I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency
neladunato.com
neladunato.com
We've deliberately chosen not to take on staff. We could have grown at many points along the way but haven't wanted to. Instead we've stayed small, focused and profitable.
The benefits to growing would have been being able to take on bigger gigs, but we have always aimed for family first. The business has always been a means to a sustainable, balanced and loving family - and not an end.
I have friends who have taken the growth route. Some are doing ok. Others are desperately stressed. One has split from his wife in part because of the financial burden of maintaining a 5-10 person team.
We've never regretted taking the route we have. We have been here for our kids and we've been able to be flexible with our time in large part because we're able to scale our own work up and down in response to changing times without having to worry about paying salaries.
I think a lot of people forget that and think that they need to push to be more "successful" - kudos to you for doing in the right way for you.
Another great advantage is being able to fire bad clients.
It's not something I've done more than once or twice but the freedom not to be brought down or stressed by someone else's insane demands is worth gold.
Related is the ability to pick and choose your clients in the sales process. e.g. plenty of small consultancies have formal or informal policies not to bid for government work because of the effort and frustration involved in responding to public sector RFPs.
That's not an advantage to owning your business, that's an advantage to owning a successful business. When you're struggling to get off the ground or to keep the lights on, you can easily get stuck with bad clients because you can't afford to fire them just yet. In the worst cases this results in a death spiral where the financial hit from firing them would be too much of a risk but the cost of maintaining them slowly starves your business and/or burns you out.
As the old wisdom goes, most businesses die and most businesses that die do so in the first couple of years. If you have to start by bootstrapping your business you already start from a disadvantage. If your financial situation means failure is not an option, bad clients can turn into hostage scenarios.
what works now in the economy now with your skillset now etc. is not guaranteed to continue. I just think it's risky to feel zero pressure to change.
My grandfather runs a quite successful one-man architecture consultancy built on decades of experience and networking in the industry. He gets to pick and choose his engagements, and if he lives long enough I’m sure he can sustain his business for many decades to come.
I know plenty of agencies who have either switched to products or just sold up / closed.
Using associates is a good option if you have a good network, however, it can be just as stressful if they don’t deliver.
An associate model is great, allows everyone flexibility and participate in killing what they eat along and together
This is always a temptation for agencies which almost never works out. They underestimate the effort to build a product. They also typically don't have the skill or experience to build a high quality product that can compete with the whole world.
I don't think they underestimate the effort or lack the skills; the issue is trying to do both - grow the agency and launch a product.
The ones which made it either split the agency or stopped doing client work.
It winds up being the end of a lot of businesses, whether or not they actually did grow. They took on a contract that was just too big for them, despite their intuition telling them not to. Or they hired too many people despite not wanting to but was talked into it by a friend.
So good on you for knowing what you want and being deliberate about it! You and your wife have avoided a lifetime of stress by doing so!
Only started properly setting boundaries in the last year or so, no regrets.
You're a "Small Giant": https://www.amazon.com.au/Small-Giants-Bo-Burlingham/dp/0143...
The pandemic cost us most of our employees and the final one left for personal reasons later that year. Trying to be as non-exploitative as possible (within the constraints of the system) left us without sufficient resources to weather a nearly year-long struggle and the fixed nature of wages meant we ended up sinking money into people effectively just sitting on their hands (to no fault of their own).
We talked about possibly moving to an "associate" or "collective" model before the pandemic hit and it was very clear that people who look for employment aren't necessarily also people willing to run a company or give up the labor protections for a stake in their place of work, especially when they were already with a "good employer" which we tried to be.
During COVID, work dried up and company (more or less) ceased to exist (but website is still up).
He told me he is much happier again as a “normal” developer.
As for me, I also wouldn’t want to manage many people. The stress of dealing with bad employees, sickness, all government related stuff, etcetera, it’s not for me.
Actually I’d prefer to develop full time on my own projects, if I had the financial means. But I don’t, so since May I am an employee at a Thailand based company.
Together we make enough in 10 hours a week to pay for our tiny apartment, 16 year old car, insurance, and healthy veggie diet. The rest of the week?
Well, this year we're ultra-marathon training, volunteer firefighting, backpacked the first half of the Appalachian trail, crew on a racing sailboat, and running a charity teaching apprentices how to be software engineers (got two into the industry in 2023). I just got asked to come be a helper at our fire academy starting next week which I'm very excited about.
We've based this model on that story of the corporate worker and the poor fisherman. https://www.reddit.com/r/simpleliving/comments/9yze06/the_fi...
As a solo, the job is to add value and make the customer happy so you build your reputation. There are definitely solo contractor grifters out there but they usually struggle with the reputation issue.
Agencies develop a grifty dynamic where they realize that their job is to sell themselves and as many headcount and hours as they can squeeze into a contract. Now instead of hiring that solo dev, they’re forcing you to pay 20 hours/week to the project manager and to have two devs minimum on it, one or more of whom are complete juniors who will spend incredible amounts of hours solving simple problems, but that’s okay because that’s what they want.
Agencies rely on their status and size to impress clients, which short circuits the reputation issue and opens the door to these shenanigans. They also target bigger companies where wasting time and moving slowly might be the norm, or at least something they can gloss over by sending the sales people out to schmooze the execs over dinner again.
I knew some excellent devs and infosec people who turned into agency operators who just tried to milk companies for contracts and run a revolving door of junior hires who they can squeeze hours from until they quit. It’s sad to see.
To be fair, I know a few good agencies as well. They tend to be in such high demand from reputation that they’re always booked without even trying. It takes a long, long time to get there though.
Telco I worked at spent 6 months choosing an agency, end up spending 3 million for what turned out to be a new Color scheme on the public website. Mind blowing, but completely normal for them
Every project was all about forcing the customer to pay for PM, designer, and two engineers.
It was really hard to watch what had been a committed group turn into a grubby machine.
Which is the complete inverse of what a client needs. It is what it is, but somehow it feels wrong.
The agency should be providing value and to make the customer happy. It should charge what's appropriate without all this headcount business.
More like what can they do about it?
It’s like if you go see a doctor and they tell you they will charge you a PM and BA for the surgery. What can you do about? No thanks?
What you call grift is actually sales. Most business in the world are incentivised to grow and scale, so that's a given if it's done ethically.
As a buyer, I would rather work with an agency or a consultancy, given enough budget. The advantages are:
- I don't have to source, manage and pay individual contractors. - If a team member isn't right then the agency will switch them out quickly. - There is one throat to choke. - There should be at least some institutional knowledge in the agency. - The agency will provide oversight, be it from leadership or a billable PM resource.
I have built a few products for startups and my own projects over the last few years, and even with a budget as small as $50-$100k I would rather work with an "agency" with a thin layer of management even though I am very technical. It is much easier to manage and less risky than betting on 1-n individuals.
Judging by all of the comments from people saying this matched their experience working either inside or with agencies, I don’t think it’s inaccurate.
> What you call grift is actually sales. Most business in the world are incentivised to grow and scale, so that's a given if it's done ethically.
I think you’re talking about something else. I’m not talking about a sales process being done ethically.
If I was talking about ethical sales with aligned incentives, I wouldn’t have used the word “grift”. That was, literally, my whole point in using that word. :)
I’m specifically talking about the huge incentive that exists to unnecessarily balloon the hours as much as possible.
It’s simple, really: As a solo dev with a mostly full pipeline (assuming this for simplicity) your incentive is to finish work efficiently so you can impress the customer, build trust, and build a reputation to overcome the challenges of being solo. If you sandbag your efforts and deliver inefficiently, they have nobody to blame but you. You also burn your chance of a good referral. It’s bad all around.
As an agency, the situation changes. You now can scale up to as many people as you can convince to work with your agency, but now you need to force them into as many projects as possible. You’re no longer limited by the number of hours you have in a week because you’re selling other people’s hours. Hiring inefficient people will actually get you more profit.
When the client catches on, you can remove the inefficient people and apologize for the “bad apples”. You temporarily assign some superstars to the team to impress the client until they’re not looking again and then you slowly go back to the inefficient people when they’re not paying attention again.
Like I said in my post, not every agency does this. However, as someone who has done a lot of hiring of contractors and agencies I can say it’s almost like most of them are operating out of a hidden playbook. The headcount always gets inflated over time (including their assigned project managers who they require to work alongside our internal project managers) and the revolving door where the good devs get pulled off to other projects and then they try to substitute lesser devs.
It’s gotten bad enough that we have a framework for bullet points to negotiate away from agency contract proposals. We reserve the right to aggressively dismiss anyone they assign who isn’t doing work up to par. Agencies hate it, but it’s a necessity these days (at least until an agency has proven themselves)
An extension to the post I want to touch on is that VC funded startups are not the only way to break free from the dreadful corporate games.
Working for yourself at your own pace is.
As an industry we're surprisingly very behind in normalizing this.
How did you get started to snap up your first jobs on it?
I started on freelancer websites when I was 15 and it was nice to bag 20$ per hour plus extra if I happened to be faster.
But the more experienced you get the more you can charge and use your network instead of cheap jobs on Upwork.
- network
200k:
- high signaled / luke warm outbound on dev communities (YC work at a startup job board is one)
- referrals
300k++:
- dedicated outbound tech sale person
I have a dedicated outbound sales person who pings their network for referrals every few weeks. Their job is to weed out noise + educate + convert hourly to project based billing
Went into a lot of detail on Reddit a couple years back here
https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ommiww/commen...
I can see how that helps in increasing revenue, but it also makes the work less agile, requires longer negotiations and adds risks. So it's probably not for everyone.
Some others have found a way to bill similar amounts but on short projects billed by the day/week. That sounds preferable to me, but you need to have a skill that produces value in such short projects.
I assume you're a software developer? There's your skill.
I think you're overthinking this. How is it less agile? You have a project, a price and a timeline. Everything between then and the end is on your schedule.
The only "unintuitive" skill you need to hone is assessing value and pricing based on that. But there is endless analysis and analogies out there to help.
Given the fight we’ve seen over WFH, I’m very inclined to believe that this is intentional by the industry. By focusing on paying top dollar for FTEs and demanding incredible amounts of time and energy from them, companies maintain a level of control that they wouldn’t have by working with a fractional engineering team.
* I wanted to add that I am referring to software developers. Creative types like the author of this article are always shit upon by corporate types unfortunately
My performance reviews are always "exceeds expectations", but I haven't seen how this benefits anyone other than the company so far.
Maybe I should just take it more easy but I feel like I'd float under the radar for possible promotion then.
Few companies have sane compensation policies. by all means put in extra work when you have an opportunity to learn some new skill from it. but once you get to a pint where your skills are valuable, either jump ship to a another company that pays commisserate to your new skill level or start or join a startup where you get enough equity to eat at the adult's table when the ipo or acquisition happens
Basically, you're most likely being taken advantage of and will never be properly rewarded for what you're doing, IME.
Another is to find organizations that have individual contributor (IC) promotion tracks that are at least as lucrative as the management track. (Of the highest-paid, most respected people at my company, most of them are not in management and are simply really good at what they do.)
Schmoozing is not the way.
I stopped caring about getting promoted and doing things just for visibility. If I see something that needs to be done, I make sure it gets taken care of. I ask intelligent questions in meetings and have almost always put way more thought into anything we're working on than anyone else so I'm able to have good questions and concerns. I focus on delivering for the business and not impressing other software engineers.
The key, and this is the one piece of bullshit unfortunately, is to make sure your manager and ideally your manager's manager know about what you are doing. I mostly accomplish this during my one-on-one and by speaking up in various meetings we are in. I also work for a company where talking directly to senior management and even executives is truly accepted.
The thing is, most people are followers and need to be told what to do. Become the person that knows what needs to be done and makes sure things don't fall through the cracks. Unless you are looking to go into management, focus on the technical and driving projects to completion, but avoid trying to manage other people. Eventually if you build enough respect from the team you can get them to do what is needed and your can build enough trust with your manager that you can direct them to deal with problem employees.
The downside to all of this is that I'm pulled into absolutely everything because everyone wants my opinion and I'll actually make decisions for everyone instead of meeting about it 15 times. I end up doing very little actual development these days, but I'm paid extremely well and don't have to manage people. In the end this doesn't bother me that much because I see corporate software development as a different activity from the one I actually enjoy.
I went from "lucky to get hired" application support engineer peon to being groomed for CTO by stepping out of my lane. My supervisor had a sign on his wall: "Stay in your lane." I did not (he ended up sacked by the CFO). I found that even pissing off some key executives (CEO/CFO) a few times just helped my profile. I got lucky but it was all deliberate.
One of the executives I inflamed (CFO) had to sign off on two record setting raises/promotions for me. All brought before the board of directors/investors by the then/current CTO.
To be fair, I was also super productive/knowledgeable and a high-performer. Everyone else was used to working at big companies, I had been sitting at home the previous ten years playing on my computer and gardening.
If you want to stand out then you need to go somewhere that you can.
Or threaten to leave and get a real raise
Honestly it does sound like you're doing it wrong. If you want to get paid more there are more effective ways of doing that. If you enjoy tough tasks that's fine, but be honest with yourself and make sure you're doing it because you want to.
Ish. It's complicated.
IME, most folks have a low standard for "good" and don't differentiate well above a certain minimum. Someone with an MFA and 150k in debt may expect to get paid more than someone with no degree and no school debt, but that doesn't mean the buyer will rate the MFA higher -- which means they won't pay them more money.
The MFA may also expect to spend X hours on a project without _explaining that_ to the buyer.
That's not corporate types being stingy or such, it's a mismatch of expectations. At the end of the day, buyers value the work much lower than the sellers, so the sellers are going to be disappointed far more often.
Doesn't this require a level of coordination between hirers that almost certainly doesn't exist?
I see these takes all the time about how "the industry" cabal coordinates to screw over workers. Never have I seen any meeting notes or interviews from former CEOs on how this coordination might happen, just disgruntled employees feeling they deserve more.
Clearly, the heads of HR and other people who define corporate compensation talk to one another, “hey what are you guys doing to manage pay cuts, reductions in staff, etc in this economy at company x/y/z”.
It’s a pretty obvious benefit of having a strong professional network. I.e you have people you can ask for mentorship and advise. Every startup board was asking companies to belt tighten and reduce costs because of the economy earlier this year and last year.
A relatively small number of companies and startups in tech define top of market for compensation. Clearly the people at those companies know one another and talk about what they are doing.
Except when it does. Remember when most of big tech had secret no-poach agreements to keep the wages of engineers down [1]? It wasn’t that long ago.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
We are trying this but have you seen the constant media siege bombarding us with “studies” show remote work is bad for you? In the uk there are now articles saying that even hybrid is bad. We want to be more independent but we are not always allowed to. Tech is meant to be the easiest path to independence yet somehow its not. Wondering why.
Going remote shouldn’t change the pace of worn. For some people, going remote causes their productivity to collapse (distractions, loneliness, feeling disconnected, less oversight) but those people should be managed individually.
But being remote or in office shouldn’t determine your pace of work.
As opposed to wasting time chatting or in useless meeting. That means you dont have to rush getting the actual work done.
So yeah, it’s a better, slower, calmer, well thought out, pace.
It’s you, the code, and the environment that makes you happy. Thats why working less results in more output, paradoxically.
I loved:
* the flexibility
* getting paid for every hour I worked (I billed by the hour)
* the freedom to choose clients
* having more than one made me feel more stable
* how close it kept me to the business problem space
* the ability to take time off
* the distance: I could roll my eyes and say "at least I'm getting paid for this BS" when there was political BS
However, after time I joined a team because:
* PTO is quite nice
* Insurance (in America) is better in general for employees
* it was great to be part of a team
* the ability to specialize in a way that is difficult as a contractor (I can be further away from direct revenue generation or product creation)
Highly recommend everyone tries this out as you'll have a much greater appreciation for all the components of a business when you are doing them yourself (or are responsible for them).
As someone who is (overly?) honest/careful; this could be a con. Also, if you're able to, bill by the day.
This isn't really how it works though. If you find "getting called in" (what does this mean?) to be terrible, you should be charging more for that service. You should be in control.
The whole point is to generate enough surplus value that your client signs the cheque, no questions asked, and is happy to do it. You shouldn't squabbling over hours.
A while back I worked at a consultancy that typically billed using a 15-minute granularity during standard office hours, reasonably rounded up/down. Unless otherwise contracted, outside of office hours the granularity increased to 1 hour rounded up. A 5 minute fix would be billed as an hour, a 65 minute fix as 2 hours, etc. It was also only undertaken for emergencies; general work requests would be done the next business day.
Generally all contracts were budgeted some number of hours per billing cycle per service. N full-time engineers would be converted to an equivalent amount of hours for the budget.
The result was that overtime was used judiciously and clients were rarely insisted on pushing big changes near the end of a day or on Fridays.
I bill by complete days now, so I don't take on work that is less than a day.
If I work half a day for a client, the next day I will work half a day in the rest of that job.
This still gives me the flexibility to not get bored in a single day.
This sounds like a day here means "about 8 hours" as opposed to "the work performed during a given calendar day". Makes sense.
I think that it is unabashedly a pro, because whenever you are adding value to the business and can defend it in an invoice, you're able to get value for it. Unlike when you are a salaried employee and the extra hours don't get you anything material (maybe noticed and provided with a raise. maybe).
What kind of companies and tech stack do you work with?
I've worked as a freelance solo dev (sadly for far less than $500k/year) and the difference between my revenue and profit was close to zero. Expenses included accountancy costs and the occasional new laptop or whatever bit of hardware I could justifiably call a business expense, but it was a tiny fraction of my revenue.
But if you assume as I do that your time is the most valuable thing you have, then there’s no way to generate profits when all you sell is your time.
You can generate cash, sure. But profits as in selling something for more than it cost you, never. You can never get that time back, and it’s worth more than anything.
I would guess many will disagree with this perspective.
> As an industry we're surprisingly very behind in normalizing this.
This is great for people whose own pace is reasonable and matched to their compensation. If you’re paying someone 50th percentile compensation and demanding a 90th percentile work pace and output from them, you’re just going to have endless turnover as you burn people out.
Conversely, if you’re paying 90th percentile compensation and you have an employee moving at half the speed of their peers, eventually you’ll get fed up and replace them with someone better matched to the position.
But this all breaks down when you get into the weirder ends of the market. Self-pacing works great for you because you can put in the work to deliver $500K/year of value and companies appreciate it. It doesn’t work for many people whose idea of a workday is to put in 1-2 hours of focus and then browse the internet all day, which is a larger portion of the developer population than I would have guessed before becoming a manager. Other people can’t help but wander through tasks, get distracted by rewrites or new frameworks, needlessly refactor working code, or otherwise do a lot of activity without producing a lot of work. Both of these fault modes benefit greatly from the pacing and structure of management.
There’s no one size fits all approach. I think solo dev contracting is a great option for some people, but the type of person who can self-manage, sell themselves, network, and retain self-discipline isn’t all that common.
I think this is a great example of how different people thrive in different environments.
Only if they're a 50th percentile person.
Burnout is also not only a function of workload. Other factors can contribute too.
Of course they have zero incentive to get anything done, they get paid regardless of how well the project gets done.
Maybe if they had the guts to leave a paycheck for browsing Reddit and started their own business they would have success too.
When I work on my projects I have way more stamina than when I'm doing client work. I kind of have to resist the urge to kill myself all the time instead of doing that boring job and I keep reminding me I'll be able to build a villa with the money.
I don't think it's laziness or lack of accountability, I think it's the 20 years of indoctrination in the school system - which are just factories churning out employees afraid of stepping out of line.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. I personally wouldn't say humans are lazy, but simply: people avoid doing things they find unenjoyable, but if they must do something unenjoyable they'll find ways to minimize their time spent doing it.
> Of course they have zero incentive to get anything done, they get paid regardless of how well the project gets done.
This makes it sound like freelancers get more work done, not because it's more enjoyable, but because they must to get paid.
> Maybe if they had the guts to leave a paycheck for browsing Reddit and started their own business they would have success too.
For some people, getting paid to browse reddit is one definition of success.
> When I work on my projects I have way more stamina than when I'm doing client work. I kind of have to resist the urge to kill myself all the time instead of doing that boring job and I keep reminding me I'll be able to build a villa with the money.
Huh... After reading this I need to rethink what you are even arguing. I assumed it was that freelancers put in more hours because the nature of their work is more fulfilling. But you're really just saying, yeah humans are lazy to the point of wanting death over client work, but at least with freelance I can frontload the actual number of miserable hours worked, instead of spreading them over 30 years.
If you've been lucky enough not to encounter them in your day to day, then that's really good, because when you have to work with one of them, boy does it suck.
That being said, I've only encountered this a few times in over 10 years working as a software developer. Most people really do want to do a good job. Even if some of them get distracted easily and need more structure.
That's why we get paid after all. I really enjoy my job and I'm effective, but if I didn't need money, it's not so fun that I wouldn't drop it to do other stuff I find more rewarding.
We aren't built for this either, especially not thought work. Society compells it, which is what it is, but we are not evolved for an 8 hour day of thinking at a desk.
Some people are good at it, but we are asking far more than some people to do it, and you have to do -something- to survive, and the outcome is obvious from thay lens in my opinion.
If anything, school set me up with higher expectations. Here I am in college, doing interesting math problems and programming projects and such. I get out to the real world and boss man is just like, "client just needs an application/feature to do X," and the solution is just fetching the data, putting it in a list, and doing a for loop over it. If anything, College had me expecting to do a lot cooler shit.
These are all problems that stem from management, not employees.
Yeah, but not necessarily for any malicious reason. It may not matter to you. My impression is that these people are burnt out from high school and college. But they fit a superficially, stereotypically identical profile to like, the one person you know putting in 80 hour weeks, so they keep getting hired. This is not a fringe idea, it's common enough to be made fun of in movies.
My point is that there are a dozen commenters litigating all sorts of irrelevant issues, when the explanation for how people who want to work 1-2h weeks keep getting $200k/yr+ jobs seems obvious to many non-industry laypeople.
Do people really think this ? VC funded startups are as corporate as it gets, probably worse, just a different kind of corporate.
The second you take funding you have a new boss[1]and have all sorts of constraints which become more and more rigid with more rounds .
There are only few well understood models of scaling and governance that VCs know to work, if you deviate too much they are going to fire and replace you.[2]
It would be rare to have the kind of corporate control Zuckerberg enjoys today for a founder and neither are valuations and preferences terms generous to founders larger you raise .
Whether small business or a giant startup the power dynamics is the same . how much money you need to make payroll(including yours in a solo op) and who is funding it , if you don’t need any money at all then you are the king , if you cannot afford even a small short fall everyone else who can bring that money is your boss
[1] until you raise funding, there are many bosses you cannot afford to piss off : early users/customers , employees, vendors and so on you don’t have the money to attract the talent you desire or runway to say no to capricious user demands
[2] I am not even including the class of funds like a16z who early on will bring in dozens of experts who are on staff and have done scaling many times , imagine part of management, the -1 team reports to your boss also
Don't know if my experience adds to the discussion, but I thought about sharing it.
I still feel guilty when telling people that I am only open for meetings from 11 am to 5 pm. The only exceptions are people in distant time zones.
It can also feel wrong if your SO is on a regular 9 to 5 and you are getting up without an alarm clock, going shopping and making appointments in the middle of the day, and generally setting your own work habits according to your own preferences. Last night I was working at 1 am because I couldn't sleep and there was something I wanted to get done.
OTOH, she never has to go food shopping and I have always been there for the kids in ways that are not possible for her - helped my adult child load and unload a moving truck last Wednesday afternoon, and over the years took both kids to school activities, driving lessons, and other events that my spouse couldn't attend.
We don’t need to explain ourselves to them.
We don’t need to prove our success through conventional means.
We don’t need to measure against a scale that others have invented.
We don’t need to feel guilty for refusing to take on unnecessary responsibilities.
It’s selling the difference between the two.
It took him awhile but the devs he fed work to were solid engineers, almost FAANG tier but he paid them s*t or good for their locations. I've kept their names handy because poaching them would be dirt easy.
Knowing this as well as what you said, I avoid agencies now and simply assemble teams of individuals for this reason alone. They're easier to evaluate and you can let them go easily as opposed to a full service agency.
However, what annoys me the most about Upwork are agencies larping as solo guys. Anytime I evaluate a guy who has a solo freelancer account and then mentions he has guys he works with that bill through him, I cut them lose. This is easy to spot. I wish uowork would ban these guys.
In the UK, you need to collect evidence that you are a contractor and not an employee of a company. One of the ways you can do this is by hiring people to do some or all of the contracted work on your behalf. It might be unlikely given it is Upwork, but if those freelancers are repeatedly doing big or long jobs for the same client(s) then this may be a legitimate tactic to avoid falling foul of the taxman.
We charge like a low-to-mid-range US developer but only employ high-range Latin American devs. We invest heavily in those devs and their training. They get paid handsomely, our clients get top-notch work at a bargain, and we handle all the bullshit of international management and payments.
We're not all evil.
As someone with the creative urge, I always found the word hobby itself was quite patronizing, as though your identity were just what you get paid for. But with some thought, I would say our identity becomes what we are appreciated for. Whether that's as a parent, a musician, an artist, a writer, a hacker, a promoter, performer, or another thing we do long and well enough that it's what people come to appreiciate about us.
If you don't do the things you are appreciated for, you will absolutely become unwell, and if you want debilitating mental health problems, do a job where you aren't appreciated. It's like a recipe.
I think there's a lot of truth in this, and it's not something I've ever seen stated before.
I guess it's a bit of a feedback loop. We want to feel good about our self, so our self becomes increasingly about the things people appreciate and respond positively to. There are a lot of aspects to my life, but the ones that are core to me aren't necessarily the ones I do most or get paid best for, but are things for which others are most complimentary.
Today I herd an interviewer ask "what does your joy look like?" I like that one too, as a question we should ask ourselves.
I hope more people follow suit,I kinda am saying that to myself :)
For me, I have been working 4 days work weeks for multiple years now, and love it. The experiment went so good that the rest of the engineers in the time have Friday's afternoon off now.
You can do this, even if your company never had this type of working schedule or even if your team still works 5 days a week. You will not be left out nor called lazy. In my case I actually deliver more, and higher quality, since I started because previously I was developing physical pain in my hands/arms (because of work and sedentary life). I have started the process of working 4 days a week in 2 companies, a big (unicorn) one that is part of NYSE, and a small one of less than 20 employees. This works on all scales (not guaranteed it works with all companies).
Shameless plug: If you want help on this, I actually have in my bucket list to write a medium/short guide or handbook on how to do this. With examples, email templates and how to approach your employer.
If you are interested, fill this: https://forms.gle/8VkGnE6Rpq86BGQa6
*You'll only hear from me regarding this book.* I won't add you to any list, nor send you anything else not related to this.
Don't take it as whataboutism, but many companies love adding clauses to engineers contracts that forbid them from working for other companies or starting their own business. In some cases they will also claim intellectual rights on all your creative output "while you are working for them". In my case even contributing to some Github repo could get me in trouble if my employer thinks a competitor is benefiting from it.
On the other hand, as someone who suffers from similar physical pain, a 4 day week would boost my quality of life significantly. So it's something I am looking forward to at my next job.
That is true, and I actually have a friend that renegotiated that with their employer and removed that clause from his contract because he wanted to do consulting work outside his working hours. Sometimes it is as easy as asking, sometimes it is not possible.
> On the other hand, as someone who suffers from similar physical pain, a 4 day week would boost my quality of life significantly. So it's something I am looking forward to at my next job.
It is a major change in terms of life quality, even more if you use the extra free time to explore hobbies that add physical activity to your life. I tried climbing/bouldering and loved. Now I also go to the gym for lifting.
Also you don't need to wait for moving to a next job to negotiate 4 days work week. Just a reminder :)
I recently read a Tweet says that, some people dreamed of owning a storefront of the trade that they love, but not just for the money. They also wanting to use it as a place to allow them to express their interests, tastes and qualities in an externalized way (while making money doing it).
I think this is what the author was trying to say there. And in the context of design, I'd totally agreed :)
Not having to work was my goal for a long time, but lately I realised that it's not a very achievable one, without some major luck at least. Working on my own terms is the next best thing, and quite enjoyable so far. If that's the goal, why scale the business?
- have you ever built and maintained a large codebase/project over several years?
- have you ever sold or marketed a product rather than a service?
- are you ready to compete with the whole world, as opposed to locally?
In my experience they are completely different skills, that agencies and freelancers do not have.
One approach is to develop internal "products" that make you more efficient. The bar drops from being something a customer can buy and enjoy right off the shelf, to being a productivity multiplier.
I persnally actually accepted the opposite. If everyone is obsessed with passive income and not doing work, to the extent that they are accepting tiny margins with artificially low discount rates, I want to maximize the value of the time I do concrete work.
I've been in agencies, in bloated product companies and they were all terrible experiences.
I did some freelancing and enjoyed it, but I could make significantly more money with less effort contracting. I liked my solo contracting days albeit they quickly resembled little employments.
But when I run my own company or when I worked in some startups with enlightened leadership, it was great.
I think you can absolutely create an agency (or a product company) where a work pattern like yours is acceptable and where people can work flexibly and be happy about it. I used to work in one of the few remote first company before COVID and everyone loved working there because of it. Async as much as possible is crucial.
If you're worried about people not putting their 100% because they're employed and not making more money the more value gets created, you can setup a structure with low base pay + amazing bonus on success and you can get the same incentive (and risk) you have in your solo work - but with friends and scaling up your business into something that can make more money.
It's easier to have large margin as an agency than as a solo grifter.
I think more jobs should be structured this way
BUT
it also needs strong checks to catch and _fire_ folks who upsell/ oversell/ overcharge against the customers' interests.
This is a risk with any quota (minimum) system but there are a relative handful of folks who will abuse a reward structure to the maximum potential, raking in tons of money for the company (and themselves) while slowly damaging the reputation of the company.
So, we need good incentives and rewards coupled with harsh penalties for dishonesty and abuse. IME, companies are often much better at the former than the latter.
Good. Business fetishism is a cancer on society. If you're doing something that pays your bills and makes you happy there's no reason to ruin it for the sake of extra money.
My typical day as a remote worker is not that different from the one described: a couple hours of work per day and mostly leisure the rest of the time. And I probably still make more money than a freelancer. Consistently too. Is chasing down new clients all the time and working on multiple projects really that desirable to people? I think this article is just cope.
> Is chasing down new clients all the time and working on multiple projects really that desirable to people?
Chasing down new clients is probably a thing mostly affecting new freelancers without much experience. When I've done freelancing in the past, I've never had to look for any clients besides posting "I'm available to help out people on a freelance-basis" on various social media, and then I get more work available to me than I could realistically do.
I think most established freelancers "suffer" from the same. Once you're available for work, it fills up quickly.
Income multipliers, flexibility and being treated like an adult are a few reasons that come to mind.
For example, with salaried work your income is mostly fixed (minus a pre-defined'ish bonus or options, etc.). With contract work you might land a $30,000 contract that takes 2 weeks to do because the focus is on providing value that allows your client to 5x that in a few months so it's a no brainer. This is different than salaried work where you're expected to be available for 40-45 hours a week.
You may decide to spend a year traveling the world while maintaining existing work and working whenever you feel like it. As a salaried worker I don't think you'll be able to work a few hours a week for 6-12 months in a row and still be employed unless you had an exceptional situation.
With a number of salaried positions, especially with companies that receive funding or are growing a bit past early startup stages you often lose all freedom to make decisions that you're qualified to make. Such as having to ask permission from multiple people to store $0.01 / month worth of files in an S3 bucket where the discussion to get this approval literally costs 10,000x to 20,000x more in engineering time.
How often are you getting $30k contracts that can be done in two weeks? Remote workers can still travel the world and work remotely if they can tolerate the timezone differences. I just got done with a rental in Costa Rica where I lived by the beach for 40 days this summer while working remote.
I don’t particularly care if I have to ask permission to get stuff done in a company. This is actually one of the reasons I spend a lot of time doing nothing: I’m blocked by other people and am waiting for them to resolve something or get their specs straightened out. By the time there is work for me to do, I’ve spent a lot of time idling. The actual work is done quickly, efficiently and I’m back to waiting for more work. The bottleneck is always other people, it’s not engineering taking too long.
I’m not going to push those people to hurry up either. They are under other pressures and it’s none of my business how long they take. As a remote worker, they are out of sight and out of mind until they have something useful for me.
Sometimes when we finish a big project, there’s a period of 2 or 3 months afterwards where we basically do very little except maintenance of the new deployment. Conveniently this year, we planned for those months to coincide with the summer.
Everything I’ve heard about freelancing has told me it’s not going to be this easy. It’s going to be a pain in the ass talking with clients all the time and stressing about keeping money coming in.
There’s not much that is going to persuade you that freelance is ‘better’.
Often enough, but it's not always exactly 30k for 2 weeks. It's opportunities that lend itself well to making a client really happy while being able to maximize my skills in a way that makes sense for both parties. For example if I spend 20 years honing in on a surrounding skill set and can deliver something quickly then everyone wins. The client gets a high quality product delivered quickly and I get to work less "butt in chair" hours since I've built up the tools and skills to perform the work in less time.
The above is also guilt free because the deliverable is the outcome, not a working agreement that you'll be working 40-45 hours a week.
> Remote workers can still travel the world and work remotely if they can tolerate the timezone differences.
Oftentimes it's not up to you. Your role may require you to be in a specific timezone or overlap with X timezone for N hours. More importantly a business may disallow you from operating out of different countries for an extended period of time because they're not set up to file taxes in those countries. You may also end up getting a big pay cut from wanting to move a few states over. Even if you could move to a different country, if your company subscribes to adjusting your pay for cost of living you may end up getting 20-30% of your salary if you occupied a low cost country.
> I don’t particularly care if I have to ask permission to get stuff done in a company. This is actually one of the reasons I spend a lot of time doing nothing: I’m blocked by other people and am waiting for them to resolve something or get their specs straightened out
Fair enough. I'm the complete opposite in the sense that I really value having full autonomy or at least enough to make decisions without needing to ask for every detail. Being blocked for me is bad, especially if you're blocked on 6 different things and you're forced to break up your time as if you were a CPU getting sliced for execution time.
Everyone says multi-tasking produces poor results but so many businesses create environments where the only option is to multi-task because otherwise nothing would ever get done.
I want to work because the work itself is what motivates me. I really like learning new things, tinkering, seeing it all come together, shipping it to production and watching it positively impact the teams and customers I work with. Being paid to able to do that is a true gift of the world.
Not being able to do that efficiently because of non-changeable unreasonable policies made by someone who isn't doing the work is pretty much the only thing that causes me burnout.
> Everything I’ve heard about freelancing has told me it’s not going to be this easy. It’s going to be a pain in the ass talking with clients all the time and stressing about keeping money coming in.
It's all about trade offs. I don't find talking to clients a pain in the ass, it's one of my favorite parts of the job. Money is a stressor for full time positions too. You can be laid-off at any moment or fired and that's that. It's fully out of your control and your eggs are all in 1 basket. You may also be placed into a non-favorable position if your working agreement or environment changes but you can't do anything about it since if you quit then you have nothing. In my opinion that's not going to create a good working environment.
If I want to make a side project I don't have to worry there will be any issue with copyright or god knows what. Because I am my own company and single customer cannot include in contract that I cannot do any other work.
I can only speak about my anecdotal network but everyone that I know who went the independent contractor road is making around a million or more a year. They didn’t start out like that, and I’m not sure how easy the road would be in the current economy, but the people who started out 10-15 years ago have it made for them. They did work a lot more than us who went into the corporate mill, but they are frankly going to “win” anyway considering some of them are basically set for retirement at age 40-45.
I guess the latter isn't really an IC anymore, but I know he didn't plan for things to happen this way. It started with him just being an IC and then eventually when he had too much work he had one of his friends join him, and so on.
For start, remote work is not so bountiful.
At least it is pretty hard to find companies paying around UK/USA salary to people employed in Poland.
In my solo freelancing I charge a bit less than UK/USA salary, depending on who is hiring. So far all companies refused such salary and wanted to pay at most 200% of typical local salary.
Also
> I work for a couple of hours and then make lunch. Depending on my workload, I may go back to my office and keep working for another couple of hours in the afternoon, or take the afternoon off.
can be done without deception/lying/swindling.
Wait, how do you get to not working 8 hours per day?
Bill as a fixed price project with milestones — you want the work assignments to be ambiguous. Plan/budget by your own workload, consider using offshore resources as a bonus (keeping in mind you intentionally pulled them on as just bodies).
Customers do not hire agencies with the expectation they will build great software. They turn to agencies because they don't have the time or skills to do it themselves, and agencies are cheaper than hiring people and they are more dependable than freelancers. By that I don't mean that freelancers are collectively unreliable, but with an agency you have a dozen or more developers and if one falls sick, they can just replace them with another developer. If your product depends on that one freelancer, you are screwed.
So "10x developers" aren't really suited for agencies, where every hour is billable and accounted for, and the output does not have to be great, it just needs to be more or less reliable and more or less on time and under budget (or at least cost overruns are accounted for).
There is always a price for growth. Always. Sometimes it’s worth paying. Sometimes it’s not.
It’s ok to have a lifestyle business. Not every company needs to make millions a year or be worthy of investment.
It all depends on what you want.
I love it. I started my career as a super nerdy systems programmer. Now I get to jump between client work, sales & marketing, finance & strategy, and—my absolute favorite part—coaching and supporting the amazing technical professionals we have on our team, helping them become the best version of themselves as they can.
My email is in my bio if you want to chat.
Often I'll question the ab-normal ways I've been choosing to live my life and I loved how the author summarized one major benefit for doing so.
But I think Nela should also understand that she is an outlier deciding to work ALONE: what happens when someone decides to have children? Do a single person has the skills to manage the complexities of a business? Be ready all the time? I don't underestimate Nela skills, just saying, again, she is an outlier and should balance her own mantra.
On another note, Nela is quite an outlier! I've been following her work for close to 20 years now I think, starting from her HTML&CSS tutorials long time ago. Her blog was basically CSS Zen Garden for my generation, teaching us how to achieve beautiful things with HTML&CSS back in the age of Dreamweaver, inspiring many future developers and designers. She gave so much to the community through the years with her knowledge sharing that it still inspires me and motivates me to this day to share more. Nela, if you're reading this, thanks for all the great work!
> And if you have a great reputation and a constant stream of clients
If you have a great reputation and a constant stream of clients that is sustainable for decades you are an outlier.
Maybe I missed something but she nowhere claimed that everyone should work in this way.
> what happens when someone decides to have children? Do a single person has the skills to manage the complexities of a business? Be ready all the time?
None of that would be solved by transitioning into agency.
Be mindful of laws around disguised employment with those types of engagements. You need to make sure you are in the clear legally by paying the appropriate amount of tax for your given situation (in the UK the regulation is called "IR35" and tries to specify what falls under a legitimate B2B arrangement and what counts as "disguised employment" and incurs taxation equivalent to conventional employment).
You want it to be about 40 hours a week.
Too little means you’re probably spending too much time on client or admin work.
Too much could mean you’re in a hyper competitive field and you’re struggling to keep up, eg academics.
where infrastructure means - account managers, talented (but junior) design/copy staff, invoicing, etc
Its an interesting model - where really talented people & studio can still achieve scale up without the uninteresting parts of the scale up.
Once you know that you can start adjusting the world to yourself.
Yes, respect your process first. Clearly.
All dreams of growth are insubstantial, comparatively.
Good, clear explanation.
She’s far from alone and for no other reason than my seething hatred of capitalism, I believe it’s true for most people.
Once you separate the ideas there is no implication of hypocrisy.
You define capitalism (incorrectly) as free markets
You point out her freedom depends op free markets
So she hates “free markets” but she is able to work this way because of it: she’s a hypocrite.
Don’t gaslight.
What a terrible thing to accuse me of.
Now you're just being a jerk.
I’m happy to be called a jerk by someone who is clearly dishonest and gaslights
For one I did not say you are a jerk. I said you are being a jerk. That is a description of your specific actions not you as a person.
To have a reasonable conversation you must allow people to explain their meaning. Not impart your own meaning into their words.
To accuse me of being dishonest and gaslighting is not warranted.
Source: Solo digital agency owner (6yrs here in Australia) who's been up, down, up, and recently made the decision to roll back to a single person consulting firm that's now WFH (gone from WFH - Office - WFH & 10 FTE to 0 )
I've found the last 3 years hugely difficult as an agency owner, when people are your business it cannot be underestimated how challenging (read: stressful) it can be. I got to the point where I was so anxious about opening my inbox in the morning.
However, there are ABSOULTELY some types of agencies that do work well and can scale effectively. Interestingly, these seem to be mostly accounting firms. Who in recent times have been able to easily add capacity through off-shore labour, who's client expectations are comparatively low and who's business is largely unaffected by the macro - You still need to do your bookkeeping at the end of the day! This makes for half decent retention rates and your customers don't expect a bookkeeper to solve every problem in their business.
The WORST type of agency to build is the mid-tier marketing agency or even bespoke dev firm - You get clients who are highly demanding and staff who are relatively expensive (agency owners will be nodding their heads here)... And it leads to a stuck-in-the-middle feeling where its hard to get out of the 5-10 person range and build any scale, and you'd honestly be more profitable and less stressed as a single person consultancy.
We used to work with large enterprise, and this is probably when we were most profitable. However, these types of customers have differing challenges and remote-style firms are at a disadvantage unless their sales teams are located where the big fish are.
The idea that agencies are 'booked without trying' is laughable. You get this by doing great work consistently over a long period of time, exceeding customer expectations and staying in constant contact with prospects. And this comes from great people... But you first need the work to be able to hire great people, which comes from the grind of agency sales. It doesn't change, no matter if your WPP or a local agency. Your pipeline is your lifeblood and what enables you to choose the right type of work.
If I did it again, I'd be looking at segments of the market where you can build easier client expectations and have more cost effective/simpler delivery, as ultimately this is where the game is won. I'd also be doing it with another 1-2 founders so that we could better achieve more freedom for each founder (as ultimately, this is a large drawcard alongside financial rewards to start). Id then leverage the cashflow better in productising... But in all honestly, I do think a large portion of you needs to like the 'work'.
On exit (if you're lucky), you're also stuck with more lengthy exit conditions. Meaning even when you want out, you're going to be tied up with the business in order to support the transition of clients.
On the flipside, I have found it to be pretty lonely just working away on client work. For some this is OK and I guess it seems novel, or maybe fits your lifestyle? But for me it's difficult because I always found it rewarding to be building things together with a team. That feeling of alignment when everyone is building the same thing is cool.
In some ways, its never been easier to start a serviced-based firm. However, in others, it feels like it has never been harder.
I’m currently on the path to a principal-level role at my company. I really don’t know what I think about it. The jump from lead to principal is a big one in terms of workload and stress, and I’ve been told the pay difference isn’t huge.
Older I get, the less I care to ascend the ladder. Even at this point I’m doing it out of a sense of amassing status in case I need it, rather than being motivated by it. And I feel that lack of intrinsic motivation.
I’m mid-career, and mostly just tired of selling so much time and energy to someone else’s enterprise, especially because I watch myself trade away time that should be spent taking care of myself for a stupid title upgrade.
I think I am a late bloomer bootstrapper.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-coworkers-are-less-ambitio...
Don't get me wrong, I love my job and find my work interesting. I'm incredibly lucky to be where I'm at. But I'm also completely fine just doing my thing and being done for the day.
Nice name, btw. Classic song, still!
The optimal answer for me is to stay at Senior level and enjoy my work to an extent. But I am forgoing the related compensation increase and career progression.
Then my thoughts turn to working for myself or with other friends/associates I trust and potentially seeing more of a reward for the effort I put in every day.
The best thing about this company is the work life balance; I never put in a lot of hours. The worst thing is the skill level of most of our software engineers. The thing I hate about this new role is that I'm less connected to the day-to-day work and just getting shit done. I'm in even more meetings now and the expectation is that I'll somehow help to level up the semi-competent people we hire, and make sure projects go smoothly even though everything is built on a foundation of shit.
Fortunately I am paid extremely well. Pay is literally the only reason I accepted the promotion. Sadly, the company probably gets less value out of me now even though we all convince ourselves that this layer of principals and managers is making everyone below us more productive.
A principle helps other and finds ways to add value. You get to deal with the enterprise issues. If you like sticking your nose in everywhere, going to meetings and want to move away from programming this is the role.
It's a role with little power or accountability. Part of your role is justifying your value. The successful ones I have seen have been able to listen, take in everything and convey that message in language a vp understands.
By default I say don't take it you sound happy at your current level. You are better off going the management route or product manager path if you are looking at status, power and higher pay.