Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?
How many of you are self employed? What do you do? I won't count startups that are funded, but more the individual who started something for themselves. Curious to know what sustains people.
My backstory: Collected coins as a kiddo, took a 35-year detour into startup land: Started a VC-backed Web 1.0 company from 1999-2002, ran a non-tech company for ~10 years, then 2014-2022 did very traditional early stage tech product management / utility infielder roles. All fun times with at least one legit acquisition/IPO so far, but it turns out I don't love long zoom meetings and politics and formal process all that much.
In 2021 I started getting back into my old coin-collecting hobby and dabbled in buying and selling at a local coin show, and boy oh boy did that escalate quickly (it was one of the most fun and dopamine-filled weekends I can remember in a long time).
Cut to 2023 and I'm running my own rare coin business full-time -- buying, selling, and trading. It's such a fascinating business and very quiet multi-billion dollar industry with enormous opportunity. You need to have a passion for coin collecting and have a knack and aesthetic eye for quality (it's not all spreadsheet Moneyball), but man is it fun.
Feel free to AMA about being a tech nerd full-time coin dealer :)
And at the extreme: I know one high-volume wholesale dealer (who's been doing this for decades) talking about his business. He has about $250k in capital for inventory and he turns his inventory 36 times a year --- $9m in gross sales! And he's a high margin guy -- so I'm guessing he's making $1.5-$2m a year on $250k in rolling inventory.
There are a lot of ways to make money in the coin business and one of the most fun parts is learning new and different strategies every day.
I've written my own software stack that does a few things:
Consolidates pricing -- by putting readily-available data all on a single screen, so when everyone else needs to check 3 different price guides to get various pricing indicators, I have it all in one place.
Manages inventory -- you would be surprised and perhaps shocked at how disorganized most dealers are. They have absolutely no idea what they own or how much money they're making -- when they buy a coin, they slap a sticker on it with their "cost code" which is just an incredibly weak substitution cypher -- and they refer to this code when they quote sale prices.
Allows for quick appraisals/quotes -- again, most dealers open a paper pricing guide and write down line by line how much they're willing to pay for a coin when they're quoting someone. I can enter a line in 10 seconds and have a buy price right away.
Does some VERY light machine learning / price prediction -- I'd love to say this is massively complex AI, but it's a pretty simple tabular regression based on historical sales data. It gives me one extra data point when I'm buying or selling to figure out if I'm paying a good price or not.
I think it's very possible to run a successful coin business without tech and I know a lot of people who have done it, but I certainly think having this software is helping me get better faster. It's like a set of training wheels that lets me play with much more experienced dealers at a much faster pace than I'd normally be running.
There are 1001 ways to collect and it's fun to meet all the different folks and learn about their different approaches.
I do think that numismatic know-how is an absolute must and the more you have the more opportunities there are. There's very little money to be made simply churning bullion, for example. That doesn't require a ton of know-how other than hanging a shingle and buying and selling gold and silver. But margins there are 2-3% if you're lucky, so that's a hard game to play unless you've got a BIG chunk of capital to throw at it. (Also, I'd argue bullion slinging is on the fringe of true "numismatics" but I'm a snob about that lol)
If you’re ok sharing, what’s a sane startup cost in your mind as to be competitive in the numismatic-competent approach you describe, but still small time ($10-20k/yr profit) - an initial $5-10k, $10-30k, $40k+?
But you never know - I've had double-ups on some coins, so you might buy a $10k coin and make $10k in a single deal if you know what you're doing :)
And what I mean by that is, for example: The 1909-S VDB or the 1955 Doubled Die are two of the mega rarities when it comes to Lincoln cents. They are worth $500+ even in the worst shape. But they're very obvious to someone with even basic coin knowledge, and there are lots of books and pictures out there. And in fact, I'd argue there are very very very few of those coins out there that haven't been identified for what they are -- they've been known rarities for 114 and 68 years respectively. So computer vision telling someone that it's a rare coin isn't going to be too much of a game-changer.
(This is a strongly stated, loosely held belief btw - I can easily be argued into a different perspective).
I think a much more interesting application for computer vision to the business is when it comes to grading (coins are graded on a 1-70 scale for Reasons). And in some cases, the difference a single grade point makes can be $thousands. Official grading is still done entirely by human eyes. An efficient computer vision system to look for undergraded coins I think has real opportunity. It's not an easy feat though - you can't really truly grade with static photos, and there needs to be normalization, so you'd need video clips w/ depth mapping of many thosands of coins to train a model properly. But it could be done!
I'm not sure I'd jump to the conclusion that he was dealing drugs, but it's certainly an option that he was...shall we say....washing his income.
It's a balance of time investment for me. If I know someone has no intention of selling and just needs an insurance appraisal, then that would be a paid service since I'm simply selling my time and expertise (which I'm more than happy to do). If there's an opportunity for me to purchase the collection, I'll usually put the bid together at no charge since that's a sales & marketing expense on my internal brain books.
A lot of dealers will try to split the difference -- they'll offer the appraisal at no charge if they get to purchase the collection, and if they don't end up purchasing then the appraisal fee comes into play. I actually think that's a reasonably fair model and may adapt that.
I mean if you're paid for the appraisal then there's no incentive for your number not to be honest.
On the other hand if you are valuer, then buyer, then it pays you to err on the low side. Not "wrong", just "low".
I don't mean to impinge your ethics of course, but as a model (which I'm sure the whole industry follows) it seems to leave the seller open to abuse from folks with imperfect motivations.
To be sure though, I can't suggest a better alternative. The best people to value it are dealers. Short of more-or-less auctioning it to multiple dealers at the same time.
I think this is true for most collectibles. And especially true for the collections of those who have passed. My suggestion to any collector is for them to sell it themselves before they die.
I conflated the two but they really are separate requests and are to be treated distinctly.
The former (which is much more common) is what most dealers hear. It's a request from folks who happen upon a collection and want to sell it and turn it into cash (or gold or silver or whatever near-cash equivalent they desire). That's where a call to a dealer isn't so much a request for an "appraisal" (in the formal definition) but more "how much money can I get for this collection now". It's implicit that the number the dealer offers is what they'd pay for it, which also happens to be the number the dealer believes it's worth. I don't have any moral qualms about that.
(Side note -- speaking of "not wrong just low" -- one of my favorite old-school dealers who's been doing this for 40 years and is appropriately salty lives by the mantra "I like to pay on the low end of fair".)
The second type of request - which is for a formal, written, insurable, usable-in-court Capital-A "Appraisal" is where there might be more potential for a conflict of interest, but if we as dealers are clear this is the job we're being hired for then we're going to issue a valuation which is based on published price guides (and the appropriate disclaimer that is is retail replacement value, not necessarily the price a dealer will pay).
Hope that clears it up - and thank you for the comment.
This time around, I'm building a solo "digital product studio" [1] instead of a startup. So, I'm staying one person, haven't raised money, and have multiple revenue-generating products. Product revenue doesn't cover my costs yet, so I do occasional consulting to bridge the gap.
I like the flexibility of this lifestyle. I'm based in NYC, but writing this from Tokyo where I've been doing a creative residence for the past two weeks.
And, a fun technicality - I truly self-employed in the sense that I have a salary and a payroll system. This is because my company is registered as an S-Corp in the USA, which requires the owner to be on a salary.
[1] https://www.contraption.co/essays/digital-product-studios/
I decided to work on a more ambitious project that I had been thinking about for years, inspired by a product I wanted at my last startup, and by the chaos of being in 100+ slack channels at a previous job. I hate how people use Discord + Slack - they're good for urgent communications, but we need a "low-attention" version for important communications in communities and at work. So, I started building this product last Summer.
Booklet is an async, newsletter-first community platform [2]. Something like Google Groups with the polish of Slack. Booklet's far more complex than Postcard, but plays into my skills more - such as complex permissions systems, email marketing infrastructure, B2B sales, and being able to incorporate all the latest OpenAI goodies quickly. I launched it about three months ago, it has revenue, and I've been scrambling to build things in response to user feedback. I'm thinking of doing a bit of a relaunch next week as some foundational flows come together, such as full PWA support, search, and Stripe member sync.
Coincidentally - the project I launched to dogfood Booklet, called FRCTNL [3], is doing quite well. I had no intention of monetizing it, but I included a referral link to the accounting service I use. People have been using that referral link, and last quarter FRCTNL was my highest-earning product.
I'm sure in a few years I will have some great stories after the fact about the lessons I was missing in plain sight. But, things feel a little chaotic, uncertain, and fun at the moment. The core theme is building things that I want. My main insight so far has been to build unique, differentiated products that I want to use myself.
The next piece I plan to publish tomorrow will be a recap of a talk I gave over the weekend, covering how most of our knowledge work practices come from factories, and ways software engineers are at the forefront of changing those industrial-era practices.
P.S. - if you're ever in NYC, come join for a dinner of Dimes Square Ventures [2], which is a little community I run for local indie makers (using Booklet!)
However, the current "version" of Almost Perfect is ending in about a year, and I think they are fully booked until then:
https://www.instagram.com/almostperfecttokyo/p/C2PCMtpS_wq/
It's been a fun experience, though - I shared a house with an illustrator from LA. I spent time exploring Tokyo and working on Booklet. At the end, every resident gives a gallery - normally it's visual, such as drawings, but mine became a presentation.
That's how most devs here in Norway would do it. Make a "proper" company, where you own 100 % of the shares. Then hire yourself, and pay yourself salary, withhold taxes, pay into a pension program etc. Mainly because if you make good money, it's better to leave some of it in the company (and for instance re-invest it into some index funds or something), instead of taking it out immediately as salary and getting it taxed before re-investing. But then still take enough salary to cover your expenses, get social security benefits etc.
For most solo folks in the US, the revenue flows directly to you. You could set up a more complex corporate structure to hold the income that you don't pay to yourself, but that corporation would itself have to pay taxes on the income too. I suspect there's not any real savings/benefit until there's enough 'leftover' money to start getting creative/flexible.
The biggest issue we've seen in software was the 2017 tax act, affecting software R&D starting in 2022. Depending on how you classify those expenses, you could have a sizeable tax bill, even without any 'profit'. But even hardware - that's typically going to be amortized over minimally a few years.
Bring in $200k in revenue. Spend $20k on hardware. You may only get to deduct $4k of that hardware expense in each of the next 5 years.
As best as I can determine, through reading the IRS's guidance and consulting with an industry expert, the answer is that doing software dev as a contractor/consultant does not qualify as R&D activities that must be capitalized if you're the contractor/consultant. Here is the language with a guiding example w/ analysis. The key being that the contractor bears no "financial risk" or right to use the software for its own purposes.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-23-63.pdf
SECTION 6. RESEARCH PERFORMED UNDER CONTRACT .01 Purpose. The Treasury Department and the IRS intend to propose rules in forthcoming proposed regulations consistent with the interim guidance provided in this section 6, which provides taxpayers with clarity in determining whether costs paid or incurred for research performed under contract are SRE expenditures under § 174. .02 Defined terms. For purposes of this section 6: -27- (1) Research provider. The term research provider means the party that contracts with a research recipient (as defined in section 6.02(2) of this notice) to: (a) perform research services for the research recipient with respect to an SRE product, or (b) develop an SRE product (as defined in section 6.02(4) of this notice) that the research recipient acquires from the research provider. (2) Research recipient. The term research recipient means the party that contracts with the research provider to: (a) perform research services for the research recipient with respect to an SRE product, or (b) develop an SRE product that the research recipient acquires from the research provider. (3) Financial risk. The term financial risk means the risk that the research provider may suffer a financial loss related to the failure of the research to produce the desired SRE product. (4) SRE product. The term SRE product means any pilot model, process, formula, invention, technique, patent, computer software, or similar property (or a component thereof) that is subject to protection under applicable domestic or foreign law. For example, mere know-how gained by a research provider through the performance of research services for a research recipient that is not subject to protection under applicable domestic or foreign law does not give rise to an SRE product in the hands of the research provider. .03 Treatment of costs paid or incurred by research recipient. The treatment of costs -28- paid or incurred by the research recipient is governed by the principles set forth in § 1.174-2(a)(10) and (b)(3). .04 Treatment of costs paid or incurred by research provider. If the research provider bears financial risk under the terms of the contract with the research recipient, then costs paid or incurred by the research provider that are incident to the SRE activities (see section 4.03 of this notice) performed by the research provider under the contract are SRE expenditures. However, even if the research provider does not bear financial risk under the terms of the contract with the research recipient, if the research provider has a right to use any resulting SRE product in the trade or business of the research provider or otherwise exploit any resulting SRE product through sale, lease, or license, then costs paid or incurred by the research provider that are incident to the SRE activities performed by the research provider under the contract are SRE expenditures of the research provider for which no deduction is allowed except as provided in § 174(a)(2), regardless of whether the research recipient is required to treat its costs as SRE expenditures under section 6.03 of this notice. For purposes of the preceding sentence, a research provider will not be treated as having a right to use the SRE product in the trade or business of the research provider or otherwise exploit the SRE product through sale, lease, or license if such right is available to the research provider only upon obtaining approval from another party to the research arrangement that is not related to the research provider within the meaning of § 267 or § 707. .05 Example. The following example illustrates the rules set forth in section 6 of this notice. (1) Facts. Company C engages Company D, a contractor located in the United -29- States, to develop an SRE product for use in Company C’s trade or business. The activities undertaken by Company D are undertaken upon Company C’s order, and Company D makes no performance guarantees with respect to the SRE product. Company C will pay Company D a fixed sum of $25,000 plus an amount equivalent to Company D’s actual expenditures. Company D does not have any right to use or otherwise exploit any resulting SRE product. In 2023, Company D incurs $125,000 of expenditures to successfully develop the product in the United States, and Company C pays to Company D $150,000 pursuant to the terms of the contract. (2) Analysis. Under section 6.04 of this notice, Company D may not treat the $125,000 of expenditures it incurs to develop the SRE product on behalf of Company C as SRE expenditures under § 174 because (i) Company D does not bear financial risk, and (ii) Company D does not have any right to use or otherwise exploit any resulting SRE product. Under section 6.03 of this notice, the $150,000 paid by Company C is an amount paid to another party for research or experimentation undertaken on Company C’s behalf under § 1.174-2(a)(10) and (b)(3) and is thus an SRE expenditure under section 4.02(2) of this notice. The applicable § 174 amortization period is 5 years (60 months) because the research is performed by Company D in the United States. Company C’s location is not relevant for determination of the applicable § 174 amortization period.
Business gross earnings: $200,000
Owner salary: $60,000
All other expenses including employer-side payroll tax: $20,000
Year-end result:
Owner receives a W2 reporting $60,000 in wages, which is taxed for Social Security, Medicare, and a special "self-employment tax". These wages are also eligible for deductions for retirement plan contributions (but not section 125 cafeteria plan deductions). Owner receives a K1 reporting $200k - $60k - $20k = $120,000 profit, which is taxed at the owner's individual income tax rate.
The business itself will not pay corporate tax on its profits like a C-corp would.
Here's a video one of the residents made about the program I did:
When I started this comapny, I didn't have a product - but I had the holding company (Contraption Company). My first product was Postcard, but now I spend most of my time building Booklet. As the shift in products has happened, my professional email address has been the same, the terms of service have been shared between services, and I have a unified blog + announcements email list. This also means I can launch lightweight experiments such as "FRCTNL", and even if it's not commercially successful - I benefit from compounding returns in the brand and mailing list.
The good news it that Japan seems to be in desperate desire of skilled foreigners, and announced plans this week for a digital nomad visa: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/02/02/japan/society/d...
I've heard that the path from temporary visa to a more permanent one is somewhat straightforward for a self-employed person if you're able to show moderate revenue from Japanese clients.
Is such a thing even possible?
At your age, you'll likely be on Medicare soon either way, but some of us are still decades away.
Also, I am on the highest ACA premium tier because of my age. Someone who's 35 could get the same policy I have for about $400/mo., unsubsidised.
This article has good details:
https://www.collective.com/blog/health-insurance-for-s-corps
Tips:
1. Live simply and reduce expenses. Avoid debt if you can. Rice and beans recipe: https://hypertexthero.com/eat-play-read/
2. Try to be nice to other nice people and stay in touch with past co-workers, especially the nicest ones. They make the best bosses or clients later. Don’t burn bridges unless there is no other option.
3. Always be working on a project for yourself that you enjoy and can learn new skills from. If the project could be useful for others, clean it up a bit and share it.
4. Use a paper weekly planner and write down things to do and cross them out when they’re done. Write ideas and things to look up here. Have a drawer or cardboard box in which you throw pieces of paper with ideas written on them. Open the drawer and pick a random piece of paper when feeling stuck.
5. Look in the mirror now and again and ask yourself if you are happy with the upcoming day. If there are too many days in a row when you’re not, time to change, move, etc.
Besides the obvious message here (less spending, more money to save), the simple life is that gives you less headache and burden of administration, which is a huge pro when it comes to "being on your own" (eg managing yourself as a business).
In general, minimalistic lifestyle xnot owning stuff (especially expensive stuff like a car, home, etc) gives so much freedom...
> 1. Live simply and reduce expenses. Avoid debt if you can. Rice and beans recipe:
Some people can make really good money self-employed, but for the rest of us (including myself), salaried employment would've been much easier.
Also, a period of lower income will keep paying negative dividends afterwards, because it's expensive to be poor. There might also be long-term impact of stress, if the lower income and uncertainty of being self-employed had more net bad stress than the corporate job would've. (Though corporate BS as an employee can be the worst stress, worse than not knowing whether you can keep your self-employed business afloat.)
And those are the good bits...
On the other hand you are more in control. You decide what to work on, and when. You decide how many zoom meetings to have (well, sort of.) You won't be laid off (although you might not get paid.) There's no office politics, and no boss to get jn your way.
Sure it can end up being financially rewarding, but a good job, with good investing, likely comes out ahead.
Meeting in person and getting along with your client is important.
On the one hand, I know which idiot last used a tool: me.
On the other, I would no longer see other humans besides my wife most weeks. To keep sane I also work one day a week at a bike shop fixing bikes. It's something I'd done on a volunteer basis many years back.
The unexpected nice thing about this is that it gives me projects that are an hour or two in size in addition to the many-week sized projects that I do as part of my business. It's sort of like getting to fix a small bug in the midst of adding a big feature; it lets me pop out of the big project for a bit and see something else through from start to finish and see some tangible progress before diving back into a long-running project that moves forward in fits and starts.
Beyond getting to tackle some bite-sized projects, I'd say the thing that sustains me is getting to work with clients. It's tons of fun when people come to me with a vision that we can iterate on and bring into reality. And then the flip side is also rewarding: getting to scratch an itch and turn a design I've been turning over in my mind into reality.
Edited to add: If you've got an idea for a furniture or woodworking project, my contact info and website are in my profile.
https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149...
Did you start off with woodworking as a hobby? If so, has it affected your enjoyment now it's a job?
What pitfalls did you find when you first started out?
I might be a little weird in that I started woodworking by taking classes to explore it as a possible career change. I took some evening classes, followed by some week-long classes to see how it would feel to do it all day for a full week. It's not directly comparable, but it was close enough.
Given that I got into this with the intent of it possibly being a job instead of going from hobby to career, I'm not sure I have a good basis for answering whether doing it for work has sucked the enjoyment out of it. I love building stuff, and when I get tired of doing one kind of project, I seek out other types. Sometimes I quote something lower than I otherwise would if it's something I'd like to do (or vice-versa). Honestly, I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do this for work.
The parts that do sometimes wear me down are the non-woodworking parts. Today I'm in front of my computer getting my books finalized to get a P&L to my accountant for our taxes. I can enthusiastically recommend FreshBooks for having excellent support, but damn, bookkeeping is not my thing.
Figuring out how to market the product is also a trick; I don't have a background in that, and I'm probably overlooking opportunities as a result.
Keeping a website up to date is sometimes kind of a hassle. My wife does most of the nuts-and-bolts work (because otherwise I'd get hung up on stupid stuff that doesn't matter), but I'm still very much a part of generating the content.
As for pitfalls, I guess the above has pretty well covered it :-D Figuring out the non-woodworking aspects is a continuous learning experience.
If only you could not have it redirect on load, it makes the back button break. Clicking back to return to hackernews is almost impossible
I've not been able to reproduce this in neither Safari nor Chrome (https://sf.gl/share/1707213387.mp4), curious to know which browser you're using. Thanks!
I tried it again now and it's working now
I figured I'd mention that from a user's perspective to give you a data point. Great service!
One feature that might not align perfectly with your service but definitely something I would use is Email to webhook forwarding and vice versa.
I started self employment as software consultant, which worked pretty well despite not having any connections from my previous employment. I only needed one or two projects a year to sustain my lifestyle. Getting two companies a year to accept your application isn't hard. If you write at least 5 applications a month, you need a success rate of less than 5%.
I changed to technical writing later, because text is less of a struggle than code, and educational articles that explain how to use software (e.g., services, tools, SDKs, frameworks, etc.) are paid pretty well, especially compared to the non-technical writing tasks. Regular software consulting projects take months and can haunt you for years. An article takes a few days and after that you can do other things you find interesting.
Via technical writing, I got into other kinds of text related jobs the software industry offers, like social media management (e.g., Twitter/X, newsletters, blogs) for companies with developer audiences.
Usually I work less than 20h a week and I can do it from everywhere, which allows me to travel often and having enough time off to enjoy it.
Over the years I got a hand full of stable clients. Some want content every month, some every quarter, etc.
Then there is word of mouth. The people I work with at my client companies are usually in the content business, so they need constant influx of quality content and know many other people who need it too.
I also work with a tech content agency, they always have a few articles a month I can work on, if business is slow.
- I have a Business Analyst/Product Mgr background. I've never been a developer, but I can read code well enough and get a good idea of what's going on. Do I have a chance of breaking into this? How would I go about doing so (other than the obvious like trying to do it as part of my day job)? - Do you worry LLMs are going to put you out of business? - Very broadly speaking, could I make $150k doing this?
In my experience, the success stands and falls with how well you can grasp technical topics and explain them to people who have less time than you to learn them.
I know a bunch of good writers, who never got far, because their technical understanding wasn't enough to write guides/tutorials/explainers.
"Do you worry LLMs are going to put you out of business?"
Not yet. I use LLM every quarter to write an article, and they've always been bad.
"Very broadly speaking, could I make $150k doing this"
Probably.
An article makes you between $500 and $1000, depending on the length and quality. If you could write 200 a year, that could work.
But that's how I found my first clients. After 2-3 clients from such platforms, word of mouth did the rest.
I only went for projects that went 3-6 months, so I didn't need that many per year.
If you don't mind, can you share how much you're currently able to make from this?
In order to find how much your service would cost, i needed to create an account and also download the app.
You also did not specify which features would be locked behind a paywall.
Can you be more transparent about this? I like to know what i'm getting myself into before i start using a product.
PS it’s about $30 for a year and $6 for a month (depending on your state/country)
I think the thing that I would say about self-employment is that people understate the day-to-day flexibility and overstate the month-to-month flexibility. It is _addicting_ to be able to structure a given day exactly how you want it, and to take days off without having to worry about PTO; conversely, I've done a hither-to poor job of increasing my bus factor and it's tough to e.g. plan entire week-long vacations without knowing I'll need to carve out extra time afterwards to catch up on inbound issues.
Being self-employed is hard work for sure. I also _totally_ understand the cliche of "becoming a founder makes you un-hireable"; it's really hard to imagine going back to a traditional job after this, and I find it more fulfilling than anything else I've done in my career.
Bookmarked for when I do need it!
I completely agree! Somehow every day feels like you are free to do what you want, even take it off, but in the long-term it feels like you never really have free time at all, because your mind is always thinking about the business or feeling guilty for the time off, which could be spent to further improve the product.
I believe that around 50% of workers are technically contracted one-man companies, and this percentage is inversely correlated with the seniority level - the greater the earnings (and the sense of job security that goes along with expertise and experience), the greater the incentive.
Going B2B makes a substantial difference in terms of fiscal burdens. Other than that, your day-to-day work looks pretty much the same though. You're just sending monthly invoices to the same employer, typically a single one, sometimes for years on end.
It's worse for society overall, but let's not pretend the high earners don't mostly subsidize the safety net.
I guess it translates into the lack of political will to curb the practice, too, as the government would risk that self-employed programmers (and whatnot) may not fall in line, but mostly log out of the system instead, registering their companies abroad, for example. I guess the government isn't eager to start this cat-and-mouse game, preferring a smaller slice of a bigger pie.
There are even some extra incentives on the top of the flat income tax rate (which is an option for all one-man companies, regardless of the sector)...
Like the "IP Box" tax relief, which drives the income tax rate from the regular 19% all the way down to 5%, as long as you get your services classified as "research and development". It takes some patience and loads of legal paperwork, which you obviously have to pay for (the latter, that is), but it's well worth it in the end.
"Registering" the business only is a trap and a way to pay much much more _when_ the tax office decides you are avoiding taxes. To truly do that, you need to move your center of life abroad, which generally means being outside Poland for 183 days a year.
>I guess the government isn't eager to start this cat-and-mouse game, preferring a smaller slice of a bigger pie.
I agree that it mostly is the case, as I still pay few times more taxes (and VAT on consumption...) than average citizen, even when using 12% lump sum tax.
Yeah, theoretically. But at least within the Schengen area, that's pretty difficult to prove/disprove, especially if you've got no family. I'm working remotely, I'm renting a cheap room in Budějovice, here's the tenancy agreement. Come see if my toothbrush is wet :)
https://forsal.pl/artykuly/1415939,srokowski-tylko-3-proc-mi...
As IT workers - even those who've got contracts of employment - typically do flexible hours, and pretty often work from home (or otherwise remotely), it doesn't really apply.
This is exactly what happens in Poland and everyone involved feels very smart for cheating the system. That's also why software from Poland is such a tacky crap despite so many "talents". The software professionals have no leverage to push back, they only can walk away. The irresistibile benefit is that one can write off buying a car into operating costs, so the dream of PREMIUM GERMAN CAR prevails over doing anything creative.
[citation needed]
How do you recognize "software from Poland" anyway?
Whatever is created in all these nearshoring and outsourcing centers in Warsaw, Kraków, and Wrocław. Currently mostly Azure, SAP, business Java and Angular.
My original question still stands - by what metrics do you regard "software from Poland" as "tacky crap"? I'm not being belligerent about it, but somewhat curious, sure.
The second problem is that the companies tend to hire a lot of people at the same time when they open their offshore/nearshore center in Poland - often going from zero to hundreds, or even thousands over the span of just a couple of years. Having such large organization of effectively people with no previous institutional history is akin to a herd of only young elephants, who don't have any elders and don't know what and how they should be doing exactly. The "elders" are in the HQ obviously, but building company culture exclusively over Zoom, especially on the scale of hundreds/thousands new hires, is a bad idea.
Also, your experience is very different than mine, I’ve never meet anyone working in Poland doing coding for a company abroad thinking they’re some kind of entrepreneur. They’re not delusional, they know that they’re just doing a job, selling themselves to a highest bidder like everybody else.
I've had terrible experiences with Hungary, Latvia, etc. and (judging from conversations to the owners of the outsourcing agencies) Hungary has very high taxes and not many smart ways of avoiding them.
It's really rare that the tax office would prove a company exists solely for tax optimization. The risk virtually drops to zero if one freelances after the hours and has legitimate invoices with other companies.
This often causes mismatch between Polish employees who wish to work remotely abroad, and for ex. employeers from the DACH region, where I've heard the laws are strictly enforced. One party claims there is no risk, and the other claims it's too risky :-) (taking other factors aside, such as employee protection, etc.)
We have a lot of this in NL as well, the long term effect is the slow erosion of the social safety net. Because good luck if your client decides they no longer need your services, suddenly you find out what the downside of being self employed is. Nothing to fall back on. So save like your life depends on it.
Another common example is MDs - quite a lot of private doctor's offices are contracted by the National Health Fund, basically providing their services for the public healthcare that way.
Clearly having multiple customers isn't a reasonable requirement for a small company. Software engineering isn't like private residential plumbing - "sink drain unclogged, next please!" :)
> good luck if your client decides they no longer need your services, suddenly you find out what the downside of being self employed is.
That goes without saying, and the same obviously applies if you're running a "regular" company, with employees, like a restaurant or whatever.
The risk is arguably even greater, as you will usually pile up some financial obligations (such as credits) and other commodities limiting your financial fluidity (remember Covid? Restaurant owners do).
By the way, you can insure yourself against loss of income. Many insurance companies offer this service.
In the US, I am not familiar with insurance for loss of income due to simply not being able to sell products/services. Usually, the loss of income has to be a result of covered natural disasters, vandalism, legal issues, etc. Most business insurance policies even specifically exclude pandemics, as many found out recently.
Let's hope you won't find out why that's a very bad idea.
> Clearly having multiple customers isn't a reasonable requirement for a small company.
On the contrary, it's a must.
> Software engineering isn't like private residential plumbing - "sink drain unclogged, next please!" :)
That's a strawman.
Sorry, but if you have just one customer and you're developing software other than taxes and your rights you are less than an employee. Don't kid yourself, that tends to lead to rude awakenings. If at the end of the year you've only sent invoices to a single customer then you are simply at risk. You need multiple customers to be stable and secure. Two is better than one and three is really the minimum.
Loss of income insurance is to take care of mishaps, not to insure against market downturns or other normal risks that a business is exposed to.
And that was their preference. I'm totally fine with being fired; that flexibility is also part of what I sell. It's why they pay me more than they pay employees.
that's not really a concern for high billing consulting professionals. it is a common misunderstanding (as you can see from comments here) though and is variously used by companies to undercompensate people who could be far more profitable consulting
I love freelancers and I love freelancing. But I know the difference between being a freelancer and running a company and being an employee in all but name and you really don't ever want to be in that position.
I appreciate that it sounds like you had a bad experience with a client though.
That helps. What helps even more is to have a nice fat savings account that allows you to negotiate properly, to weather the inevitable dry spells, to build a solid base of clients that value you and that will repeatedly hire you.
> take some insurances
Against what? 90%+ of the freelancers are not even insured against loss of income from health related issues. The remainder is well off enough that they can probably afford to take the risk.
> whether you have 1 or 3 clients at one point in time is immaterial as long as it doesn't sour your relationship with your clients
Until: that one client goes bust, there is a 'policy change', the project/product you are working on gets axed, the economy burps, your main contact at the company gets fired and the new guy or girl doesn't like you and so on.
> I appreciate that it sounds like you had a bad experience with a client though.
I appreciate that it sounds like you haven't had a bad experience yet, but that makes you simply less experienced. Give it some time and you'll see all of the above and variations on those themes.
Here is a 2011 booklet I wrote on the subject.
in my jurisdiction there are for example some excellent guaranteed income insurances covering various situations. they won't pay forever, but they'll pay. income replacement due to health issues is covered by normal social welfare in my jurisdiction as well
all of those things you mentioned happen regularly to employees. they are harder to let go, sure, but employers have a lot more leeway to make your job hellish enough to force a resignation, or if the economy is really bad overall they can throw their hands up and say we're cutting divisions of the business with no objections from the law in most places. sure you can go to your work council (hope they are on your side) about it, or to the union (hope they have time for you and you're lucky enough to have enough evidence to win the tribunal) or the lawyer (hope you have a legal assistance insurance and are ready for years of process and fees). employees without a savings buffer are similarly vulnerable in these circumstances
the biggest reason to stay an employee if you can consult instead where I am is really the unemployment benefits you can get, but that now takes up to 10 months to actually start paying out due to how understaffed the government is. so again, best have some reserves. the next biggest reason is you hate paperwork
As for job security, employment doesn't give a shred more job security than being a self-employed contractor these days. My job security comes from my skills and the succession of successful projects I've worked on.
And there are a lot of companies that have a single large customer. I think I have a lot more flexibility than they do.
So please be very careful and if you can find a side gig that doesn't interfere with your main one so you have at least some protection. It could be a low hours but high pay job that way you don't end up eating into your time too much, for instance a coaching job.
> Expecting self-employed contractors to have multiple clients is unreasonable.
On the contrary: it's a must. Without multiple clients you are super fragile, don't have a strong negotiation position and in case of any kind of headwind you're immediately on the ropes. If you insist on doing long running contracts try getting two that do not overlap in terms of run-time, make one two days a week, the other two days a week or three days a week and bill the smaller job a higher rate.
> And there are a lot of companies that have a single large customer. I think I have a lot more flexibility than they do.
That's true, but they tend to have a much stronger position than you do due to the kind of contracts that get written between large entities. In a conflict with a much larger entity you usually end up drawing the short stick. They could stiff you on a bill and it would already pull you under water.
Protection from what exactly?
> Without multiple clients you are super fragile, don't have a strong negotiation position and in case of any kind of headwind you're immediately on the ropes.
Not at all. I can walk away and I have my financial reserves. My negotiation position is stronger than when I'm an employee.
> If you insist on doing long running contracts try getting two that do not overlap in terms of run-time, make one two days a week, the other two days a week or three days a week and bill the smaller job a higher rate.
This sounds like an absolutely terrible idea. I'm not going to undermine myself like that.
> They could stiff you on a bill and it would already pull you under water.
One (very small) client did stiff me on a bill. I won't work for them anymore, and I tend to prefer larger clients now that simply do pay their bills. I have considered suing them, but the amount was too small to be worth it. It didn't pull me under water.
I think jacquesm is advocating that you have multiple sources of income (clients) to protect from the possibility that you lose your one and only client and suddenly have zero income.
I take a different approach to my consulting. It sounds like you do too. I typically have just one client, but I charge them a metric shitload and tell them quite specifically that I do that in part to protect myself should I need to go months and months without a replacement client. Obviously there are limits to this and I'd have zero clients if I charged too much, but between that and a savings buffer built up from previous clients, I don't feel like this is a precarious situation at all.
But I also have to admit/concede that I do not think my advice is replicable. I only started being so aggressive about my rates once I already had the privilege of being able to survive for years without any income. For someone who _needs_ reliable income, jacquesm's advice is probably more useful than mine.
> Let's hope you won't find out why that's a very bad idea.
The way you phrased it feels needlessly patronizing (perhaps unintentionally), but more importantly, it does not really address my comment.
I wasn't arguing if it is a good idea or not. I was responding to the argument that having multiple customers is necessary to be regarded as "truly" self-employed in the eyes of the taxman. My point is that it's not uncommon nor unusual for a small company to be invoicing only a single customer. Hence my examples. Whether it is safe business-wise is another story.
> If at the end of the year you've only sent invoices to a single customer then you are simply at risk. You need multiple customers to be stable and secure. Two is better than one and three is really the minimum.
Noone denies that having diversified sources of income is (other things being equal) the safer option. But the subject was legal recognition, not optimal business strategies.
As for legal recognition: the only reason this is a thing right now is because the social contract is broken, in any other setting you'd be an employee.
A couple of years ago, the Dutch tax service was trying to tackle the problem of fake self-employed people who were really just employees without the same rights, pensions, etc. The Dutch postal service PostNL was notorious for firing firing all their mail deliverers and hiring them back as self-employed people who still had to wear their uniform and work according to their schedule. And somehow the tax service approved that. But self-employed programmers who hop between big projects, negotiate their own pay (which tends to the high side) and have a lot of control over the projects they work on and the way they work on them, suddenly have to prove that they're really "zelfstandig", self-sufficient.
It's frustrating. I recently went back to regular employment and I hated it. Tons of extra rules, limited vacation days, and significantly lower pay. I guess I prefer being in control, saving for my own retirement, and going on vacation as often or as little as I like. Seriously, how many vacation days I had left used to give me stress. It's significantly healthier for me to be self-employed.
The way I see it: if a large company can have a single client and just rent out all their employees to that single company, why can't a small one-man company do the same?
And I think I'm a lot more self-sufficient than that company; if my contract ends, I can easily get a new contract elsewhere for myself. But if their contract ends, they need to find new work for all of their employees at once, and they'll likely fire some or all of them, making the whole job security argument moot. Their risk is higher than mine, and their security isn't. I really think having lots of self-employed contractors like me is better for the industry than the overhead of having to organise into companies.
For a while it was possible to have a flat 5% income tax rate, but I guess someone pointed out that it's too generous, so the best option now is a flat 12% and 3% healthcare contributions.
The market now is interesting - there are a huge number of low experience / low skill people flooding the market which has driven prices down for some very good people whilst also making it hard for companies to actually find qualified people. It actually lead to me rejecting a project who really wanted me and I fancied (Government but with a chance to have a really big positive impact on society; I moved mountains with the last project and learned some valuable lessons, seemed a shame to let that dull... oh well).
I've been doing it for about 8 years now, I enjoy it and it has allowed me to both grow like crazy and do things I've always been capable of but wouldn't have attempted as an employee.
The other thing: funding in Europe for ventures is horrible compared to the US. I'll be looking to raise for a project this year and I'm dreading it (Healthcare, we're going to try the public route first because it would be better long term.. although it will leave money on the table it will increase the probability of success we believe).
Find customers that value you and make sure they pay and pay on time. A single hickup in the payment department is a good reason to start looking for a replacement customer. And never ever rely on just the one customer: your negotiation position is now crap and if anything happens to that one customer, their customers, their market or the relationship then you're done.
If and when you are looking for funding for your healthcare start-up please contact me, I may not be able to invest myself but I do have a whole pile of contacts and some of those are doing regular medical investments.
- the subcontractor doesn't get any social security. Has to provide everything for himself from the private sector. And pensions (however meager). Theoretically he's free to have multiple clients or vary prices but I guess for most this is a pipe dream and they are dependent. For some tax dodging he gives up the whole legal safety net of being employed. Based on your contract you are freely exchangeable.
- the contracting company has more freedoms with getting/tossing employees, although loses a safety net of subcontractor suddenly leaving or changing prices.
- the government loses oversight of actual corporate structures.
Instead of fixing the flaws in the social system, hidden employment just throws it in the bin because haha less taxes, more money and freedom.
Most programmers provide outsourcing services for companies from abroad (including outside of the EU).
Low taxes help them - and the umbrella companies AKA software houses - to remain competitive on the global market.
So even if they only pay a smaller fraction of their income to the budget, it's still better than if they didn't get the gig to begin with, because the contracts would go elsewhere.
> the subcontractor doesn't get any social security.
You do get healthcare insurance in Poland; no difference here. You're paying those fees just the same way.
You're only required to pay minimum pension charges though, so you have to take care of that yourself. (Objectively speaking, investing your savings in the pension system, of all places, probably isn't an optimal strategy anyway. At any rate, noone stops you from paying more than you're legally required, if you think that it is).
> the contracting company has more freedoms with getting/tossing employees, although loses a safety net of subcontractor suddenly leaving or changing prices.
It's obviously a trade-off. Being able to let people go without fuss if a customer downscales their budget (I was on the receiving end of this last year) is a competitive advantage.
> the government loses oversight of actual corporate structures
What do you mean by that?
So many problems. These are just top off my head:
- Countries should want internally organised production, strong companies with own IP, not one-man "companies" producing IP to external entities.
- Those foreign companies will switch to other countries with better prices (Asia, Africa) any time if their programming scene improves. It's not like they have stakes like when building a factory.
- Lot of people think they can invest better, create a better future pension for themselves. This is often true, and why would we want to allow exits, further eroding the whole system? There should be a base pension fund with everyone involved.
> the government loses oversight of actual corporate structures
To the government the company could be a 5 person shell, while it actually employs/pays salaries of 100s of families. Theoretically you could roll up the contracts, but that would be very complicated.
Of course it's great to have domestic tech giants (and, sadly, Europe as a whole isn't doing very well in this regard, for reasons that deserve a separate conversation), but these things are largely orthogonal to eachother.
There is no reason why a domestic tech giant couldn't have local talents on contracts. Promising domestic start-ups, such as Tidio (mentioning them as they're from my home city) are doing that too.
> - Those foreign companies will switch to other countries with better prices (Asia, Africa) any time if their programming scene improves
Sure, but having people on employment contracts isn't going to protect you against it.
> Lot of people think they can invest better, create a better future pension for themselves. This is often true, and why would we want to allow exits, further eroding the whole system? There should be a base pension fund with everyone involved.
And there is. I can't see why preventing people from investing into a better future pension for themselves (on the top of the state-provided minimum) would be a good idea.
> To the government the company could be a 5 person shell, while it actually employs/pays salaries of 100s of families. Theoretically you could roll up the contracts, but that would be very complicated.
The government has got a centralized system, National System of E-Invoices (or KSeF). It's a fairly fresh thing, but it's becoming obligatory this year. Meaning the taxman gets to see all the invoices without having to jump through any hoops. So even if you are contracting (instead of hiring) a hundred people, it is still transparent.
> welfare/health care system is bad, taxes are not used well
There's a widespread lack of trust in the Polish government, which decreased even further during the 2015-2023 period. If the money is being funelled to the ruling politicians' families and friends, why willingly pay high taxes? I believe this is an underlying core issue, which would probably take a new generation to repair.
While it is true that it's relatively low in Poland in general... Eg. according to this survey [1], the percentage of respondents expressing trust in the government decreased from 38% in 2016 down to 32% in 2022 (while clearly exceeding 40% about half way through).
Which is pretty normal whenever the same party stays at power for a longer period; its popularity wears out over time.
For comparison, the same score was at 39% back in 2012, midway through the term of the government preceding Law and Justice. Hardly a striking contrast.
I'm even less sure about your claim when it comes to the context of welfare systems in particular.
Social transfers and safety net is one of the very few areas where the Law and Justice government achieved substantial results, even though it had to steer the country through the hardships of the pandemics.
For example, in terms of the percentage of children at risk of poverty and social exclusion Poland ranked 14th in the EU back in 2015 [2]. By 2022, it ranked 6th [3].
Also look at [4], [5], [6]...
I am putting aside the infamous judiciary reforms, abortion, and other hot button areas (which are far less of a priority for an average voter than echo chamber—commentators tend to assume). I'm focusing on the taxing & welfare, and sheer facts.
[1] https://www.cbos.pl/SPISKOM.POL/2022/K_037_22.PDF
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/E...
[3] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
[4] https://notesfrompoland.com/2022/11/10/poland-has-eus-second...
[5] https://notesfrompoland.com/2023/06/20/poland-has-eus-third-...
[6] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1130472/poland-poverty-r...
Standard tax rate (on UoP) is 12% up to ~30k USD, the rest is taxed 32%. On top of that, the employer pays a social security fee, its rate rises proportionally to income.
As an one-person business, you have two most popular options:
- 12% flat tax rate on income, with a flat rate social security fee; (1)
- 19% flat tax rate on revenue. The social security fee is dependant on income, but it's less than on UoP. You can write off expenses in this scenario, so the actual tax rate is actually lower. People generally try to write off as much as they can - for example, the tax agency is OK with programmers buying multiple bikes as a means of "transport to clients" ;)
You can also write off VAT in both scenarios, effectively making a lot of major purchases (desks, chairs, phones, etc) way cheaper. There's also a 5% tax rate, called IP Box, but it's tricky and doesn't apply for every scenario, so I'm taking this aside.
With the employer spending 5k EUR per month (21,7k PLN), you're left with:
- 14,6k PLN on UoP
- 18,5k PLN on 12% tax
- 16,7k PLN on 19% tax, out of which you can potentially recover 3,9k PLN
It's easy to see why software developers choose to start a one-person business. It's worth to jump through the hoops to save on taxes.
(1) There are actually 3 levels dependant on income, but it's lower than the UoP fee for basically most software developers
The US doesn't do this. They try to make self employed vs employed by a company have the same tax rates.
Being self-employed has its own downsides - if anything goes south (as in, you did something terribly wrong, there's graphite on the ground, and you're held financially responsible for the outcome), you are liable down to your very last penny, in theory at least.
By comparison, if you're on a contract of employment, you're only liable up to the equivalent of your three salaries, even if your negligence has caused damages in the millions.
You are not protected by the labor law (by contrast, getting fired on an employment contract runs into plenty of legal protections should you choose to dispute it).
It makes sense to me that accepting greater responsibility - as a one-man company - gets compensated somehow, like in the form of lesser tax burdens.
The US famously had a huge amount of tax law exemption just because of corruption. Nowadays you need an international setup to achieve the same, because the same old tricks have been used by many and there was enough political pressure to change it.
Some countries simply just didn't go through enough scandals of finding out how all well networked people pay almost zero taxes and therefore still have some relatively simple setups to pay little taxes.
A separate matter is countries trying to desperately attracting businesses and creating tax benefits only for wealthy expats, but not for their own people.
The self-employed in Poland provide almost 30% of total budget revenue from income tax [1]. (This statistic is somewhat dated, but I don't believe it's changed drastically since). That's a lot of "friends" and "wealthy expats".
[1] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/259268/1/1777969808....
It was a good wheeze but some years ago the govt bought in legislation "IR35" which basically says that if it looks like a employment contract then it should be taxed like a "normal" employment contract.
It's hard, but less hard than what startup founders do. It's nice having control of my schedule, but the flip side is that there's never a day off. Personally, I think being self-employed is great for people who naturally work really hard and want to capture the full output of their labor.
I don't think I could ever go back to full time employment for someone else. It's addicting having your own business that actually cash flows!
Definitely envious of those with actually sustainable business models, though, heh.
(p.s. https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants, come say hi in the Discord if you want to talk shop about Rust/Bevy/WASM/gamification of mental health)
Just now I spent 3 months making a game that turned out to be worth $0, but that's part of the process. As long as the project itself is interesting and you learn something from it, it doesn't feel like totally wasted time.
Learned a ton of lessons, the first of which is starting a consulting shop for general development is fools errand. You can kind of make if worth it if you're decent at sales and offshore everything.
If I do it again I'll slice our niche down thinner than prosciutto, something like CRM integrations for real estate agents, and have contracts that allowed us to own the IP.
Is it a dreamland or such clause is really possible in the present day cookie-cutter contracts?
Large enterprise clients would never let you own the IP. But those gigs are usually pretty profitable because they're large and they can afford high rates.
Small clients mostly don't care unless they are planning on selling the software.
And mid sized clients it seems to depend on whether or not they see it as a cost savings measure or competitive advantage. If it's the latter you can usually justify higher rates.
Saved enough money to generate 80 percent of my last drawn salary from my investments.
Now focusing on creating my own fintech web app, with generative ai integration.
I like the feeling of working independently and years of corporate job had taken taken toll on mental health.
Currently building skills in fullstack web development and generative ai. Would take freelance job for some extra cash
But I have planned for conservative returns of 12 percent overall
On the other hand my own portfolio has a mutual fund that invest in US stocks for more diversification.
US 10 year treasury yields are ~4% while Indian treasury yields are ~7%.
The long term inflation rate has been 7 to 8 percent and bonds have returned par with inflation rates
I then rebooted my software project, launched a landing site and started talking to prospects (hundreds of them), before I set out to pivot my existing product to something that might gain traction. (I wound up throwing away 95 percent of the code.) I spent 2014 through 2019 with the product in beta, barely making a living off of a few enterprise support contracts and doing freelance photography (and depleting my savings), but spending at least 80 percent of my time on building the product and getting it to a finished state.
(Some people seem to be able to build a product in a weekend that gets eager customers. I'm not one of those people, choosing to build something that was, in retrospect, much too big of a project for one person. I probably also spent too much time polishing the product before commercializing it, likely due to a fear of failure.)
In 2019, the product was finally commercialized as a SaaS service. I remember thinking that I either wanted it to be a spectacular success, or a spectacular failure (so that I could focus on other things, after close to 20 years).
It was neither, but has been growing steadily ever since. I would have made much more money working for someone else, but the freedom is unparalleled. I get to set my own hours and focus on things I consider important. I enjoy doing everything from support calls and UX work to building a compiler and a type system (that I have mentioned before on HN).
I also have no one I need to answer to, other than our customers. That has been important over the past couple of years, when a series of health emergencies in my family has diverted my attention elsewhere. I have been very fortunate to be able to do so, focusing on what's important, without having to ask permission to cut down on work temporarily.
Overall, I wouldn't trade this for anything. This year, my product will gain a sister product in a more lucrative field (I'm hoping), and I have plans to commercialize my compiler, both as a service and as a traditionally-licensed library. So I'm excited to stay solo and keep working on building the business.
With my own business, I gain agency. If the product fails, it's because I failed to market it properly, or the product vision was bad and did not resonate with enough customers, or because I failed to execute on that vision. When all the decisions are out of your hands, and you can't even see what prompted them, they can feel capricious and arbitrary.
With my own business, I am in control. I don't have one boss, I have hundreds of them. And as long as I continue to provide them with value, I get to continue doing what I'm doing. I like those terms.
I really like having close contact to customers as well having a very high variance in the type of work that I do.
I also run DebianSupport (https://debiansupport.com) from which we provide professional services for Linux. Mostly Debian and Ubuntu but not exclusively so.
Having used Linux extensively since 1997 and PostgreSQL since 2000, I really like working with both pieces of technology. And I love being able to provide value from my skills and experience.
I've been active on both the open source and commercial side of embedded Rust since the beginning, so it's been fun to watch it grow both as an ecosystem as well as from a commercial adoption perspective. Doing consulting makes it easier to help do more open source docs + support in the open, and seems to be one of more sustainable ways to do OSS in my opinion, if you can swing it.
> James talks with Scott Mabin about how he joined the Espressif team and got involved in embedded Rust, the working culture in chip manufacturing companies and preferences about designing and building mechanical keyboards.
I worked nights and weekends for about 10 years on the products before they were good enough and selling enough that I could go full time. I’ve focused heavily on not having technical debt, and making the app as user friendly as possible to cut down on customer support burden.
Customer support work on holidays and vacations is required, but only for an hour or two. It’s been a pretty good gig.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37419830
The reality is that being self-employed requires building business skills and being able to sell your skills. I previously founded a VC-funded developer marketplace, and the people that won all the jobs were the great communicators - not the most experienced (or inexpensive) developers.
Fractional work is a nice in-between where you ideally have a retained part-time contract, paid weekly or monthly, so that you aren't constantly looking for new projects.
Here's to hoping you succeed. The thing I messed up: personal relationships due to business success.
As someone with a likely ADHD, it's very hard to plan for multiple things in my head, I can usually focus only on one big event at a time: product release, party event, plan romantic date, etc. So, usually I do have to choose onlu one thing to prioritize in the short-term.
I was doing typical employment until October 2023 while doing some part time freelancing. The company had layoffs and I decided to do more freelancing while I look for the next job. Then the freelancing pay became double or more what I'd make from normal employment, so I am unlikely to get back to "being an employee" unless the situation changes significantly.
Initially I was worried about being able to find enough gigs to be able to make enough income to survive, but now my main struggle is to not take on too many responsibilities at once to be able to keep the clients happy, and even had to turn a few people down because I'm getting too busy...
I do get some spare time for myself to work on my own things, a few of those projects do bring income, but my main income source and the thing that takes most of my day is the freelancing.
I hired an accounting company to take care of taxes and stuff.
Most of my clients are in the UK.
I work partially through Toptal and some through my network.
I can't complain too much about it!
I run 2 long-term consulting gigs (one of them is an Elixir project for the French government at https://transport.data.gouv.fr?locale=en, the other is in the healthcare sector).
I have also bootstrapped various products (and plan to do more in the future).
And did my first freelance project about 3 years ago. Mostly doing FullStack with a FE focus. From then I've been working on and off due to studies.
It certainly has its upsides and downsides. Here in Germany, freelancing allows one to somewhat escape generally low salary for employed software developers (as compared to the US). But what I don't enjoy is the distance to the actual issue/customer at hand. It's on average a much more corporate form of work. And the last couple months have been very slow in terms of demand.
Anyways, building out an automated cloud compliance platform. MVP is coming out in the next few months. B2B subscription based SaaS platform for automated SOC 2 compliance in AWS. Post MVP looking at PCI and then some of the data privacy regulations. Also reviewing upcoming compliance requirements for AI and Electric Vehicle Charging Management Systems (EVCMS).
PS: Happy to answer any engineering questions or share tips on how to become compliant with least toil. Regulators aren’t engineers and engineers don’t understand what needs to be minimally done to get the auditors off their back, so this is my way of giving back to the community. Traveling internationally and will respond here on a best effort basis, or my LinkedIn (listed in my HN profile) is the best way to reach me.
Cheers! Vic
I have at times taken 6mo - 24mo contracts as just a software engineer when the pay and environment were good enough. This work is far less interesting, because someone else is typically designing what is to be built.
What does this mean?
Also how'd you get your first business?
In software development “greenfield” generally refers to new systems development whereas “brownfield” refers to the maintenance, extension, or enhancement of existing systems and solutions.
As for first business, I built a very small network over 7 years working in house at an advertising agency (which did a lot of digital work) and some startups. While I was just an IC developer, because I could communicate with non-technical people well, I became the first point of contact for a lot of decision makers over time.
If you want to do solo technical consulting start making friends with non-technical people who are in leadership roles. It takes time but it does snowball.
I have a similar timeline: dropped out in 2009 and started a few blue collar shops (mostly electrician-related). By 2019 I realized (with substantial help from clients / friends) I didn't want to be "on call" 24/7, as bossman, so over the next two years I fired all but my two best clients.
Reflecting on my worklife, I am grateful for so many of my clients/experiences; but it sure would have been a whole lot "easier" had I just worked W2 for somebody else [as were my IBEW apprenticeship days].
I had a family emergency 2022Q1 and then lost my housing 2023Q1 (to a landslide), so I've been promising myself "get employed 2024Q1;" and now with all these layoffs, I've just accepted that this will be my second year I don't have to file income taxes (legally, no income).
The one great thing about being self-employed is it does allow higher wages, flexibility, etc.; in my case, I have enough savings to last decades. If I had a family I would definitely prefer the stability and work/life balance of being a W2 employee [verse running a company, managing clients, installing, etc].
Do you really need to work if you have decades of savings? Or is it more about just having something to do?
Absolutely.
After the first year, unencumbered, it gets kind of boring (probably because I don't have enough savings to do everything/travel, just to eat/shelter).
It’s not easy to get started, but im very happy with this change after being a FTE for 15yrs. It’s a refreshing experience having to talk to customers to understand their pain points and then build something for it
I’m also doing some part time freelancing, so with my products + freelancing I’m earning way more than as a FTE
However I still rely on k9s due to the key bindings and plugin system being irreplaceable. That could change, I'd really like to do things like toggle FluxCD resources or do other custom actions directly in aptakube.
Great product!
I’ve been thinking of building custom UI for popular CRDs like FluxCD/Argo/others, but I need to get a few highly requested features out of the way first.
After a decade of building products for clients, we've recently launched our own bootstrapped SaaS offering: https://reamdocs.com --- the contract management platform we've built in-house to manage our services business for the last 5 years.
That all pays the bills, but what sustains me is my time outside of work: my family, my hobbies, my cat. Joys which I have time for because self-employment has allowed me to set my own hours, walk away from toxic clients, and freedom to do what is interesting on any given day.
I left my job in 2014 (worked for a semiconductor company), muddled around for 4+ years with not much to show before writing programming ebooks allowed me to earn a living. Fast forward to 2024 and I'm still only earning about 1/3 of what I used to earn (without even considering inflation, what my salary could've been now, etc), but it works for me.
2/3 of my time is spent on consulting projects, which pay better, and the rest is spent maintaining the platform. At the moment, the platform is self-sustaining and the revenue from it is growing fast. I work some of the largest companies in the industry, which is great for network building. The flexibility in schedule it offers is terrific, and I have no need to fundraise or hire.
I handle the customer-facing stuff, ie service and support. That sort of work has the downside of dealing with occasional negativity, but for the most part our customers are happy and capable of producing complex problems that are fun to solve :)
Opalstacker here as well, is it 16 years now? Wow, time flies!
Sending my greetings to Sean, best support I've ever had :D.
In the past 3 years through my company (https://webesque.agency) with the aim of expanding in digital product delivery, though I haven't invested enough time and marketing on that front yet. Thus I continue to contract and consult on DevOps automation and Cloud related projects for the time being.
I have no doubt luck was involved. I hit the market at a good time and gained traction quickly. I have done zero marketing and customers come in through word of mouth and via search engines. Surely there was luck in there.
As for choosing the idea-- that was more systematic. I chose a service that solved a real pain point for many companies in a specific industry. I chose it because it because:
1. There were many competitors (10+). That meant someone was making money, and more importantly, someone was spending money.
2. The industry/customers had a very clear channel for early word of mouth/traction (ie, it was easy to reach the customers and say "hey look at this solution for X").
3. A cottage industry exists around the industry. There are many "influencers" and training seminars, conferences, etc. Once my service gained some traction it was easy to stick around because people kept talking about it at conferences. I also gave access to these "influencers" for free.
I'd say stick to B2B, and look for 1-3 from above.. those are ideal for a solo-SaaS product.
As @lorenzk said, thanks for sharing your experience on these things.
You also taught me something meaningful, and you didn't even have to do anything!
I was curious about what kind of product you've made and started stalking your comment history to see if I got some clues about it.
I eventually reach a comment from you (on a thread about a dev. who got his Apple account cancelled) to which I replied ... like ... this ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38395858
<clown face>
I wish I could hide under a rock now, lol; but on the positive side I feel like I learned how/why one should be more measured in general, to avoid ending up looking in situations like these.
Congrats for shipping whatever it is that you do, and thanks for the life lesson on the side!
Yes, you never know who you could be talking to. Reminds me of the trial lawyer advice of "never ask a question you don't know the answer to".
In addition, I co-founded a company that makes Escape Rooms. We sold 13 turn-key rooms to other operators, then eventually invested in our own venue. We were the only company in the southern hemisphere to win a prestigious TERPECA award this year, so it's not a stretch to say our venue is probably the best in Australia. I've never earned a cent from this in eight years... But, this year is the one. Maybe. Probably. Hopefully?!?
We (my wife and I) do business-development for our crazy schemes, sometimes alone, sometimes with the help of up to six contract developers that we love to work with. I fund those crazy schemes by doing contract software development myself. Benefits include 100% paid health and dental insurance, as much 401(k) matching as we can possibly have, and afternoon siestas.
We have no plans to hire anyone else, simply because it would be very important to me to give them a square deal: Equal ownership in the company, equal benefits, nice equipment, and so forth. But I don't mind enlisting other contractors who are already comfortable, and if one of our schemes really takes off, we incorporate a Delaware C-corp around it and make sure everyone owns a piece. That's only happened once, but I managed to quickly step down from the C-suite and become a SW dev contractor at that company.
Main income builders: - https://www.deepwander.com - https://www.readthistwice.com - https://www.iso100mm.com
I've got a background in B2B and product development, and I don't think it would be too hard for me to raise some capital, but I'm intentionally choosing the indie/bootstrapped route as I want to maintain my relaxed lifestyle and have complete ownership and freedom over what I work on and how I do it.
I also enjoy working on B2C way more than B2B because I like seeing my impact on an individual level. But I digress. :)
After selling my last startup in 2022 and being very burned out I decided to lean deeper into my own hobby - metal detecting. This lead to me building out a lot of cool tooling around historical maps to help me find better areas to detect and I slowly began to realize that there were many other hobbyists and enthusiasts who also were interested in the maps and tools I was building. So Pastmaps was born
The traffic and server costs started snowballing in the past year so I added the ability to buy physical prints of any of the maps in the collection and this has also started to take off. It's only ramen-profitable for now so don't go thinking that this is hugely successful by any means but it's growing on its own so I'm excited to see how big it can get.
Next up is also adding some premium tooling and features that many of my members have been begging me for so fingers crossed!
I set myself the goal of earning the same or better (after taxes) as what I was as a full time worker in the same sorts of companies I am now working in, and I’ve always managed that - plus I get many more hours in the week to spend with the family, I don’t have to travel constantly, and I can run every day without thinking too hard about how I am going to fit it in around sleep, family, work, and the rest of life.
I sometimes miss a few things about working in a ‘normal’ job in France (job security, sick leave, paid vacations) but the freedom to create my own schedule and fit work around life a lot of the time more than makes up for that.
I worked in tech for about 15 years where I paid off my student loans very aggressively, then once those were done I started pushing the same amount of money into retirement and savings accounts. My wife and I have no kids and were probably putting $50k+/year away. Turns out if you do that for 15 years, you end up with enough money to never need to worry about rent or health insurance again and you can choose what you want to do that is more fun. For me that was instructing and leading epic multi-week rafting trips like the Grand Canyon 3 times, the Maranon River in Peru, and the Alsek River in Alaska.
[1] - https://emysound.com [2] - https://github.com/AddictedCS/soundfingerprinting
The flexibility and being my own boss is great. I have enough bandwidth to work on long term bets, while keeping income flowing. The type of clients who hire fractional CTOs can be challenging - they're typically bootstrapping, and often have unrealistic expectations. Finding new clients hasn't been particularly hard, at least so far; word of mouth in my network has been about 70% of engagements, with online postings the remainder.
Not for everybody. I own my house and don't have kids, so I have a high risk tolerance. But, if you have a safety net and the confidence in your skills, it's a great lifestyle.
It's an excellent self-employment opportunity with virtually zero costs (other than traveling to students by car).
For example, if you saved up some money to live off of while you get your business going, it's very possible that your net income for the year could be negative (or at least very low), so with a spouse and kids it's feasible that your insurance premiums could be $0.
Of course, once you start making money, you'll want to dial back and eventually stop using the subsidies, otherwise come tax time you'll have to pay them all back for that year.
I'm also working on a new SaaS product (co-pilot + CRM for small recruiting agencies). I'm looking for someone to work on it with me. Tech stack is svelte kit + node + python for custom models. I have an audience of 160K followers on LinkedIn, mostly recruiters, that I can reach when the product is launched.
If you are looking for an interesting side project that will generate revenue, email robert at getditto dot com.
The greatest thing it to be able to adjust the daily and weekly schedule around what I want or have to do and when, and no commuting.
I have difficult managing two clients. How do you switch context, and make sure your are fairly distributing time and focus for each client, while not getting overwhelmed. My psychiatrist suspected ADHD, so probably that's why context switching is difficult for me. How do you make yourself to stay on the task and meet deadlines?
Anyway, yes context switching can be a problem. That's why those days must be consecutive. Furthermore, I write down in a text file a few lines about what I did every day and how many hours I spent. My file goes back to October 2012. That's very useful to bill customers at the end of the month and to restart from the previous week. I also write short TODOs in the same file about what I'll have to do the next week when I'll be back on the project. Git commit messages and slack chats also help to get back into context.
What else... I have a virtual desktop per customer, with editor windows, terminals, browser windows open all the time. Not having to restart everything every week and finding all pieces in the same place probably helps too. It surely costs some RAM but it's cheap. My laptop has 32 GB, 18.9 used by programs right now according to htop.
I am trying to write things down for the last few days, before it was Zim (It's still my core knowledge base), I feel I enjoy writing more than typing to note things.
I find jobs on Upwork and I do cold reach out on LinkedIn and via email. So far, I managed to keep myself pretty busy and I landed a few pretty good projects. I consider that a success since I went into the freelancing world not knowing much about it.
It's hard, especially with the uncertainty of where the next project/money is coming from, but I can't imagine going back to a full-time employment anytime soon.
And yes, you are right, Upwork can be a race to the bottom. Since I am based in a rather expensive city, I can't really compete with other developers on price, but I can still compete on offering, expertise, commitment, etc.. So far I managed to find enough clients who are willing to pay extra for a premium service.
Naturally, it also depends on the service you are providing. Luckily, my niche is not as saturated yet.
The other point with companies not willing to hire an individual is something I can relate to as well. And not only in regulated industries. It's mostly startups and small companies I work with at the moment.
I've bootstrapped a few companies. B2B apps are easier since you can do custom work for business clients while you perfect your software.
Crone AI is much harder. It's my first edtech consumer app. It's been live for 3 months and we've made $1,500 so far (lol).
My previous business startups made $200k ARR and $1M ARR. Iterating on consumer apps is more fun and you can still extrapolate growth from small numbers.
Previously, I worked as a back-end dev in NYC in the media sector - initially at half a real salary because my employer decided to take a gamble on a n00b dev with a degree in writing - and then as a suit wearing front-end dev consultant in the finance sector for 2 years altogether.
I love the flexibility and the range of work. I have had partners and employees but am solo again and enjoying it. My spouse has good health insurance and a more traditional career, albeit one that has required a move every 2-3 years, and that helps quite a bit.
You will save yourself a lot of grief if you can build up your credibility and a good stack of relevant and wide-ranging contacts before you start. Bad clients can cost you more than money.
If you are considering it, be honest with yourself. Many, many folks are better suited to a more structured work life. Advocating for yourself AND your client's best interest is no small challenge when you are solo. Finding a niche, whether in technical expertise or industry focus, will help significantly.
Also – I highly recommend adjusting not just your rates but your billing structure to create more value for clients and better work. E.g. I now have tiered support plans – and tbh if I were based in SV and 10 years younger, I would probably build a SaaS to make it easier for more folks to do that.
I've been hit by layoffs in tech twice in the past 2 years. Once due to the consultancy I was working in selling, and all non-billable roles being terminated as a part of the sale. Then I joined a mid-sized startup as a head of engineering, and it turned out their remote work policies were bogus and they wanted me in the office all the time, and so they ended my probation.
So I'm a bit disillusioned with the hiring process in tech right now, so I'm working on two things:
1. Building market pricing intelligence software (basically manual scraping and data engineering, but I have plans to make it more sophisticated) to track prices of products in the market. I've got a couple of profitable no-risk ways to use this data, and it's started off nicely. And I think one day the tool will be worth a lot.
2. Working in my wife's gourmet packaged food business. It makes good money, and a large part of the business is waiting around for dehydrators or ovens to do their thing... so it means I have time to work on code while bringing in steady money.
I'm going to check out the fractional work/moonlighting job sites someone else posted as it might be a better way to more effectively make money to support my family while I build, but then again it's pretty satisfying working with my hands making food.
I quit my job in December to work on it full time. It doesn't pay the bills yet (current MRR $590/month), but it is slowly growing! Little bit of a race to see if I can pay my bills with it before I run out of runway.
The reddit comments are pretty direct, like, the poster is asking about how to convert pdf bank statements to csv and I provide a link w/ full transparency that I'm the developer.
Though, I have a course I've pre-sold during the recent work drought. These pre-sales have been paying the bills. So there's lots of pressure to deliver on them while still trying to line up freelance/consulting work.
I started doing this because I had big indie hacker dreams. Now I just think that I'm partially unemployable. What matters most to me is controlling my own destiny and Intellectual Property rights. Writing code is what fills me up, and It needs to be protected. Otherwise, I feel trapped, growing bitter and angry over time. So I'll keep doing this until I have more products.
My ultimate goal is to create a portfolio of products to pay the bills. I have no particular biased towards what. They could be courses, ebooks, or even games. 2023 was a special case in terms of cash flow (business cycle goes down), but I'm hopeful for the future, and my course sold decently well, so I think I'm getting the hang of this entrepreneurship thing.
I worked on the second product full time for about a year. It was profitable, but I never scaled the business up enough to make a living from it. I went back to work full time.
By this point, my appetite for hustling on the weekend to build a business in a market with limited growth potential had diminished. I focused on paying off my mortgage and saving money. After a few years, I had saved enough money to be able to cut back my hours and focus more on my hobbies and passion projects.
I've been working on my current startup Emurse full time since the end of 2020. I am covering costs with the revenue from my first startup and living off savings. We're getting ready to launch the first paid product soon.
I decided long time ago the former makes me a lot happier than the later.
1 - No direct subordination relationship with a customer, you are a service provider, not a contractor.
2 - Focus is on revenues, profit and low debt, not growth above everything.
3 - No founding from venture capital investor. If you have a partner most probably she is also part of the operation, or expect to have a return on their investments from what the company sells, not by the company being sold.
4 - You draw a salary, if any, from the operation. There's no other source of money for you to survive other than your personal economies (see 2 and 3)
In case it was because the "client" wanted a temp, but the contract lasted longer than what, IMO, was appropriate. I was early-career, and the "client" really wanted to treat me as an employee.
In the second case the employer had a limited budget and we agreed on contract-to-hire. 18 months went by and I eventually had to really twist their arm to bring me on full-time. (They were treating me like an employee.)
Anyway, contracting (as a self-employed consultant)'s great if you like that kind of thing and are prepared to incorporate to take advantage of tax laws; but if you want to be an employee, it's annoying.
First when I started I was doing subcontracting for larger companies but now I have few customers of my own and it works out fine. I can provide them better and quicker service then larger companies can and for some customers the man and a dog company suites very well and for some companies it doesn't.
I handle everything myself when it comes to business - creating content, being active on Linkedin for inbound leads, doing the bookkeeping, doing the monthly tax reports etc.
> Curious to know what sustains people.
It allows me to work on what I am interested in, for me that's the key. For whatever reason I've decided that text productivity apps are really interesting, and worth my time to build. So that's what I do. It hasn't lead to great riches, but I wake up pretty much every day excited to work on what's next. Pretty fun!
Now I find myself middling between looking for steady/normal work and trying to stand up my new project, https://getspence.ai (landing page gets a revamp this week). I never expected trying to find steady/normal work as an exited entrepreneur to be so difficult. There are so many square holes and I often feel like a round peg.
I build firewalls, deploy workstations, troubleshoot crapware like Quickbooks, setup/maintain domains, admin MS exchange/azure, build/run mail servers, virtualize things, fix hardware inc med & pharma equip (with son #3).
Lots of other things except web - which is done by my long-time friend/biz partner.
I've been employed on and off (mostly by clients) and prefer that but circumstances always intervened.
Pros: Flexible sched is plus to deal with family demands and endless crisis. Cons: Uninsured.
In 1990 near DC, I did lawn care & hauling. I ingratiated myself with a guy who did GSA auctions and had a PC shop. I did auctions and learned to fix hardware for 2 years. His shop closed and DC is super expensive. I moved my kid and pregnant wife to FL (inexpensive back then) in 92. Worked as an mechanic at a car lot and at a small local IT shop.
In 93 I got a programming scholarship to college. In my last year the org funding me was shuttered as part of the Contract with America. I graduated but without connections, getting hired here was difficult. Two years of resumes yielded one distant job offer.
During that time I did residential IT, which is about as fun as it sounds. I also handed out cards to every local biz and chatted up anyone who'd stand for it. Three years of that led to my first real client, an org for developmentally disabled adults (ARC) down south. I supported ARCs for years until I picked up a nearby automotive group.
I got sent back to zero a lot. The 08 meltdown hit car dealerships. I pivoted to local medical but market changes from the ACA ended that. Next was wife's MI (5 kids by then) and that chaos left me with 2 small clients until she left in 19.
During the entire 30 years, I had a friend and on/off biz partner. I gave him my ARC and pharma clients in 04 to focus on auto. In 19 he moved out of state and returned the pharma along with a web retailer. I picked up another med practice and am really busy sometimes.
Combined with income from 3 sons, we're making just enough to cover FLs (now) expensive bills.
I tried to get funding but never really got there and we've just managed to grind it out to a point where we have enough revenue to pay ourselves.
The flexible lifestyle is great, I play golf on Wednesdays and help out with childcare much more than I would have been able to with my previous jobs.
There is the looming threat that all our customers will leave us one day and I'll have to go back to a regular 9-5 job, but hey ho.
Happy to answer any related questions.
Been doing it independently for almost 14 years now. Was based in Minnesota, but now I'm in Colorado. Wouldn't have it any other way.
It's amazing taking a full product from 0 to 1 with a small team, we're bootstrapped but have some revenue coming in now from very satisfied customers. I don't know if we'll ever raise money or have an exit, but I wouldn't trade the experience for the world.
Backstory: Not entirely planned, but I was talking with a company about potentially being a frontend architect or something along that line. As the conversations progressed, they said they couldn't hire me fulltime since I wasn't able to come in to the office daily but they could give me a long-term contract. I've been consulting ever since.
I work as a CTO in my day job (as an employee).
Also I'm self-employed (via a company structure) to build https://persumi.com - a blogging platform, and https://rizz.farm - a lead gen platform, as well as to work on client work.
What sustains me? I like to eat and have a roof over my head. Could I have made more money going a different route? Almost certainly. But, life is about tradeoffs.
Pays the bills and gives me enough free time.
Self-employment is definitely not for everyone, but I love the freedom and flexibility. It'd kill me to go back.
I'm fully bootstrapped and I have some months left of savings to try this out. If this doesn't get traction then I guess I'll have to get a "real" job again :).
Pretty standard bootstrap story - used consultancy to get us out the door. These days, we're (nearly) self sustained through license revenue, with a small amount of consulting (1-2 projects a year).
It's been a tough ride, and in hindsight, I wish I hadn't pivoted away from consulting quite as early as I had, however we've managed to stay alive, so - so far - independent, which has been nice.
I then founded a software services company where I currently work and grew it. It's been a very rewarding journey so far.
I'm not sure if either of these qualifies as "self employed" but that's that. :)
Does it mean it's around your software product, or it's some sort of agency?
The twist is my wife is also helping run her family business and while the two companies bring in similar revenue every year, that's about all they have in common.
It's been pretty eye opening seeing how my father and my FIL operate their respective businesses.
My dad typically believes in working smarter not harder and my FIL will do basically anything he can to save a dollar including doing most things himself.
What muddies the water a bit is their respective behavior might be a function of the businesses they run.
Our business is a software consulting practice with healthy margins and my FIL has a physical location with high fixed costs (owns a Tennis club).
For a summary, https://orib.dev/consulting.html
I'm just starting out with this, but it's looking promising.
My goal is to continue consulting while releasing my side project.
Next job is idea generation, prioritisation and mockups of ones that pass the initial filter. Then the real work starts.
For the rest of the week, I'm bootstrapping a language learning app.(https://vokabeln.io/)
I'm lucky enough not having to pay rent and also living expenses in Czechia are not that high.
I do love seeing threads like this though. All the fun tools & projects people build up.
As a hobby working on side projects (apps for apple ecosystem) and my main hobby - skydiving (it is expensive).
+1. Self-employed since 2006. Previously at Sophos.
>What do you do?
I'm a technical generalist, and it's slowly killing me. I need to specialise in…something.
>Curious to know what sustains people.
Fear of eviction & a broken anhedonic treadmill. Coming up to 20 years of that, there's a lot of damage to fix, frankly.
I am registered as corporation so I am my own employee and pay myself a salary
I do side gigs when the opportunity arises, but more often than not I don't have the time for anything but my main thing.
I still have the desire to create a great start up, but at least this way I can pay the bills and have more free time to work on start up ideas.
I'll likely be going back to it after being laid off last June and not being able to find the same level of pay.
I do advisory work and development too.
On one hand I have been doing software development for a long time, 40+ years of coding (currently Go), 25+ years as a manager (CTO, DoE, HoD,...) in large enterprises and startups. Founded three startups, one fizzled out, one went belly up in 2001 and one sold successfully.
But I learn something new every day.
On the other hand I have no training in coaching - but have been doing it for some years now. You decide.
I always find it extremely difficult to believe a 20 or 30-something can provide meaningful coaching advice, most of it is going to end up being a combination of theory (what they think) and things they've read (their interpretation of others experience).
- a crotchety 45+ year old
I run a small hardware product design firm and injection molding supplier right here in San Francisco.
Www.iancollmceachern.com Www.goldengatemolders.com
[0]https://www.zigpoll.com/blog/being-a-solopreneur-part-one
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261936
Just make sure that when you negotiate the rate you bump it up enough to account for self-employment tax, health insurance, and vacation time. The company would have to pay for these anyway for W-2s (self employment tax becomes payroll tax) so they shouldn't be opposed to the slightly higher rate to account for these things.
It's idiotic that W-2 cannot deduct these but it's reality.
As a bonus if you ever work overtime you actually get paid for your additional work. Another thing W-2s should get but don't.