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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Guys, a question about this: reading HN, I have the feeling that in USA freelancers are a pretty common phenomenon in software. Where I work (Netherlands), all freelancers I know are working full-time 2 year projects anyway, not at all getting them the flexibility articles like these refer to. They mostly get paid more than the employees, in exchange for less job security and having to invest in education themselves.

What do US freelancers do? Are these people who make websites for local bakeries? Can you do a 20-hr a week freelance job actually coding something? And how long do employers expect such projects to last? What kind of employers look for freelancers like that?

Any personal anecdotes or whatever will be most appreciated!

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I did freelancing (web, then iOS) for 8+ years based in the US, but for companies (large and small) around the world. I rarely worked with companies in my local area. The problem is thinking of the clients as "employers".

If you think of them as just clients and you have a lot of inbound leads (built up by word of mouth over time), then you can choose the projects that interest you.

In my experience, projects ranged from 6 weeks to 6+ months, but I almost always had multiple projects in various stages happening at the same time. There were often a couple other freelancers on the project, coordinated by a project manager. It's useful to work with or through a design agency or "interactive" agency (as they were called 10 years ago). The key is to manage the entire project from start to finish for the client. The worst problem is clients who don't deliver content/approvals/etc, so you need someone focused on bugging them.

I also usually set a per-project price, not hourly. I hated tracking hours and it didn't give me the motivation to get stuff done faster. A fixed price also forces everyone to agree on a detailed spec up front. Add a little padding into your price, so you you can be kind about implementing the inevitable changes.

tldr; Yes, it's totally possible to make a living doing freelance development, all from home (or anywhere you want).

The tough part for me is, how to find leads? I have a lot of contacts from previous jobs but nobody I know who could give me any kind of freelance work. How do you bootstrap this?

I don't know your specialty, but in design or programming, you only really need a good example of your work to get started. Try the monthly freelancer posts on HN. Worst case, here's a list of RSS feeds I used to follow (some can filter by freelance/anywhere): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465077

I'm a programmer. Those feeds look useful, thanks! :)

It sounds like you're describing the difference between contracting and freelancing - the former where you work somewhat-like an employee for a fixed amount of time, and the latter where you take on projects for a certain price.

Having done them both, contracting was infinitely more pleasant. When you're freelancing, it's really easy for the "I'm working" and "I'm not working" time to blur, and very easy to lose work/life boundaries. In addition, dealing with non-regular clients can be a royal PITA.

Good point!

But can you do contracting for 20 hours a week?

I suppose it depends on your field. In my highly technical field (thermodynamics) this is what I am doing, in fact more about 3 to 4h a day. This is long term work (100+ days/year) at about $750/day.

This is why I always recommend people to specialize themselves and not to drop out of college. You will have hard time convincing someone that you are 12 times faster/better than a "normal" developer, but if you have only 1000 people in the world able to do the job the company want to be done, you do not need to convince anybody.

At my current client, I did! I went from 5 days to 3 days a week, split pretty much how I wanted. I've since gone back to 5 days, thinking that I might as well earn all I can from the contract before it's up, as I like the work and it's a good rate

Not US but UK here. And yes, in my experience, yes you can do 20 hour weeks from freelance jobs. The people/companies who want you are simply those companies with more work than they can currently handle.

It's not hard to see why, in the UK especially, there's a severe shortage of good developers. I can safely say ( hopefully without coming across as arrogant) that I'm a better developer than any other I've met whilst freelancing thus far. Companies are willing to pay for that knowledge and experience, even if it's on a time limited basis.

It's well understood in programming circles that a good developer can be much more economically viable then several not so good developers working on the same problem. I think Joel Spolsky's sums up this point quite well here http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html.

> there's a severe shortage of good developers Couldn't agree more!

I can't agree more about the standard of developers, a host of roles I've interviewed candidates for in my past 2 positions just don't get the same calibre of applicant for a permanent role vs contract.

Friends of mine in the Netherlands (i'm Dutch) who freelance are like me; once starting to freelance you rather work MORE than less. Not for the money but for the freedom of being able to take on whatever you like. And then ofcourse you don't like it anymore as you end up doing way to much. Jobs protect you from that (or should).

I don't know how that is in the US and would like to know as well. It's very possible in the Netherlands to do so though; you make enough with limited time, but I just see people start with that intension and then add up more and more , while people with 'jobs' work less and less.

Cool, thanks for the response. What kind of work do you and your friends do? And, now that we're nearby anyway, in which city/area? (I'm in Eindhoven)

Most people I know are in software development in the Noord Holland area. My freelance days where a long time ago after university; I freelanced all over NL in software development, my first gig was in Den Bosch. After that I just started companies and moved things to a bigger scale :) Currently we do projects for Dutch, UK and German companies and that's what I liked most. I never liked freelancing very much really; it's all too chaotic for me (unless you take a 2-year project which is not in my nature).

It's the same with Freelancers in Germany (at least the ones I know). I've been working way more hours since I went freelance, however, only a fraction of them paid, since there is a significant overhead to doing freelance work (acquiring jobs, dealing with clients, chasing bills, taxes (those alone are a full-time job in Germany, sigh)). I think I went from about 40h in my full time job to roughly 60h now. That said, I'm happier than ever before with my job. Because it makes a hell of a difference if you spend your time doing what you love instead of wasting away in a corporate office. And you will not even notice how much time you're spending on it. A 20h week though - that only works if you are able to command a very high hourly/daily rate. The segment I work in, unfortunately, does not.

A lot of the people I work for need someone to be able to make sites and maintain them, but they don't have enough work to justify paying someone fulltime. Most of my employers just come to me when they need work done. Luckily, they always seem to want and need extra customizations on a somewhat consistent basis.

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