Lessons learned from losing tens of thousands of dollars freelancing | Hacker News Reader

Lessons learned from losing tens of thousands of dollars freelancing

blog.valhallaresearch.net

6 pointsvalhalladev11 comments

Hi folks. This is a blog I wrote up detailing what will almost definitely be my last freelance contract. I want to get ahead of a lot of the comments I foresee from HN:

- Yes, I know that most of these mistakes are avoidable and more or less my fault. They were my mistakes to make, and I feel like I owned up to them in this blog.

- No, I'm not looking for pity. I got caught up in the "get rich quick" nonsense around freelancing that you see a lot on YouTube, in blogs and on Twitter.

- No, I'm not going to name and shame. I personally would only be risking more by doing that.

- Yes, I know I can talk to a lawyer. I'm not going to discuss that here for reasons that should be fairly obvious.

- Yes, I know there are some people that have made bank from freelancing. I know it's possible and that people do it frequently. This is more of an anecdotal story to offset a lot of the discussion I see around freelancing.

- It was a Rust contract, btw.

This has been/continues to be an exceptionally hard mental struggle for me as I sunk a ton of time and effort into something and ended up getting screwed. It sucks. I'm not asking for pity, I'm asking for any of the devs here who are thinking about freelancing to read this and to take caution.

What's a Net/60 basis? I am having trouble understanding how often you were paid. Every month or so?

Edit: Nwm, I saw you worked for 90 days without pay. Ack.

Net/30 is 30 days after the contract is signed in this case, Net/60 is 60 days. Sometimes instead of "after the contract is signed" it is "after work is delivered" but my case was the former.

Anyone who is considering, or doing contact work absolutely needs to watch the video on YouTube that has to be like 10 years old or more... it's titled "F you, pay me". Trust me, watch it.

It can be very lucrative, steady and yes even fulfilling if you do it right.

I want to reiterate, not to be catty to iancmceachern but to make it clear, I know that this can be done and can be done correctly (and I've even watched that video!) but for me, this one stung too bad to go back to freelancing, at least for a while.

> Freelancing is a flawed model because there will always be a power imbalance.

It seems like you chose to work all night on this project for several months after the client missed a payment deadline.

Freelancing is a flawed model for you because you chose to let a company walk all over you.

Freelancing isn't a flawed model in general, except that people like you ruin it for everyone else by letting companies think they can get away with stuff like this.

Ah yes, I ruin it for everyone by "letting" a company with significantly more financial means "get away with" breaching contract.

Again, I acknowledged the mistakes I made in this blog, and ironically you are literally the commenter I tried to head off in my own comment on this post, but if you're choosing to blame the power imbalance on me, that's your choice and I'm fine with it.

Putting your foot down and demanding payment _does not fix the power imbalance_ by the way. Because if they continue to choose to not pay for the hours you've worked, you still have to pursue them legally. You can mitigate risk by demanding payment up front, stopping work, etc. (again, as I noted in the blog) but it does not at all mitigate the imbalance in power dynamics between a solo freelancer and a larger company.

What do you think happens when regular employees don't get paid by their employer (who also has more money and more resources than them)?

At least in the United States, the government has the ability to and a history of stepping in for the employee to ensure they are reimbursed, and court cases _very frequently_ side with the employee.

You have significantly more protection as a full-time employee compared to freelancing.

Long before the govt steps in, people will have stopped working hundreds of hours a month for an organization that hasn't paid them.

... I don't think I'm seeing the point you're trying to make.

I'm saying that there is a massive power imbalance in freelancing that is not at all the same as the power imbalance with working a 9-to-5

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