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I am in my 11th year as a fulltime freelancer. It is nice ride, interestingly I haven't had problem with things all wannabe freelancers expecting: all of my inv

by dejv 9y ago

I am in my 11th year as a fulltime freelancer. It is nice ride, interestingly I haven't had problem with things all wannabe freelancers expecting: all of my invoices get paid (with 99,9% of them on time), I was always able to cover my monthly costs with money coming from last month billing and I always found good clients. During last decade I was able to do all the stereotypical things people imagine to do when they don't have to go to the office: waking late, spending year wasting time in SE Asia, traveling around the world, working from coffee shops, coworking places and even in my bed, I also started a startup (or five), had numerous side projects and whatnot. So far so good, that digital nomad-remote freelancing thingy actually exists and it is actually quite easy to get into this lifestyle. The dark side of freelancing is that you usually get into quite boring and not that interesting kind of work: writing CRUD apps, maintaining old software and basically doing stuff that don't require a tons of deep expertise and continuous effort of highly skilled team of people. For some people it doesn't matter, but if you ever want to work on some high tech stuff be worry, it is very hard to get back into game after years of freelancing, you might be destined to sling some basic apps for the rest of your life (which is actually what majority of devs do in their jobs anyway).

nightski 9y ago
I've had a very similar experience. While I do agree that you end up with a lot of boring work, it really isn't tough to keep skills sharp either. It's probably worth setting time a specific amount of time for this very purpose. Establishing a 20% time concept is much easier when you are in control of your own hours. I've found that as a freelancer while I haven't been working on cutting edge tech as much my social, project management, and business skills have all improved by leaps and bounds. This may be even more important than being familiar with the cutting edge js frameworks or slinging around some deep neural network models.
- dejv 9y ago
  Well it depends on what you consider being interesting: finding work that let you use latest javascript framework or architecting micro services? Easy. Finding work that will let you spend years and years perfecting the way how to make query engine of specialised embedded database run faster? (my old job) Less likely. It depends on your ambitions, lot of people would be happy to work on regular apps for rest of their professional life, some not. People just have to think about it as coming back into that "hardcore" sector is not easy after years of writing crud apps.

by dejv 9y ago

nightski 9y ago

I've had a very similar experience. While I do agree that you end up with a lot of boring work, it really isn't tough to keep skills sharp either. It's probably worth setting time a specific amount of time for this very purpose. Establishing a 20% time concept is much easier when you are in control of your own hours. I've found that as a freelancer while I haven't been working on cutting edge tech as much my social, project management, and business skills have all improved by leaps and bounds. This may be even more important than being familiar with the cutting edge js frameworks or slinging around some deep neural network models.

dejv 9y ago
Well it depends on what you consider being interesting: finding work that let you use latest javascript framework or architecting micro services? Easy. Finding work that will let you spend years and years perfecting the way how to make query engine of specialised embedded database run faster? (my old job) Less likely. It depends on your ambitions, lot of people would be happy to work on regular apps for rest of their professional life, some not. People just have to think about it as coming back into that "hardcore" sector is not easy after years of writing crud apps.