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> And you might find it harder when trying to maintain a steady income stream. This can't really be overstated enough. Contracting is one of those things that

> And you might find it harder when trying to maintain a steady income stream. This can't really be overstated enough. Contracting is one of those things that sounds super easy when you first jump and you already have a client lined up. But maintaining a steady stream of work is often far more difficult than people expect. Getting consulting clients is a completely different skillset than doing consulting work. If you're not the type of person who enjoys networking, cold outreach, selling yourself, and chasing deals then the consulting life probably won't be as fun as it may sound on the internet.

jasonkester 5y ago
You can get around this by simply interviewing for a regular dev gig, then telling them you’d prefer to come on board on a contract. That’s how I’ve negotiated my last several gigs, and it nicely sidesteps the business development issue.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  That’s a different thing though? That’s contracting. There are even such contracts day rates on job sites so no need to bait/switch.
- DnDGrognard 5y ago
  But from a UK perspective the premium in the USA for contracting like this is rather low - and you pay both sides of the SS tax.
tjader 5y ago
I wonder if something like an agent could help with that. In many freelance-heavy professions, like music and acting, having an agent handle this part of business seems to be the default. Is there something similar in tech?
- claytonjy 5y ago
  I had a similar thought recently; I'd gladly pay 15% to someone that can consistently find me interesting work that pays well.
  - jpindar 5y ago
    I'd pay more than that to anyone who can find me any remote work.
    - claytonjy 5y ago
      I see from your profile you work in hardware/firmware; I'm guessing the remote wave hasn't disrupted those roles the way it has for software folks?
      - jpindar 5y ago
        Yeah, I think a lot of engineering managers still think it's impractical. It worked out well for me on a few projects, but I got them from people I had previously worked with in person. However, I'd be fine with any kind of work, it doesn't have to be firmware.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
        It has made a dent, but it's slow going. In my previous position we built a lot of wearable devices so having a dev system at home was no problem since they're portable by definition. Likewise at my current position, we have larger, but still easily movable development/debug systems since the product I'm working on fits on a desktop. Takes up more room with everything splayed out on a back plate, but still fits on a tabletop. But going back two jobs where the machines we built were large, very complex and floorstanding, it would be much more difficult. It's also much easier when the hardware is stable. When you're still in the "bring up" phase, there's a lot of shipping hardware back and forth, or occasional office days together if feasible, especially if you need a $70,000 tool that the company doesn't want you taking home. As the pandemic has progressed, embedded development has adapted. The biggest reason it's likely to reverse is simply that a lot of companies prefer to have their people onsite.
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  There are a number of contractor agencies where they basically manage your relationship with a number of businesses/specific projects, and you get paid through them or some affiliate. The skim is usually more like 30-50% though.
  - tjader 5y ago
    I think it's a bit different than what I meant. In this agency case, the freelancer works for the agency, in the "agent model" the agent works for the freelancer.
- imilk 5y ago
  And when you start relying on them for all of your business, you've basically reverse engineered being a regular employee at a creative agency.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    Maybe not. The agent should get a percentage of your income and should be trying to get you the best income possible (well a mix of bess possible / low vacancy rate) But the employee gets let’s say $150k/y and f you are hired out for $5k a day you still get your same salary regardless.
  - tjader 5y ago
    When you are a regular employee at an agency you don't have much of a choice on what jobs to take. With an agent you are much more free in that regard.
    - what_is_orcas 5y ago
      Being a contractor for an agency is the worst of both worlds: no choice on what to work on that you'd get as a freelance contractor and no career growth wherever you're placed. I did it for a year and it was miserable. It was great for the first few months, but then I started getting put on more and more menial tasks just to fill out my contract duration and I realized that there was no real point in understanding the systems I was working on in much depth beyond what it took to execute my task. The other contractors who'd been at it for longer wrote some of the worst code I've seen, even though they were obviously very talented; they just didn't see the point of writing beautiful code if they're not going to be around in a few months to maintain it.
- burntoutfire 5y ago
  It's called recruiting, but it doesn't work like you described. In freelance tech recruiting, the jobs are the scarce resources, not the candidates. Freelance recruiters focus their effort on obtaining new positions for them to fill in, and only then they look for suitable candidates. You can see that in how they angle to find out about other companies that you're interviewing in - they do that, because they very much need it as another lead. In other words, nobody would care about becoming your agent, because you're fungible. That's why it's not done in our industry. I suspect actors are much less fungible (you can't cast a 20 years old white cheery woman to play 50 years old broody black male who can ride on horses and do a british accent), hence market dynamics are different there.
  - urthor 5y ago
    Actors are very fungible. The commodity in cinema is entirely actors whose name the audience knows and remember. You can definitely staff a film entirely with superlative talent from the indie world.
  - fecak 5y ago
    I am a former recruiter and wrote an article about this years ago. One of the main issues with third-party recruiting and the recruiter/candidate relationship is that their interests aren't aligned. In perm hire recruiting, the recruiter is typically paid a percentage of the candidate's starting salary. That means the recruiter and candidate are aligned in negotiation - if the recruiter can negotiate a higher salary, both the recruiter and the candidate are beneficiaries. Therefore, the more the candidate makes, the more the recruiter makes. Win/win. For contracting roles, a recruiter is a middleman and trying to maximize their margin, defined as the difference between bill rate (what the client pays the recruiter) and pay rate (what the recruiter pays the candidate). There are only a few ways the recruiter can maximize margin. The most obvious is to negotiate the bill rate UP and/or the pay rate DOWN. A less obvious way is to simply try to make sure the candidate with the lowest pay rate gets the job. So if I have two candidates and one is asking for 100/hr and the other is asking 120/hr, if I can get the 100/hr candidate into the job, that means an extra 40K in the recruiter's pocket for a year (based on 2000 hour work year). I'm admittedly oversimplifying a lot of things here, but the typical recruiting model is not aligned with candidates for contract hiring.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  There are recruiters who specialize in filling contract S/W development positions.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
> Getting consulting clients is a completely different skillset than doing consulting work. If you're not the type of person who enjoys networking, cold outreach, selling yourself, and chasing deals then the consulting life probably won't be as fun as it may sound on the internet. It's really not this dramatic. People need software developers. All you really need to do is let enough people - who can hire you - know who you are and what you do. I do this entirely online. I will say it's way easier when you specialize in a particular industry however.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > All you really need to do is let enough people - who can hire you - know who you are and what you do. Right, that's what I said: If you're not the type of person who enjoys networking, putting yourself out there, and setting up contracts with clients then it's going to be a pain to do this. > I will say it's way easier when you specialize in a particular industry however. I looked at your profile and it appears you are very specialized in a smaller (fewer overall specialists) market. Big fish in a small pond makes consulting easy. The average developer doing generalized work isn't going to have the same experience, though.
  - LAC-Tech 5y ago
    > Right, that's what I said: If you're not the type of person who enjoys networking, putting yourself out there, and setting up contracts with clients then it's going to be a pain to do this. LOL fair point. I guess I never really thought of what I was doing as networking. I don't exactly think of myself as a very extroverted, salesy kind of person. I just went about it from first principles - problem 1 was no one knows I exist, solution was let people know I exist. > I looked at your profile and it appears you are very specialized in a smaller (fewer overall specialists) market. Big fish in a small pond makes consulting easy. The average developer doing generalized work isn't going to have the same experience, though. While there is some stuff in my industry that's different (low connectivity and older users) - really the day to day work is not that much different than writing software for any other. I'm sure most people could look at their past employment history and find themselves a market.
parksy 5y ago
I felt the pain of losing a steady income stream before but for a different reason. I have no problem networking per-se but I did once rather blithely sign a really onerous contract with a massive soul-less organisation that buried me unpaid for about 9 months essentially reworking their entire CRM. Renegotiation was impossible, they'd just point at their massive legal department and I'd squeak and get back to work. When it was all done and dusted, every ounce of my energy had been poured into this one job for so long, the payment was like a middle finger and barely filled the hole of bad debt that had grown to cover basic living expenses, and it took a couple more months to reconnect with old clients and drum up some new work as I'd essentially fallen off the face of the planet in their eyes. It also took months to recover emotionally and start to feel some joy in life again. It was a painful, very real education, whereas as an employee you're shielded to an extent from the direct effects of this type of thing since your employer is still legally bound to pay you whether they make good or bad decisions client-wise. The risks in contracting and self employment are often subtle and not realised for many months until the trap is seen, and I doubt everyone making the transition is aware of all the tricks (net 30 EOM) etc that seem innocuous at first glance but in combination really screw contractors down to terms much less comfortable than sitting in a cubicle 8hrs/day dealing with latent passive aggression from middle management. In the current system at least we just have to weigh up which option suits us better. I was certainly unprepared, but I survived and am stronger / more experienced now with only slight residues of latent psychological damage (mostly self-inflicted). tl;dr I agree. It's not all roses. Very simple mistakes based on subtle information can have very real, very painful consequences long term and a lot of this knowledge is only gained through hard-won experience. With more inexperienced contractors entering the market it seems like a field day for unscrupulous types looking to lock in some cheap labour without the annoying hassle of traditional employment laws but that's just my hot take. I'd encourage people to think very carefully before making any transition one way or the other that's for sure.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  I used to stop working once they were 15 days late. In general the people causing payment problems were not the ones commissioning the project. The project owner would kick up a stink and a cheque would arrive the next day.

jasonkester 5y ago

You can get around this by simply interviewing for a regular dev gig, then telling them you’d prefer to come on board on a contract. That’s how I’ve negotiated my last several gigs, and it nicely sidesteps the business development issue.

quickthrower2 5y ago
That’s a different thing though? That’s contracting. There are even such contracts day rates on job sites so no need to bait/switch.
DnDGrognard 5y ago
But from a UK perspective the premium in the USA for contracting like this is rather low - and you pay both sides of the SS tax.

tjader 5y ago

I wonder if something like an agent could help with that. In many freelance-heavy professions, like music and acting, having an agent handle this part of business seems to be the default. Is there something similar in tech?

claytonjy 5y ago
I had a similar thought recently; I'd gladly pay 15% to someone that can consistently find me interesting work that pays well.
- jpindar 5y ago
  I'd pay more than that to anyone who can find me any remote work.
  - claytonjy 5y ago
    I see from your profile you work in hardware/firmware; I'm guessing the remote wave hasn't disrupted those roles the way it has for software folks?
    - jpindar 5y ago
      Yeah, I think a lot of engineering managers still think it's impractical. It worked out well for me on a few projects, but I got them from people I had previously worked with in person. However, I'd be fine with any kind of work, it doesn't have to be firmware.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
      It has made a dent, but it's slow going. In my previous position we built a lot of wearable devices so having a dev system at home was no problem since they're portable by definition. Likewise at my current position, we have larger, but still easily movable development/debug systems since the product I'm working on fits on a desktop. Takes up more room with everything splayed out on a back plate, but still fits on a tabletop. But going back two jobs where the machines we built were large, very complex and floorstanding, it would be much more difficult. It's also much easier when the hardware is stable. When you're still in the "bring up" phase, there's a lot of shipping hardware back and forth, or occasional office days together if feasible, especially if you need a $70,000 tool that the company doesn't want you taking home. As the pandemic has progressed, embedded development has adapted. The biggest reason it's likely to reverse is simply that a lot of companies prefer to have their people onsite.
geerlingguy 5y ago
There are a number of contractor agencies where they basically manage your relationship with a number of businesses/specific projects, and you get paid through them or some affiliate. The skim is usually more like 30-50% though.
- tjader 5y ago
  I think it's a bit different than what I meant. In this agency case, the freelancer works for the agency, in the "agent model" the agent works for the freelancer.
imilk 5y ago
And when you start relying on them for all of your business, you've basically reverse engineered being a regular employee at a creative agency.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  Maybe not. The agent should get a percentage of your income and should be trying to get you the best income possible (well a mix of bess possible / low vacancy rate) But the employee gets let’s say $150k/y and f you are hired out for $5k a day you still get your same salary regardless.
- tjader 5y ago
  When you are a regular employee at an agency you don't have much of a choice on what jobs to take. With an agent you are much more free in that regard.
  - what_is_orcas 5y ago
    Being a contractor for an agency is the worst of both worlds: no choice on what to work on that you'd get as a freelance contractor and no career growth wherever you're placed. I did it for a year and it was miserable. It was great for the first few months, but then I started getting put on more and more menial tasks just to fill out my contract duration and I realized that there was no real point in understanding the systems I was working on in much depth beyond what it took to execute my task. The other contractors who'd been at it for longer wrote some of the worst code I've seen, even though they were obviously very talented; they just didn't see the point of writing beautiful code if they're not going to be around in a few months to maintain it.
burntoutfire 5y ago
It's called recruiting, but it doesn't work like you described. In freelance tech recruiting, the jobs are the scarce resources, not the candidates. Freelance recruiters focus their effort on obtaining new positions for them to fill in, and only then they look for suitable candidates. You can see that in how they angle to find out about other companies that you're interviewing in - they do that, because they very much need it as another lead. In other words, nobody would care about becoming your agent, because you're fungible. That's why it's not done in our industry. I suspect actors are much less fungible (you can't cast a 20 years old white cheery woman to play 50 years old broody black male who can ride on horses and do a british accent), hence market dynamics are different there.
- urthor 5y ago
  Actors are very fungible. The commodity in cinema is entirely actors whose name the audience knows and remember. You can definitely staff a film entirely with superlative talent from the indie world.
- fecak 5y ago
  I am a former recruiter and wrote an article about this years ago. One of the main issues with third-party recruiting and the recruiter/candidate relationship is that their interests aren't aligned. In perm hire recruiting, the recruiter is typically paid a percentage of the candidate's starting salary. That means the recruiter and candidate are aligned in negotiation - if the recruiter can negotiate a higher salary, both the recruiter and the candidate are beneficiaries. Therefore, the more the candidate makes, the more the recruiter makes. Win/win. For contracting roles, a recruiter is a middleman and trying to maximize their margin, defined as the difference between bill rate (what the client pays the recruiter) and pay rate (what the recruiter pays the candidate). There are only a few ways the recruiter can maximize margin. The most obvious is to negotiate the bill rate UP and/or the pay rate DOWN. A less obvious way is to simply try to make sure the candidate with the lowest pay rate gets the job. So if I have two candidates and one is asking for 100/hr and the other is asking 120/hr, if I can get the 100/hr candidate into the job, that means an extra 40K in the recruiter's pocket for a year (based on 2000 hour work year). I'm admittedly oversimplifying a lot of things here, but the typical recruiting model is not aligned with candidates for contract hiring.
HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
There are recruiters who specialize in filling contract S/W development positions.

LAC-Tech 5y ago

> Getting consulting clients is a completely different skillset than doing consulting work. If you're not the type of person who enjoys networking, cold outreach, selling yourself, and chasing deals then the consulting life probably won't be as fun as it may sound on the internet. It's really not this dramatic. People need software developers. All you really need to do is let enough people - who can hire you - know who you are and what you do. I do this entirely online. I will say it's way easier when you specialize in a particular industry however.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> All you really need to do is let enough people - who can hire you - know who you are and what you do. Right, that's what I said: If you're not the type of person who enjoys networking, putting yourself out there, and setting up contracts with clients then it's going to be a pain to do this. > I will say it's way easier when you specialize in a particular industry however. I looked at your profile and it appears you are very specialized in a smaller (fewer overall specialists) market. Big fish in a small pond makes consulting easy. The average developer doing generalized work isn't going to have the same experience, though.
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  > Right, that's what I said: If you're not the type of person who enjoys networking, putting yourself out there, and setting up contracts with clients then it's going to be a pain to do this. LOL fair point. I guess I never really thought of what I was doing as networking. I don't exactly think of myself as a very extroverted, salesy kind of person. I just went about it from first principles - problem 1 was no one knows I exist, solution was let people know I exist. > I looked at your profile and it appears you are very specialized in a smaller (fewer overall specialists) market. Big fish in a small pond makes consulting easy. The average developer doing generalized work isn't going to have the same experience, though. While there is some stuff in my industry that's different (low connectivity and older users) - really the day to day work is not that much different than writing software for any other. I'm sure most people could look at their past employment history and find themselves a market.

parksy 5y ago

I felt the pain of losing a steady income stream before but for a different reason. I have no problem networking per-se but I did once rather blithely sign a really onerous contract with a massive soul-less organisation that buried me unpaid for about 9 months essentially reworking their entire CRM. Renegotiation was impossible, they'd just point at their massive legal department and I'd squeak and get back to work. When it was all done and dusted, every ounce of my energy had been poured into this one job for so long, the payment was like a middle finger and barely filled the hole of bad debt that had grown to cover basic living expenses, and it took a couple more months to reconnect with old clients and drum up some new work as I'd essentially fallen off the face of the planet in their eyes. It also took months to recover emotionally and start to feel some joy in life again. It was a painful, very real education, whereas as an employee you're shielded to an extent from the direct effects of this type of thing since your employer is still legally bound to pay you whether they make good or bad decisions client-wise. The risks in contracting and self employment are often subtle and not realised for many months until the trap is seen, and I doubt everyone making the transition is aware of all the tricks (net 30 EOM) etc that seem innocuous at first glance but in combination really screw contractors down to terms much less comfortable than sitting in a cubicle 8hrs/day dealing with latent passive aggression from middle management. In the current system at least we just have to weigh up which option suits us better. I was certainly unprepared, but I survived and am stronger / more experienced now with only slight residues of latent psychological damage (mostly self-inflicted). tl;dr I agree. It's not all roses. Very simple mistakes based on subtle information can have very real, very painful consequences long term and a lot of this knowledge is only gained through hard-won experience. With more inexperienced contractors entering the market it seems like a field day for unscrupulous types looking to lock in some cheap labour without the annoying hassle of traditional employment laws but that's just my hot take. I'd encourage people to think very carefully before making any transition one way or the other that's for sure.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
I used to stop working once they were 15 days late. In general the people causing payment problems were not the ones commissioning the project. The project owner would kick up a stink and a cheque would arrive the next day.