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I've been working as a freelancer for a bit more than a year now and let me offer a counter perspective. This article is a report from the absolute bottom. Par

by Udo 11y ago

I've been working as a freelancer for a bit more than a year now and let me offer a counter perspective. This article is a report from the absolute bottom. Part of the problem is the clientele: data scraping jobs are the shadiest, worst-paid jobs you can take on as a programmer. Also, offering the client to pay what they think is fair is a monumentally bad idea. The bigger problem is the perception of value. I regularly get requests for doing insane amounts of work (usually it involves cloning a multi-million dollar site or app) for less than I charge for a single day. There are "idea people" out there, who think the goal to success is paying someone 300 bucks to implement a clone of the Android app store. It's a real example by the way. I mainly get my work through the Who Is Hiring thread on HN, and although the overall client quality has been high, it's unavoidable that over half of all requests are absolute bogus. I suspect I'm not the only one having this experience. Now, these inquiries can be effortlessly ignored (I usually do answer them back with or without a short statement why I'm not taking the job) - however, if you're just scraping by, these "gigs" can totally demoralize you. To an average person, programming is not a valuable thing, and they do not view it as skilled labour. This has been the case for as long as I can remember. After high school, twenty years ago, a friend and I got into freelancing. A lot of inquiries were pretty much the same as they are now. My friend used to say we should rebrand ourselves as the Web Sherpas, named after the local people who often get hired for grating or dangerous work on behalf of tourists yet receive little compensation for it. To the freelancer just starting out I say: don't get suckered into these kinds of debates, be friendly but firm in rejecting malicious "job offers". Holding out until the right client comes along can be tough, and you're going to need a financial buffer to do this. But it's definitely the only way to go. People taking $15/hour data scraping jobs are part of the problem because they help distort the value perception of our profession (plus they help making the internet a worse place). Don't be that person.

WhitneyLand 11y ago
It looks like most of the jobs on HN are full time gigs. Are you pinging them to ask about freelance work?
- mrfusion 11y ago
  I was going to ask the same thing. It seems kind of spammy to me.
- mkagenius 11y ago
  freelance can be a full time job. I am guessing all the "remote" tagged jobs posted here can be considered.
- Udo 11y ago
  I mistyped, too late to edit it now: I meant to say the "Freelancer" thread. I don't have to contact anyone myself. In fact, I never had much success getting business from people who didn't contact me first.
robotkilla 11y ago
I've been a freelancer for almost 4 years and I have yet to make money via any sort of website. The clientele's expectations are borderline delusional for the price they want to pay. I get all of my contracts through recommendations from past clients and colleagues and can charge from $60 to $90 per hour (the most I charged was $250 per hour for a job I didn't want to do and didn't expect the client to accept).
- zippergz 11y ago
  I don't know where you're located, but $60/hr seems insanely low. Annualized as a full time job that's $125k/yr. not terrible, but quite a bit less than what a good developer can make as base salary at a tech company. But that tech company job comes with benefits, paid vacation, stability, and possibly equity and bonuses. Plus the freelance gigs are rarely actually full time (even if you have enough clients on a steady basis, you need some time to manage the business itself). I can't imagine going freelance if $60/hr was what I was able to bill...
  - jedrek 11y ago
    ...in a handful of markets.
  - sqldba 11y ago
    I absolutely agree. For freelance/contract work the price should be about double expected base salary. First of all because agencies get away with charging that much so you're just undercutting yourself needlessly unless you join in. But secondly because there are big costs; liability insurance and software licensing being some of them.
    - mgkimsal 11y ago
      "First of all because agencies get away with charging that much" Perhaps they deliver a different sort of value than an individual freelancer? Having a larger staff, having multiple people with different expertise, separate billing/financial folks, admin folks, etc. They provide a different set of services and customer experience - some people want/need that, some don't, but just because agency ABC is charing $200/hr doesn't mean every else can "get away with that" as well. Just being able to have 4 people work simultaneously on a project may be worth the increased pricing for some clients. Liability insurance isn't that big a cost, and unless you're focused on some really niche industry, "software licensing" probably isn't that big a deal for an individual freelancer. I'd be surprised if even with multiple systems, those combined costs are more than a couple thousand per year (much less for most people I know). Health insurance is going to be a far bigger expense than almost everything else put together for most folks.
user_0001 11y ago
>To an average person, programming is not a valuable thing +1 And any changes you are asked to make are not "easy" nor "quick" nor could they "do it in an hour if I knew how" I like to give the example that if you were having a house built, when they were putting the final touches to it, painting the walls, screwing lightbulbs etc. It may delay the house being ready, it may cost a bit more if you decide you want to move the house by 1 metre to the left, change the load bearing walls. Yet they think similar changes to a project should take no time nor cost a thing. And the best of all "just build something so I can see it then I will know what I want" but I won't pay you for that. >To the freelancer just starting out I say: don't get suckered into these kinds of debates, be friendly but firm in rejecting malicious "job offers". Holding out until the right client comes along can be tough Can also be impossible if you have bills to pay, a family to support, are just starting out. I've been there (move to the tropics with a young family during the economic down turn, the few contacts I had who had promised work before I left were unable to deliver when I arrived (took the best part of two years wandering around the world to get to the destination). But good clients are out there. I still do the odd bit of work for a couple of clients I got in the early days (<$15 ph data scraping jobs lol). Financially these days isn't worth doing, but they paid on time, offered to pay for time to discuss changes, offered pay for changes, so like to help them out with the odd bits of work they have as they have had many problems with freelance devs (just like I had with other clients)
- caseysoftware 11y ago
  All of that is why I wrote this: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/so-you-want-to-build-an-app http://caseysoftware.com/blog/so-you-want-to-build-an-app

by Udo 11y ago

WhitneyLand 11y ago

It looks like most of the jobs on HN are full time gigs. Are you pinging them to ask about freelance work?

mrfusion 11y ago
I was going to ask the same thing. It seems kind of spammy to me.
mkagenius 11y ago
freelance can be a full time job. I am guessing all the "remote" tagged jobs posted here can be considered.
Udo 11y ago
I mistyped, too late to edit it now: I meant to say the "Freelancer" thread. I don't have to contact anyone myself. In fact, I never had much success getting business from people who didn't contact me first.

robotkilla 11y ago

I've been a freelancer for almost 4 years and I have yet to make money via any sort of website. The clientele's expectations are borderline delusional for the price they want to pay. I get all of my contracts through recommendations from past clients and colleagues and can charge from $60 to $90 per hour (the most I charged was $250 per hour for a job I didn't want to do and didn't expect the client to accept).

zippergz 11y ago
I don't know where you're located, but $60/hr seems insanely low. Annualized as a full time job that's $125k/yr. not terrible, but quite a bit less than what a good developer can make as base salary at a tech company. But that tech company job comes with benefits, paid vacation, stability, and possibly equity and bonuses. Plus the freelance gigs are rarely actually full time (even if you have enough clients on a steady basis, you need some time to manage the business itself). I can't imagine going freelance if $60/hr was what I was able to bill...
- jedrek 11y ago
  ...in a handful of markets.
- sqldba 11y ago
  I absolutely agree. For freelance/contract work the price should be about double expected base salary. First of all because agencies get away with charging that much so you're just undercutting yourself needlessly unless you join in. But secondly because there are big costs; liability insurance and software licensing being some of them.
  - mgkimsal 11y ago
    "First of all because agencies get away with charging that much" Perhaps they deliver a different sort of value than an individual freelancer? Having a larger staff, having multiple people with different expertise, separate billing/financial folks, admin folks, etc. They provide a different set of services and customer experience - some people want/need that, some don't, but just because agency ABC is charing $200/hr doesn't mean every else can "get away with that" as well. Just being able to have 4 people work simultaneously on a project may be worth the increased pricing for some clients. Liability insurance isn't that big a cost, and unless you're focused on some really niche industry, "software licensing" probably isn't that big a deal for an individual freelancer. I'd be surprised if even with multiple systems, those combined costs are more than a couple thousand per year (much less for most people I know). Health insurance is going to be a far bigger expense than almost everything else put together for most folks.

user_0001 11y ago

>To an average person, programming is not a valuable thing +1 And any changes you are asked to make are not "easy" nor "quick" nor could they "do it in an hour if I knew how" I like to give the example that if you were having a house built, when they were putting the final touches to it, painting the walls, screwing lightbulbs etc. It may delay the house being ready, it may cost a bit more if you decide you want to move the house by 1 metre to the left, change the load bearing walls. Yet they think similar changes to a project should take no time nor cost a thing. And the best of all "just build something so I can see it then I will know what I want" but I won't pay you for that. >To the freelancer just starting out I say: don't get suckered into these kinds of debates, be friendly but firm in rejecting malicious "job offers". Holding out until the right client comes along can be tough Can also be impossible if you have bills to pay, a family to support, are just starting out. I've been there (move to the tropics with a young family during the economic down turn, the few contacts I had who had promised work before I left were unable to deliver when I arrived (took the best part of two years wandering around the world to get to the destination). But good clients are out there. I still do the odd bit of work for a couple of clients I got in the early days (<$15 ph data scraping jobs lol). Financially these days isn't worth doing, but they paid on time, offered to pay for time to discuss changes, offered pay for changes, so like to help them out with the odd bits of work they have as they have had many problems with freelance devs (just like I had with other clients)

caseysoftware 11y ago
All of that is why I wrote this: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/so-you-want-to-build-an-app http://caseysoftware.com/blog/so-you-want-to-build-an-app