7 ms·

I think you - and a lot of other people - overstate how hard this is. It's really not much of a churn to get leads in todays market. Even for someone who keeps

I think you - and a lot of other people - overstate how hard this is. It's really not much of a churn to get leads in todays market. Even for someone who keeps working at small companies (whoops) in a tech backwater like me. Also clients are really not like bosses at all - even for me who is on the "software pro" - to use the Daedtech terminology [0]- end of the self employment spectrum. - There's no polite fiction that I'm going to stick around indefinitely - The 'interviews' are way shorter, because it's so much easier to fire me. I'm backing myself to deliver which is a show of confidence - It's just a much more honest and less un-equal conversation. I can survive without them, they can survive without me, but we have a mutually beneficial relationship. Not one based on power or desperation. [0]: https://daedtech.com/a-taxonomy-of-software-consultants/ https://daedtech.com/a-taxonomy-of-software-consultants/

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
I think there's a certain type of person who has no trouble selling themselves and therefore finds this sort of thing easier than those of us who are most decidedly not salesmen.
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  I don't think I'm that type of person. But at the same time I'm not the shiest programmer around. All I'm really doing is introducing myself.
- tixocloud 5y ago
  I wonder if there’s opportunity to build a community/collective/agency to help software developers manage the admin similar to a brokerage model.
  - creinhardt 5y ago
    Still involves a bit of selling, but isn't that basically UpWork's model?
    - urthor 5y ago
      I was extremely surprised how low Upwork's fees are. In vanilla software consulting it's not uncommon for the middleman to take 20% or a third off the top. Or even more extraordinary amounts in the more traditional places like Booz. Upwork's taking less than 10%. It's extraordinarily good value for money compared to many recruiters and other middlemen. The downside is of course there's a very good community of talented international developers on there.
      - tluyben2 5y ago
        > The downside is of course there's a very good community of talented international developers on there. There is a far larger community of horribly bad developers on there, many of them working at low rates to get high ratings. I am on both sides; hiring and getting hired and the hiring part is far more beneficial imho. What is a huge PITA as well; once someone who is rather mediocre (junior with some promise for instance), after a few good reviews they hike the price up so far that it makes no sense at all hiring them. I have used upwork (and before than Elance and others) for 20 years with 100s of people and almost always people overplay their hand and come back begging for another chance.
        KronisLV 5y ago
        I actually freelanced for a while during college, in parallel to studying CS, before i found local part time employment as a developer. Admittedly, there's a large amount of project postings that have unclear or unrealistic requirements (feature or estimate wise), almost always you can expect either some outdated or obscure stack in pre-existing codebases/platforms, typically some badly developed WordPress site that you're supposed to fix or use for things that WordPress isn't really suited for (advanced CRUD), you'll almost never find projects with documentation, any sort of a quality control/code review, or even separate test environments. There are good projects there every now and then too, but be prepared to compete in a race to the bottom price wise, knowing that many of those potential clients shall pick the cheaper developers, which sometimes will result in similar neglect of the codebases, because if you accept multiple projects you only have so much time for each (and the clients won't necessarily know any better). Sometimes the developers are simply in a lower CoL area, but depending on where you live, you'll also have to cope with that, some projects will just be below your living expenses. I'd probably say that in my limited experience, around 90-95% of the project postings on the site as a web dev were like that at any given time, whereas around 70-80% of the projects that i got to work on weren't satisfactory in regards to how easy or even "safe" the development process and communication was, even if i tried avoiding the red flags for the most part. I got to work for some people that were decent, however the code quality wasn't satisfactory, nor was anything surrounding the code itself. There are circumstances in which freelancing through them can work, you can also be even more selective with the projects that you undertake, but unless you have a wide variety of skills, you might find yourself missing out on anything reminiscent of a stable income. The best idea would be to somehow manage to find a few good clients and build a longer term business relationship with them, which is probably one of the better outcomes for everyone.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
    Yeah, it’s called regular employment.
  - lambertsimnel 5y ago
    Could worker cooperatives serve that purpose? I suppose there's a trade-off between security in numbers and individual freedom, but maybe working conditions could be better (despite the constraints of a permanent job) if employees shared equally in the business without any non-employees holding voting shares.
  - jdsleppy 5y ago
    Yes, there are many. https://mission.dev/ https://mission.dev/ is one I've spoken with but haven't had an opening to work with (I think this is the one, they were called GSquad before). When you get past the marketing site and hear from the people, it sounds more like a self-organizing software co-op.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Surprisingly (at least for me) I find that freelancing has made it much easier to solicit business than the hiring process as an employee. When freelancing neither side has the expectation that this is forever. We both understand we have our own businesses but will benefit from this particular time-limited engagement. In contrast, in employment there's this whole charade where the company pitches it as a brilliant opportunity and you're supposed to play the game and pretend to care about their values, how exciting the work is or be enthused by their mission to change the world when ultimately the only thing that should matter to you is the paycheck.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  Yes there is, but sales is a skill that can be taught and learned.
ttymck 5y ago
At first blush, I might guess "a tech backwater" would be easier to find leads. A tech hub will have so much noise and competition for those leads, even if the leads are more plentiful.
- sam0x17 5y ago
  I do miss the days when every teenager who "knows computers" was thought to be more technically competent than adults with 10 years of industry experience and every small business and sole proprietor in existence was looking for a 100% custom website design and was willing to pay an 8th grader rather than a web design firm. Such were the early 00s / my teen years.
  - winternett 5y ago
    As someone who has been on the web site/app dev entrepreneur grind for quite some time now getting leads is a tougher game now more than ever. Social media is fraught with scammers and people with risky black-hat inspired SEO goals that I'm not willing to be a party to at all. I get lots of emails for jobs and generate estimates at least twice a month only to find out that the person is a scammer posing as a customer. I also get tons of spam that I have to sift through to make sure no customers are missed. It's far easier to go door to door at real business establishments than to get cold leads over the net now. I can't really complain though, it's still much better than working for warehouse development shops... Far better work-life balance, and I'm in better control of project quality, client management, and the types of projects I agree to complete.
    - sam0x17 5y ago
      Frameworks and platforms like wordpress have really killed the cottage industry of web design imo
softwaredoug 5y ago
I was a consultant for 8 years and burned out, in part because of the context switching between sales and delivery. It can be exhausting. More specifically not the sales per se but the extensive amount of in depth relationship work at very sophisticated clients. Or the cheap clients that always want something for nothing. You can have a lot of inbound, but how many of those clients are qualified? Then there’s the complicated contract negotiation process, which is its own huge headache with months of legal negotiation extending well beyond the desired project start time. Often from big companies that role your eyes at you when you say you want to negotiate. Then when it’s all said and done, chasing payment. They promise they’ll pay in 30, 45, 60 whatever days, but there’s always an excuse for not getting paid. Often made up ones that actually violate your contract with them. But what are you going to do, sue? You can stop work, and we did, but then you’re maybe burning bridges and disrupting the tech colleagues you work with day in, day out… Relationship work is important in any work. And you’re _always_ selling and communicating value. But when it becomes all about administriva like contracts or being paid, it’s no fun. I don’t think it’s a valuable use of smart peoples time. Finally, there’s a certain type of company that hires lots of consultants. And they often aren’t the ones you would choose to work with. They hire consultants because they have bigger organizational dysfunction but lack awareness to tackle that dysfunction.
- lobocinza 5y ago
  The thing that I hate the most is filling taxes.
  - desireco42 5y ago
    You are missing out greatly here, as this is where the benefit of being independent is. You get tax breaks on pretty much everything you do.
    - massysett 5y ago
      This is no panacea, as it also means you have no employer paying Social Security taxes on your behalf, not to mention not getting any employer-provided benefits either.
JamesBarney 5y ago
> - The 'interviews' are way shorter, because it's so much easier to fire me. I'm backing myself to deliver which is a show of confidence I've never found this to be the case. Interviewing for an employee position was usually < 4 hours. But I have to spend way more time than that meeting with clients and putting together proposals before winning a contract.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

I think there's a certain type of person who has no trouble selling themselves and therefore finds this sort of thing easier than those of us who are most decidedly not salesmen.

LAC-Tech 5y ago
I don't think I'm that type of person. But at the same time I'm not the shiest programmer around. All I'm really doing is introducing myself.
tixocloud 5y ago
I wonder if there’s opportunity to build a community/collective/agency to help software developers manage the admin similar to a brokerage model.
- creinhardt 5y ago
  Still involves a bit of selling, but isn't that basically UpWork's model?
  - urthor 5y ago
    I was extremely surprised how low Upwork's fees are. In vanilla software consulting it's not uncommon for the middleman to take 20% or a third off the top. Or even more extraordinary amounts in the more traditional places like Booz. Upwork's taking less than 10%. It's extraordinarily good value for money compared to many recruiters and other middlemen. The downside is of course there's a very good community of talented international developers on there.
    - tluyben2 5y ago
      > The downside is of course there's a very good community of talented international developers on there. There is a far larger community of horribly bad developers on there, many of them working at low rates to get high ratings. I am on both sides; hiring and getting hired and the hiring part is far more beneficial imho. What is a huge PITA as well; once someone who is rather mediocre (junior with some promise for instance), after a few good reviews they hike the price up so far that it makes no sense at all hiring them. I have used upwork (and before than Elance and others) for 20 years with 100s of people and almost always people overplay their hand and come back begging for another chance.
      - KronisLV 5y ago
        I actually freelanced for a while during college, in parallel to studying CS, before i found local part time employment as a developer. Admittedly, there's a large amount of project postings that have unclear or unrealistic requirements (feature or estimate wise), almost always you can expect either some outdated or obscure stack in pre-existing codebases/platforms, typically some badly developed WordPress site that you're supposed to fix or use for things that WordPress isn't really suited for (advanced CRUD), you'll almost never find projects with documentation, any sort of a quality control/code review, or even separate test environments. There are good projects there every now and then too, but be prepared to compete in a race to the bottom price wise, knowing that many of those potential clients shall pick the cheaper developers, which sometimes will result in similar neglect of the codebases, because if you accept multiple projects you only have so much time for each (and the clients won't necessarily know any better). Sometimes the developers are simply in a lower CoL area, but depending on where you live, you'll also have to cope with that, some projects will just be below your living expenses. I'd probably say that in my limited experience, around 90-95% of the project postings on the site as a web dev were like that at any given time, whereas around 70-80% of the projects that i got to work on weren't satisfactory in regards to how easy or even "safe" the development process and communication was, even if i tried avoiding the red flags for the most part. I got to work for some people that were decent, however the code quality wasn't satisfactory, nor was anything surrounding the code itself. There are circumstances in which freelancing through them can work, you can also be even more selective with the projects that you undertake, but unless you have a wide variety of skills, you might find yourself missing out on anything reminiscent of a stable income. The best idea would be to somehow manage to find a few good clients and build a longer term business relationship with them, which is probably one of the better outcomes for everyone.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
  Yeah, it’s called regular employment.
- lambertsimnel 5y ago
  Could worker cooperatives serve that purpose? I suppose there's a trade-off between security in numbers and individual freedom, but maybe working conditions could be better (despite the constraints of a permanent job) if employees shared equally in the business without any non-employees holding voting shares.
- jdsleppy 5y ago
  Yes, there are many. https://mission.dev/ https://mission.dev/ is one I've spoken with but haven't had an opening to work with (I think this is the one, they were called GSquad before). When you get past the marketing site and hear from the people, it sounds more like a self-organizing software co-op.
Nextgrid 5y ago
Surprisingly (at least for me) I find that freelancing has made it much easier to solicit business than the hiring process as an employee. When freelancing neither side has the expectation that this is forever. We both understand we have our own businesses but will benefit from this particular time-limited engagement. In contrast, in employment there's this whole charade where the company pitches it as a brilliant opportunity and you're supposed to play the game and pretend to care about their values, how exciting the work is or be enthused by their mission to change the world when ultimately the only thing that should matter to you is the paycheck.
HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
Yes there is, but sales is a skill that can be taught and learned.

ttymck 5y ago

At first blush, I might guess "a tech backwater" would be easier to find leads. A tech hub will have so much noise and competition for those leads, even if the leads are more plentiful.

sam0x17 5y ago
I do miss the days when every teenager who "knows computers" was thought to be more technically competent than adults with 10 years of industry experience and every small business and sole proprietor in existence was looking for a 100% custom website design and was willing to pay an 8th grader rather than a web design firm. Such were the early 00s / my teen years.
- winternett 5y ago
  As someone who has been on the web site/app dev entrepreneur grind for quite some time now getting leads is a tougher game now more than ever. Social media is fraught with scammers and people with risky black-hat inspired SEO goals that I'm not willing to be a party to at all. I get lots of emails for jobs and generate estimates at least twice a month only to find out that the person is a scammer posing as a customer. I also get tons of spam that I have to sift through to make sure no customers are missed. It's far easier to go door to door at real business establishments than to get cold leads over the net now. I can't really complain though, it's still much better than working for warehouse development shops... Far better work-life balance, and I'm in better control of project quality, client management, and the types of projects I agree to complete.
  - sam0x17 5y ago
    Frameworks and platforms like wordpress have really killed the cottage industry of web design imo

softwaredoug 5y ago

I was a consultant for 8 years and burned out, in part because of the context switching between sales and delivery. It can be exhausting. More specifically not the sales per se but the extensive amount of in depth relationship work at very sophisticated clients. Or the cheap clients that always want something for nothing. You can have a lot of inbound, but how many of those clients are qualified? Then there’s the complicated contract negotiation process, which is its own huge headache with months of legal negotiation extending well beyond the desired project start time. Often from big companies that role your eyes at you when you say you want to negotiate. Then when it’s all said and done, chasing payment. They promise they’ll pay in 30, 45, 60 whatever days, but there’s always an excuse for not getting paid. Often made up ones that actually violate your contract with them. But what are you going to do, sue? You can stop work, and we did, but then you’re maybe burning bridges and disrupting the tech colleagues you work with day in, day out… Relationship work is important in any work. And you’re _always_ selling and communicating value. But when it becomes all about administriva like contracts or being paid, it’s no fun. I don’t think it’s a valuable use of smart peoples time. Finally, there’s a certain type of company that hires lots of consultants. And they often aren’t the ones you would choose to work with. They hire consultants because they have bigger organizational dysfunction but lack awareness to tackle that dysfunction.

lobocinza 5y ago
The thing that I hate the most is filling taxes.
- desireco42 5y ago
  You are missing out greatly here, as this is where the benefit of being independent is. You get tax breaks on pretty much everything you do.
  - massysett 5y ago
    This is no panacea, as it also means you have no employer paying Social Security taxes on your behalf, not to mention not getting any employer-provided benefits either.

JamesBarney 5y ago

> - The 'interviews' are way shorter, because it's so much easier to fire me. I'm backing myself to deliver which is a show of confidence I've never found this to be the case. Interviewing for an employee position was usually < 4 hours. But I have to spend way more time than that meeting with clients and putting together proposals before winning a contract.