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I've been a freelance / solowhatever developer for a long time but instead of being an employee you still have a boss. You usually have multiple bosses. Instea
by nickjj 5y ago
I've been a freelance / solowhatever developer for a long time but instead of being an employee you still have a boss. You usually have multiple bosses.
Instead of working 40 hours a week as a W2 employee you work as many hours as you want as a 1099 contractor. That could be 20 hours a week or 80 hours a week, it's your call.
But if you want to have semi-dependable income typically you'll be working pretty long term on-going contracts. That's cases where you might be working 10 hours a week for company A and 15 hours a week for company B for 6+ months or even years. If you drop off the face of the Earth for a month without warning chances are you're going to leave your clients wondering what's going on. That's an illusion of freedom because you still need to let them know you won't be available as often as usual and you'll likely adjust your desired time off to ensure you can fulfil your contract requirements.
There's other forms of freedom tho, like being able to say no which is really nice to be able to do. If some type of contract doesn't fit what you want to do you can say no and find work on something else.
- ptr2voidStar 5y agoFreelance developer != solopreneur
- nickjj 5y ago> Freelance developer != solopreneur That's also saying you're not a solopreneur if you do contract / freelance work but the OP mentioned he has done and potentially continues to do long-term contract work. Personally I write blog posts, make videos on YouTube, manage a newsletter, create and sell courses along with running a podcast and doing contract work. I see myself as having tens of thousands of bosses. Sure I can mostly work when I want but I couldn't go off the grid for 2 months without warning. The moment you stop outputting content people will find someone else to get it from and platforms like Google and YouTube heavily favor constant posting to rank well in search results. Also, if you're selling courses that comes with doing continuous support and updates. You have freedom in the sense you can control what you work on, but you're still in a position of having non-optional obligations to pay the bills.