I live Norway, mostly work for Norwegian clients. My rate is $120 and I bill around 800-1000 hours annually. I spend around 200 hours annually for sales and net

I live Norway, mostly work for Norwegian clients. My rate is $120 and I bill around 800-1000 hours annually. I spend around 200 hours annually for sales and networking and the rest is research, where I do crazy thing like deploying Microsoft SQL Server on a iSCSI target from a FreeBSD ZFS SSD SAN. It is hard to sell that though. My expertise is infrastructure, Linux, Java and SQL. But I usually build web applications for my clients. Most of my sales has happened through networking where friends or earlier colleagues has recommended me. It's much harder to go to "regular" companies because I'm just a guy who is not employed. Freelancers are almost non-existent here in Norway and those who are freelancers are usually considered to be unable to get a real job. I love the freedom, the daily variation where I either talk to clients, do accounting or coding. I also love that if the weather is nice outside I can shut off my computer and go out and enjoy the sun. Another plus is that I usually get to choose what technology stack I will be working with. Which really makes me happy as I can usually focus on solving problems for the client and not spending time looking for documentation that is either badly written or not existing at all. When I solve something quickly, my clients also get extra happy! What I do miss is more social interaction with other people. I spend a lot of alone, solving technical challenges alone and so on. I would love to have some one to do technical discussions with more often.