr. I have no idea if that's realistic. Maybe not at first?
Interesting. It’s not exactly common for companies to want contractors to be in leadership roles. Leadership roles generally warrant full-time employees who can be more invested in the company.
Unless this was a company that tried to treat everyone as contractors while expecting them to behave as full-time employees. That’s not true contracting/freelancing. That’s just companies abusing labor laws.
For example one company was a media company that you've probably heard of. For their next growth phase, they have two separate legacy PHP systems that they need to integrate and they need to modernize their front end. Their development team isn't capable of doing that project. They've been spinning their wheels for a few years. I thought it might be fun to go in to that company, understand their systems, architect the new solution, lead/coach their team through building it. I could also help them set up automated build systems, introduce React and coach them through learning that. Maybe help them hire some more modern developers as well. That kind of thing.
I've got a lot of experience doing complex architecture and also training up junior developers, so it sounds like projects like that could play to my strengths.
There are folks who become “fixers” but they have a long history of being fixers and have usually worked in multiple different orgs achieving similar results regardless of org structure, strategy and cruft. It sounds like you are itching for such a career, but it requires starting somewhere. Many fixers also take full time leadership positions at the company for a period of time and then move on once the problem is fixed. The leadership position also gives you direct authority over the process and resources, which you will need as both likely need to be tweaked. That the project is failing is likely a combination of poor process and some bad apples, and both usually need fixing. It’s rarely that “everyone on the engineering team is incompetent.” Without the leader title you will not have the organizational authority to fire/hire or change process.
You may want to consider the offer of the leadership position seriously: The company sees the problem within itself, sees you as a fixer and is willing to hire you to do your magic. This is how you build your reputation in this market space. Give yourself three to five years to implement the changes, then move on to a different company with a different problem to fix. It’s also a great way to find out if you’re truly as awesome as you think you are :).
Well obviously if they can’t pay market rates, and you didn’t even think it was worth asking, then it’s not exactly a great example of a consulting client.
I’m not sure what these hypothetical contracts that you didn’t even pursue because you don’t think the companies could have afforded add to the conversation, though.
It doesn’t sound like these clients were typical or even remotely competent.
Also, just in case it wasn’t obvious, this comment does read as extremely arrogant. A company wanted to hire you, you didn’t want to work there because they’re “average/mediocre”, so you’ve decided w/o engaging with them that it might be fun to pop in and just solve all their problems for them.
As parallel comments have pointed out, networking is crucial to contracting, because it’s the primary way that clients connect with you and decide to work with you. If your mindset is that you’re a rockstar saving crappy companies from their mediocrity, you’ll quickly find yourself with a poisoned well.
We would never communicate things like that - that would be arrogant, but if he's giving us the reality, then it's fine.
That said - the 'Red Flag' to me is that someone things they are going to 'contract' and 'help out a bit' and 'fix their architecture'.
This seems worse the a bit glib, it seems upside down.
This seems like someone who might be a good engineer and who has worked on good teams ... but doesn't have the maturity to understand how these projects tend to unfold.
'Fixing a Broken Project' has to be the most scary thing in software and in most cases it's not doable.
Teaching some best practices - yes. Helping to identify problems - yes. Maybe slicing off a few obvious things, sure - i.e. maybe they need a caching strategy.
But when 'Thing are Wrong' there are usually a lot of problems and 99% of the time, someone thinks they can hire a 'Savior' to come in and fix it. The 'Savior', offered a pile of money is likely to buy into their own ability to be the 'Savior'.
But the psychological development from those frothy heights, as the realization sets in that they're crashing on the rock of Scylla ... well there has to be a good German word for that.
We should try to recognize the variety of inputs that may have created what resulted in seemingly an 'architecture problem' when that might not be the source of the conundrum. A team of 'mediocre people' will probably only ever be capable of doing something to a certain calibre. The Winnipeg Symphony will never sound as good as the NY Philharmonic, College Basketball teams are not competitive with Pro Teams etc..
What is the monetary value of “fixing a broken project”? Nobody knows, because the root cause is not known - and if they knew the root cause, the problem would have been defined differently from the start.
So what happens is company tries to hire someone to diagnose the root causes. But diagnostics brings no inherit value to the org until problems are actually fixed. Which means nobody is willing to invest into diagnostics. Which means they try to fill in some flat rate position for these diagnostic purposes, position which fits the project budget, with compensation unrelated to the scale of actual problems at hand.
Another issue is that “fixing a broken project” engagements are usually launched by middle management responsible for success of these (already launched) projects. Proper way to approach this as an external consultant would be to go one level up, take a look at the actual company strategy and this project’s goals, and rework the way whole project is launched. At many times the easier way around is to re-setup, re-steer, or kill this project altogether - but this requires a different level of involvement.
In the end you are stuck on an underfunded engagement where actual proper solution likely lies outside of your area of responsibility (you are being hired by middle management, so you cannot effectively go above their head and reach the actual solution).
the real value is identifying these projects early. but identification is not near as difficult as getting the message understood by the stakeholders.
The only reason I never got into serious compensation talks is that I was just testing out the waters to see if my contacts could help me find interesting work.
I did actually do some small and limited architectural design projects / tech leadership projects (think 40 hour total project time over several weeks) and I was able to get a rather high rate for that.
I'm not sure why people are saying contract leadership isn't a thing. My day job routinely hires temporary contract leadership for things outside our wheelhouse. The people we contract are people who would never work at our company because it's beneath them, but they're willing to take some short highly paid contracting jobs.
if you don’t want to work for a company for any reason, why did you accept the offer?
i dont have any faith in your product or your leadership - you really seem to be chasing your own tail, and working for you is just going to be pointless and frustrating for both of us.
however, you want to hire me because i'm an expert in X. actually I am, and if you give me the go ahead I'll basically fix all your X problems in 3 months and be available for ongoing work if necessary later. you really dont need a full time X guy, I promise you I'm going to be bored after that first little bit.
i want the money, the engagement, and the opportunity to grow my network. that works for me. hanging out on slack with your team all day and having a weekly zoom where I remind you yet again that if you dont test you can expect problems later doesnt.
Sounds as not a good proposition for me as a client. It breaks the trust in your effort being for the best of my interest.
No that different from a mercenary's logic. Even then some loyaly to the payer is expected.
How would you go on supporting the product past completion of your work? Saying that it broke in the part that you did not write? Well, you touched it, you "own" it... at least in client's mind.
instead of trying to find another senior X person to come on fulltime, maybe you should pay someone to pick up X?
If you're doing strategic work it still needs to get implemented. And you're not doing that work. But the result is what the CEO will convey as your reputation to your next client referral reference check.
Just some thoughts.
Green field projects are much easier, but you really need to have a great product owner/manager.
Tldr: It's not just coding, it's people.
That's Yahoo right? :)
I have had several lead roles as a freelancing consultant over the last few years. Product owner, software architect, software lead. I try to communicate a lot, write down my strategies and thereby make myself replaceable. This way I can change assignments when conditions change (project entering new phase, change of directions, or purchasing goes for a drive to cut expenses) and the client gets improved progress, process, culture and way of working in return, without fears of making them too dependent on a consultant.
People reach out to me on roughly weekly basis with new leads, so finding a new gig is easy. I treat new contacts with mild distance and careful interest, and greet old colleagues that know me well with greater warmth and interest. But I also make it clear that when I'm on a contract, I want to leave the current client with some firm usable deliverables before I consider any other options. Typical assignments are 6-24 months.
Typical rate: currently roughly 100 EUR/h, increasing by roughly 10% annually. 12 years experience in my field (embedded software, specialized within automotive). Western Sweden.
For info, labour laws are pretty strict in Sweden, so employing somebody is a great expense and risk for the employer. Contracting has thus become pretty common (often 30% of the workforce; sometimes more).
As a manager, who are you going to pay that kind of rate to?
Why would someone hire a contractor at that rate, when they could hire the top tier Google Engineers?
$200-300/hr rates are usually for 'expertise' style inputs - it's where you have industry leading or arcane knowledge in your field, and you bill for your insight, which might just be a few hours.
A lawyer who specializes in IP, and is intimately familiar with the Texas IP legal circuit and all the judges, would bill some 'very high rate' per hour, but probably only for limited number of hours.
If you have a full time job, and want to do some 'evening consulting' - you could bill $300/hr if you prepare a training package and are training a team on how to do something, i.e. a 4-hour course for $1200. That kind of thing.
Or if you really have some super DevOps knowledge, you're 'The K8 Man' and they call you because they are stuck on a problem, and you always have a solution - you can bill them $300/hr.
But being a bit more senior than their regular devs and helping them out doing regular work, then it's going to be tough to get a huge billing rate.
A good rule of thumb is to plan to bill not much more than 1000 hours per year, making $300/hr more like a $300K/yr gross income.
But 'leadership' over some project, over any period of time, is not one of them.
A 'consultant to solve our DB limitations', sure.
But in terms of leadership, part time, non-business hours, no 'on site' (aka the OP has a 'real job'.). I don't think so.
$300/hr is a $600K/year run rate - is the relative cost of having for someone for extended periods.
A contractor can log much more than 1K hours per year - or less - it entirely depends on the nature of their work.
Also, some 'hours billed' are de-facto to the firm, not the individual. If you're hiring 'a lawyer' - you're really hiring 'their team' not really the individual, as often you would when hiring a contractor.
Source: Close to 20 years consulting at $150/hr.
...at 100% utilization, yes.
I've never personally met an independent contractor who books more than a thousand hours a year.
Contractors come in all shapes and forms some may book more, some less, though yes, from the contractors perspective, $150/hour is more like $150K/year.
Yes, usually in a hierarchy, 'leaders' get paid more.
But consultants and contractors are not hired for 'leadership' roles, so I'm a bit confused by that.
I started a new project and our DB guy was young, we were unsure of ourselves, so we hired some Oracle expert to help with that and they were expensive. So 1 or 2 days consulting on our project.
It could have been $1K an hour for all I know, it doesn't matter.
For short bits of key insight, high rates are not uncommon.
Corporate Lawyers will charge $1K/hour - but even then that's going to go to their interns, associates, overhead as well - it's a 'business' not just a person.
Also note that those rates tend to grow exponentially pas a certain point: someone who specializes in international law for mining and gas, who is needed 'right now' because of a flare up between SNC Lavalin and the Peruvian government, can bill $10K/hour etc..
There actually isn't that much of a difference between 'consulting' and 'contracting' but the later usually implies 'work' as opposed to 'expertise'.
If you are providing very specific knowledge that the company really needs to move forward, and the terms are fairly clear that they need it, then you can start billing much higher than contract rates. The bigger the influence (i.e. if it's affecting a giant, $100M contract), then the bigger the rate.
But for 'general leadership' ... that's a much harder thing to put into dollars.
$1,000/hr, what the fuck. I don’t think I’ve dropped a legit WTF on HN before. That’s a 40hr a week rate for at least a month, right? Otherwise you’re probably using the wrong comparison to what you want. But still… sure wouldn’t take many hours at that level. What do they do?
Agree with this. To help freelancers get clients, I manually curate freelance jobs from more than 40+ job boards and freelance sites. [1]
Most of these companies in this list are most likely to hire freelance developers/marketers/writers.
It's still in beta, feel free to reach out/dm me if you would like to access. [2]
[1] -> https://twitter.com/RahulrangarajR/status/148021905157812224...
Depending on terms of your full-time employment, it may even preclude a contracting work in the same field if it overlaps the main work. It may also claim ownership of any IP created while employed.
Here you go to a website such as Jobserve, type in eg “React Contract” and apply to one of thousands of daily rate contracts. (Inventory is a bit low today due to start of the year, but will be 1000+ in a few weeks.)
After a short interview process, typically you will start a contract for 3-6 months, but can often stay for years. The processes by which contractors are hired, onboarded, paid etc are very mature.
In London in particular, many developers will go down this route in order to earn higher rates. There used to be tax advantages but these have been eroded over time.
“Disguised employment” is absolutely rife so the model is under constant attack by the government with our terrible IR35 law.
This is a very common model in the UK. I have only met a handful of “freelancers” here winning their own B2B business, but have met thousands upon thousands of contractors using the above model.
To answer the OPs question. In England you simply start applying for contracts posted publically online. The hardest part is typically that permanent employees need to give 1 month notice, whereas people want contractors to start in 1-2 weeks so you may need to give notice before having a contract in hand. Pull this off once though and you are away.
If you're looking for ongoing part-time contracting, I have successfully landed multiple contracting jobs by applying to places that were looking for full time work, for whom my skills were an exceptionally good fit, and saying "I know you weren't thinking of part-time remote contractors, but I'm a really good fit, would you consider it?"
Lots of places have just never seriously considered it, but faced with a hot prospect, will do so. And lots of places out there are actually wrestling with the issue of needing extra work, but not having enough to justify the obligation of hiring permanent full time.
They'd be happy to hire contractors for some things, but have no good way to find them.
I still hire part-time contractors for things, but for anything that's time sensitive or availability is a concern, I prefer to have a full-time employee.
People have a different learning and onboarding speed, but it generally takes months for an engineering hire to “break even” and be able to pick up most tickets on their own. So we generally prefer people that stay longer.
That being said, there is also value to bringing in people with different backgrounds, experiences & perspectives. So sometimes freelancers or consultants can be good choice.
Then, while doing that, I worked my network and found a couple good clients. I also posted in the monthly Freelance thread here on HN. I found two great clients through that!
I suspect for many of us, the easiest to find would be what’s called “staff augmentation” - basically you get inserted into an existing team in some capacity, except you’re on a contract basis so not tied down, get to negotiate your terms, don’t get employee benefits etc etc
Such engagements are often quite stable and long term (some companies are even willing to make them open ended!)
The downside is that you have less leverage to set high rates (although I’ve been able to get pretty satisfactory ones), you don’t have as much flexibility because you’re expected to be a regular member of the team and work 9-5ish hours, and you don’t get to escape the corporate/teamwork setting as much (if that was what you were looking for going freelance)
The upside is that you have to find new clients way less often, but still have the freedom to switch around as often as you want if you get bored/want to hunt for better rates etc
Now what most ppl think of freelancing is doing a single project and then either finding another one with the client or needing to find another client (eg this is most of the work on upwork)
In my short consulting career I’ve not found such work (tho haven’t been looking either) and frankly am still nervous on whether I can deliver well in such a capacity without the support of anyone else as it may. And obviously you’ll have to hunt for clients way more often with such projects.
If you reply with your email I’m happy to answer any questions or help if I think I can
Often this also leads to clients being more careful about having sane workloads
* Finding (good) clients is key to your success
* Ongoing relationships beat new projects almost all the time
* Focusing on a specific niche(s) helps set yourself apart
I write a bunch of articles on this stuff, you might fine some helpful if you decide to take the leap https://www.devtoagency.com
Although as a lot of people say, clients come from my network and referrals. So build that up first. Also, I started my own consulting gig in the UK, which is pretty much consulting central (I don't know any other country that normalises contracting to such an extent).
Possibly something like TopTal would work if your network hasn't reached critical mass yet. They'll take the pain out of finding clients. But that's never been an issue for me.
I think starting from scratch now might be a bit trickier. I have a Saas that's in an industry that's sort of dependent on relationships. And those are harder to build in today's virtual world (or at least, I'm finding it so). I don't think I have any great wisdom on what to do differently though. My pipeline is sort of an organic subsconscious thing.
Your playing a game that you'll never know the full set of rules to and people will cheat anyway.
i've been contracting for over 15years, and I wish I'd started earlier, one of the best decisions that I've ever made.
For me the biggest thing is variety and occasionally being challenged
You can get paid a lot more than regular employment, but you have to take into account that you don't get any benefits. How much that affects your quality of life depends on your location. For example, I live in the UK and have worked as a contractor on and off over the last 12 years. We have free healthcare so it's been easy. I don't care about other employee perks and in fact, even after paying out of pocket, it's still a lot more lucrative considering the work-life balance.
Freelancing sounds very attractive but what most developers don't realise is that you have to do sales from day one. And we all know how good we are at sales. It's too big a leap for most.
Contracting, on the other hand, is a lot easier to get started with because you can find contract work through the same channels as you'd find regular jobs.
In addition to the mainstream job sites (LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.), there are a ton of smaller niche sites where you can find contract work.
Once you get some experience working as a contractor, it's a smaller leap into proper freelancing. Plus, you can build your online profile, network and most importantly, confidence along the way.
I know in the big tech companies in the US, there's a bit of a stigma around contractors. So I'd avoid those and instead focus on the many other remote work opportunities available now.
I covered a lot of the why, what and how of starting as a contractor in these free videos -
1. Why you might want to become a contractor - https://learnetto.com/tutorials/why-should-you-become-a-cont...
2. How to look for contract work - https://learnetto.com/tutorials/how-to-look-for-contract-wor...
3. How to apply for and get contract work - https://learnetto.com/tutorials/how-to-get-contract-work
Having helped a bunch of people get into contracting recently, I know a lot of the struggles are mindset related.
If you need any help, feel free to get in touch. My email's in my profile.
You should start with one person who's willing to hire you. This will likely be somebody you have worked with in the past, or some close associate of theirs. Ideally, would be a part-time gig so that you don't have to give up your day job. That will let you set up the necessary systems and habits and get a better sense of whether this is for you.
If you don't have that person already at hand, you can instead start work on your sales process, which will likely mainly be a networking process. Set up time to talk to trusted former colleagues. Tell them you're thinking of switching to contract work. Ask them about how they perceive you, and in particular what kind of work they think you'd be great at. Then ask them what kinds of contract work they're seeing happen now, or have heard about happening. Lastly, ask them if there's anybody they know you should talk to, including both contractors and the kinds of people who hire contractors. If you're lucky, they'll say, "Oh, yeah, let me introduce you to Jane."
If you keep this up, you will eventually find somebody who might want to hire you. Then you're into a negotiation and contracting process. There are plenty of books about this, and I'd encourage you to read a few of them, as it's not much like normal job hiring. (The only one I remember is "Getting to Yes", which is very helpful theory, but you'll also want stuff on the nuts and bolts of it.)
My big pieces of advice: 1) Both contract work and payments are much less reliable than jobs. Keep a big cash buffer. Right after the dot-com bust I would have made better money picking recycling out of trash cans than doing contract programming, but I got through because I had saved up. Later that saved me when a client tried to stiff me for $40k 2) For getting future work, it's important to leave everybody with a good impression of you. So do you best to be kind, warm, competent, professional, and polished. 3) Outsource the headache. Find yourself a good lawyer and tax accountant. Consider using a billing firm that just takes care of all the paperwork and pays you on a W2. Focus your energy on the three core things: doing the actual work, managing clients, and finding new work. 4) Don't expect to make more than with a job. You might! But non-billable activities can eat up a lot of your time, and many contractors do it because they like the freedom.
Good luck! Feel free to drop me a line if I can answer more questions for you.
Project based contracting by comparison, is almost exclusively network based. That's the fun contracting. You can try and shortcut it by using a freelance platform like UpWork but they're not great.
https://typicalprogrammer.com/how-to-start-freelancing-and-g...
(Free, no ads or affiliate links.)
I think the key is to identify a niche (or a few) that gets you out of the low-bid commodity Upwork/Fiverr wading pool — competition is always more dense at the low end.
A professional network and word of mouth referrals work best. Try to establish long-term relationships. An agent who can connect you with customers can also work really well.
The long haul would be to start blogging about what you plan to do contract work for and build up an audience but this may take years to materialize.
Initially I wouldn't worry about business cards, resumes, paid ads or anything like that. Just focus on things that will help folks make more money. That's really what it boils down to. For a lot of software development related gigs not too many people hiring contract workers care about formal education or certificates. It's a matter of they pay you $X but you return a multiple of $X in value to their business.
For pricing yourself, I think that'll depend on what you plan to do contract work for. For a quick and dirty ballpark you could take your salary hourly rate and add 30-50%. That's because it's usually substantially cheaper to hire contract workers since there's no health benefits or major costs of hiring. Plus you typically go in to address a specific issue so it's efficient to hire a contract worker for let's say 2 months vs a full time salary with yearly raises, 401k matching, etc.. Your taxes are also going to be more complicated as a contract worker if you live in the US. These are a few things to consider when pricing yourself.
why would anyone read my blog?
I was in the same position. I lived in the suburbs and started right after graduating high school. I ended up writing about how I got started here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-start-a-successful-fre..., most things still apply today (minus covid restrictions).
> why would anyone read my blog?
A lot of this world revolves around problem -> solution. If you can write about a topic that solves a problem someone might have or at least get them closer to solving their problem then you're in a good spot.
Think about it, if you're Googling for a specific programming problem and you run across a blog post that resonates with where you're at and helps you solve the thing you're struggling with, does it really matter who wrote it? For me it doesn't. Sure credentials help and I tend to ask myself how they applied their solution but I won't discount a post entirely based on the author's credentials.
Because you’d write high quality articles that help people solve problems, share them around as you write them, slowly grow some viewership that way, and eventually start to get organic visitors from search engines. It’s not very fast though, and it helps to know what you hope to get out of it, so you can target your writing.
I know people who get freelance leads from their writing, but I don’t get many myself. Just a few over the years I’ve been writing. I suspect this is because most of my articles are aimed at beginners, though. I would guess that higher-level stuff would attract more leads. One other benefit is that you have something to point to - I can say “Yeah I know React pretty well, I’ve been writing about it for about 5 years <here> and I wrote a book on it.”
Gotta stress that it’s not fast, though.
I got into it by mistake when I applied for a short term position without even being aware of the concept of contracting. Turns out getting contracts is typically easier than getting a full time position as there’s less risk on the part of the employer. They can just get rid of you if you turn out not to be good.
A frequent recommendation I’ve heard is to make your current employer your first client. I’ve never been in a position to pull that off, but can at least verify that it’s not the _only_ way to start. I’ve had leads off of Craigslist, though haven’t closed them. I’ve had successful matches from the monthly HN Freelancer thread. Where most of my client contacts have started, though, is conversations within my network—build initially from W2 jobs and helping run a programming language meetup, and then building atop engagements with clients and agencies.
Zach Burt’s “The Software Engineer’s Guide to Freelance Consulting” (https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/software-engineer...) is a pretty good reference; there should be ebook copies out there for a reasonable price.
Before jumping ship (if you decide to), pay close attention to the no-compete clauses etc in your current employment contract.
It's pretty easy to get contracting gigs for technical work - development, solution architecture, etc. A lot of companies are super happy to outsource risk. It generally costs more to place a human at a physical desk in an office than outsource to a contractor who brings their own devices and pays their own taxes and has their own public liability insurance. As long as you can show someone a portfolio of work that impresses them, and takes the problem off their desk, you'll find work.
There is no magic to networking. A lot of the finding work process just boils down to hanging out with the right people at the right time. Go to industry events. Cook BBQ's for coworkers. Remember the birthdays of coworkers' past and present. Put yourself in front of people who might need you in the future and make sure they remember you fondly. This is a decades-long process.
Pricing-wise just find your average local wage, add taxes and benefits, and that's your centre point to aim for. Bump it up a bit if you are actually a high achiever.
Honestly whether it's better to be contracted or employed, I think it's a personal preference. I can't stand the corporate buy-in that comes from being an employee, and value my independence. It burns me greatly at times when I find myself broke and scrambling to find a gig, so if it's assurance you're after then full time employment really is a good thing, but for me being able to jot down that I won't agree to my IP being owned by the company that's hiring me today is a pretty powerful incentive not to become a standard employee.
It's not that hard. Just remember that you go for 4-6 month projects. That way you only need 1-2 projects a year and waste lass time with applications.
After you did a good job for a few clients, they will refere you and new clients will start applying to you.
In reality you will spend your free time lining up the next job, so maybe work a third as much for 3x the money.
If you don't feel comfortable charging that, why bother. Keep the desk job
I've never done sales, and I'm deathly afraid of the need to do that some day. But my colleagues and friends keep hiring me and keep getting promoted, so we're good for now, I guess.
Not sure if I have any concrete advice beyond: take those coffees every time,and keep in touch with talented colleagues.
freelancing is total BS unless you're good at negotiating and have a deep network in the thing you're trying to do
it can also be valuable if you're trying to create influxes of cash every few months to break even on finances while taking a year off to start something
but it can also be an awful distraction that kills more momentum than it adds runway
I also work in electronics, which is in a very weird place right now, and I’m a bit concerned that I might be taking some risks here, but it is what it is.
I was contacted for an interview, and I told the company that I wanted to work on my own, but I’d be willing to consult and work for them as a freelancer if they wanted.
After that is just a sequence of problem solving specific steps that will depend on where you live, your situation, etc..
One way to secure clients is to get into partnership with individuals from other domains (marketing, business dev, finance etc) that can cross sell software development. I am always open to that :)
Worked in digital agencies. Met a lot of contacts. Started taking on side projects. Produced good work. Kept on getting referrals. Quit my full time job and freelanced for 5+ years. Wasn’t always easy but I kept my costs low and steadily increased my rates.
Easiest way to start? Freelance for an agency or a consultancy. They always need someone, like right now, to work on a project.
An exception might be if you have some super-deep expertise in a particular area, so that you're not really selling your time as a worker, but selling the ability to waltz in, look at something, do a few things that fix a problem someone has been stuck on. That kind of thing is pretty rare, though.
1.) Money laundering of some sort or another. 2.) Groups of people who have figured out they can create fraudulent projects and then contract them out to "friends". These are the worst as they are gaslighting festivals where you're forced to buy from certain places or people start purposely breaking software until you pay up.
If you dig deep enough you'll find out exactly how fraudulent most contracting companies are. It's almost all illegal activity.