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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 busin

• 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.
  • tixocloud 5y ago
    I’m actually toying with the idea because I’m finding more projects/demand that I know technical folks who can deliver. Would you like to connect?
    • thestepafter 5y ago
      I’m interested in something like this if you would like to connect.
      • iancmceachern 5y ago
        Me too
      • jpindar 5y ago
        Me too.
      • eashman 5y ago
        Add me too. Let me know if you go ahead with it in the US.
  • varjag 5y ago
    The going rate is at least double that.
    • claytonjy 5y ago
      I picked 15% thinking about the old default for entertainment agents. I know 30% is normal for external recruiting fees, why does a "dev agent" get the same? Because they can? If the gigs found are high paying enough I don't think 30% is unreasonable.
  • wastholm 5y ago
    I work at a place where about 500 independent consultants/contractors have outsourced branding, training (to a degree), office admin, and, above all, sales to a shared organization.[1] Those who want can become "partners" by buying shares (I have). Importantly, this setup also provides a community because solo consulting can otherwise get lonely at times. But essentially we're all still entirely "our own" and free to choose how much we want to work, whether we want to pursue side projects, etc. We pay 17%. So not quite the 15% you mentioned, but also far from the 30% others talked about. We're only in Sweden for now, so maybe this isn't immediately accessible to you. But it shows that it can be done. [1] https://www.kvadrat.se/ https://www.kvadrat.se/
    • dvgroup 5y ago
      I vouch for this I'm also part of the Kvadrat community and I'm my own boss. It's fantastic.
    • claytonjy 5y ago
      The geography does limit me (US), but wow this sounds awesome, exactly what I want. I have talked to consulting/contracting shops here in the US before, which might look superficially similar, but there you are generally a direct employee of the company who then contracts you out to their clients. I have generally had a poor perception of such places, though I'm sure some are fine. Kvadrat sounds much better!
    • netjiro 5y ago
      These umbrella sales / networking / socialising organisations are fun. I've tried a few. But 15-20% is highly inefficient. My overhead for cold-finding new clients is <5% (against those projects), and I'm not a good salesman: I'm overly direct, opinionated, and have very low tolerance for nonsense. My overhead for recurring clients and referrals is <1% (against those projects), which is also the majority of my business. Admin, billing, accounting, etc is also <1%, so it's a non issue. These sales organisations have _much_ better salesmen than me, yet they need >3x the cost to do the job, and they produce worse results? My guess is: if you actually tried to spend one day per week (20%) for sales and networking you will get a better result. But for many (including me) it is uninteresting / uncomfortable / annoying / etc and therefore many of us overestimate the difficulty of sales. There is also very likely a notable difference in interest alignment between the sales partners/employees and you. They will make more money/h the faster they sell you and therefore have greatly reduced monetary interest in working significantly more for a higher quote or a more specialised project. They also do not have the deep domain knowledge you do in your areas, and you are much better at judging how well you will enjoy working with a prospective organisation and how interesting you will find any given project. My experience: Yes they can sell you. They will get lower quotes than you will get yourself. They will find worse projects than you will find on your own. And they cost too much. Still, I had fun with all the groups I've tried, and I still recommend them as a social luxury. Fun, overpriced, business friends.
• 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.