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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

I do sell my time for money. Directly. As a contractor I have an hourly rate and people take me on as needed. The money is good, I like meeting new people and what I really, really like is working on a project, seeing it ship and then going on to something else entirely.

Although it's also awesome that I get paid for every minute I work, if the client wants overtime I get paid more, if they don't I'm out the door at 5. I set my own vacation allowance and when an email comes in from a client at 3am to tell us how awesome the product is I don't care.

So IMHO, go the other way start selling your time for a living. Stop pretending you give a crap about anything but yourself and cold, hard cash, go contract!

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Well, as a contractor you can start selling outcomes instead of selling time. So for example, you're able increase sales for a business by 9% in a month. That's a whole lot of freaking money. Suppose it only takes you 5 hours of work. Maybe you're an expert at conversion rate optimization. Your client won't blink if you tell them it will cost $X0,000. That's way better for you than charging $200/hr for 5 hours.

Charging by the hour, as the basal form of hourly wage employment or in contracting, is just the worst case scenario when you have no other metrics to effectively predict and judge performance on.

But that means you have to take the fall if you aren't good at whatever alternative payment criteria you agree to. It just ends up being the default because it is somewhat safe, but if I were ever doing contract gigs I'd definitely rather charge by feature than by hour.

That's up to you. There's a well established contract market here in the uk that does not work that way.

I see that as consultancy, not contracting. An equally valid and even more lucrative occupation I will probably get into sooner or later.

I go to clients who have a project in mind, they need a team to do it, usually full time for several months, but don't need them post-delivery. I get paid, I get to do novel work, and I get to get the f*ck out on time :)

Freelancing, consulting, contracting, it's all the same thing in my opinion. It's just how you want to present yourself. Obviously, going at it as a consultant will net you the most amount of money. But it's only because of how your client will view you. Brennan from Planscope has successfully addressed all these problems and helped people make a ton of more money: http://blog.planscope.io

That is not anything like what I do for a living. I don't approach people with business solutions that will help them, hell, I don't care about business solutions. I work on specific projects that clients already want but don't have or want the people for.

I think just saying "do X or Y" doesn't properly acknowledge people will walk different paths.

If you have an idea you are passionate about (like the OP) and think you can make a living off of it, you only get one life, you might as well take the plunge. If you can't, and you want the freedom of contracting, go for that. If you want to work in a team on one project for years under direct supervision (because let us be honest, not everyone is a self-motivated workaholic) that is fine too.

More important is that people realize options exist, and that while your parents and grandparents might have been 9-5'ers who hated their jobs but did it due to a lack of marketable skills to attract revenue in a different way, the immense communication potential of the Internet lets you get a much larger audience for your talents to find yourself a niche with you in charge.

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