9 ms·
As a solo dev contractor who got my business to $500k/year during the pandemic - I echo a lot of the sentiment in this post. An extension to the post I want to
by pxue 3y ago
As a solo dev contractor who got my business to $500k/year during the pandemic - I echo a lot of the sentiment in this post.
An extension to the post I want to touch on is that VC funded startups are not the only way to break free from the dreadful corporate games.
Working for yourself at your own pace is.
As an industry we're surprisingly very behind in normalizing this.
- DeltaCoast 3y agoCan I ask how you find contracts? Are there that many contract roles posted in public or is it due to your network?
- freitzkriesler2 3y agoUpwork. Solely up work.
- delfinom 3y agoWow, I tried upwork but it generally always seems to be entities in significantly cheaper countries underbidding everything. How did you get started to snap up your first jobs on it?
- frankreyes 3y agoNo idea on the specifics, but the theory goes like this : clients have been burned many times over cheap solutions. Cheaper is usually more expensive on the long run. For this to break the circle you need reputation of reliability.
- freitzkriesler2 3y agoI didn't nor do I use Upwork. I'm just saying what the reality is.
- bdcravens 3y agoIf you're in the US, restricting yourself to jobs where they are limiting to the US results lessens that problem (doesn't eliminate it - I suspect there's a ton of fronting accounts)
- csomar 3y agoI've tried it on the buyer side and anything less than $50/hour can't speak proper English. It's definitively cheaper but not significantly; and if you add the struggle of going through all the profiles, then the price will match reality.
- zo1 3y agoJust wait till chatGPT hides this telling input signal. I mourn for humanity.
- ransom1538 3y agoIf you are cool with $12 USD an hour: it is the place to be.
- bdcravens 3y agoYou can do "decent" rates in the US if you only look at gigs that are only looking at US contractors.
- jokethrowaway 3y agoUpwork can work for very niche things as a extra channel. I've seen it work for people selling packages of "I'll fork bitcoin for you for 2k". For normal contracts it's terrible. I started on freelancer websites when I was 15 and it was nice to bag 20$ per hour plus extra if I happened to be faster. But the more experienced you get the more you can charge and use your network instead of cheap jobs on Upwork.
- jalapenos 3y agoUpwork is masochism
- pxue 3y ago100k: - network 200k: - high signaled / luke warm outbound on dev communities (YC work at a startup job board is one) - referrals 300k++: - dedicated outbound tech sale person
- mylons 3y agoyou hired a sales person? can you elaborate on that?
- pxue 3y agoYeah. I have a dedicated outbound sales person who pings their network for referrals every few weeks. Their job is to weed out noise + educate + convert hourly to project based billing Went into a lot of detail on Reddit a couple years back here https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ommiww/comment/h5mz744/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ommiww/commen...
- tuukkah 3y ago> convert hourly to project based billing I can see how that helps in increasing revenue, but it also makes the work less agile, requires longer negotiations and adds risks. So it's probably not for everyone. Some others have found a way to bill similar amounts but on short projects billed by the day/week. That sounds preferable to me, but you need to have a skill that produces value in such short projects.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y ago> As an industry we're surprisingly very behind in normalizing this. Given the fight we’ve seen over WFH, I’m very inclined to believe that this is intentional by the industry. By focusing on paying top dollar for FTEs and demanding incredible amounts of time and energy from them, companies maintain a level of control that they wouldn’t have by working with a fractional engineering team.
- manicennui 3y agoI find it humorous that anyone thinks they are capable of forcing talented people to do more than they want. Most of the people who feel pressure to make their corporate masters as happy as possible are either desperate or barely competent. All one must do is appear to be slightly better than all of the dead weight in the corporate world. No need to work hard. * I wanted to add that I am referring to software developers. Creative types like the author of this article are always shit upon by corporate types unfortunately
- beezlewax 3y agoMaybe I'm doing it wrong but I feel I work harder than most people on my team. I always go for stories in areas that are more complex than the rest or areas that are new to me. I'm always trying to learn more to keep ahead of the rest. My performance reviews are always "exceeds expectations", but I haven't seen how this benefits anyone other than the company so far. Maybe I should just take it more easy but I feel like I'd float under the radar for possible promotion then.
- singpolyma3 3y agoEvery exceeds expectations review that does not come with cash (or at least stock) you need to ask why.
- cultofmetatron 3y ago> Maybe I should just take it more easy but I feel like I'd float under the radar for possible promotion then. Few companies have sane compensation policies. by all means put in extra work when you have an opportunity to learn some new skill from it. but once you get to a pint where your skills are valuable, either jump ship to a another company that pays commisserate to your new skill level or start or join a startup where you get enough equity to eat at the adult's table when the ipo or acquisition happens
- codeTired 3y agoWould you mind sharing how to get started? I am full stack dev. I can pivot my current job into a contract but I’m scared of getting more clients.
- ekanes 3y agoWork on getting the contracts first. Then when you're ready, pivot. Then there's nothing to fear. If you can't / don't get contracts, nothing changed.
- gumballindie 3y ago> Working for yourself at your own pace is. > As an industry we're surprisingly very behind in normalizing this. We are trying this but have you seen the constant media siege bombarding us with “studies” show remote work is bad for you? In the uk there are now articles saying that even hybrid is bad. We want to be more independent but we are not always allowed to. Tech is meant to be the easiest path to independence yet somehow its not. Wondering why.
- slau 3y agoI haven’t seen the studies you mention, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if in a few years some of these studies are revealed to have had some bias due to being funded by commercial landlords.
- Aurornis 3y agoRemote work is different from pace of work. Going remote shouldn’t change the pace of worn. For some people, going remote causes their productivity to collapse (distractions, loneliness, feeling disconnected, less oversight) but those people should be managed individually. But being remote or in office shouldn’t determine your pace of work.
- gumballindie 3y agoIt does change the pace of work, because suddenly there are fewer distractions so you can focus on doing actual work. As opposed to wasting time chatting or in useless meeting. That means you dont have to rush getting the actual work done. So yeah, it’s a better, slower, calmer, well thought out, pace. It’s you, the code, and the environment that makes you happy. Thats why working less results in more output, paradoxically.
- mooreds 3y agoI feel this! I have run my own one man contracting shop for about half of my career, in two different stints. I loved: * the flexibility * getting paid for every hour I worked (I billed by the hour) * the freedom to choose clients * having more than one made me feel more stable * how close it kept me to the business problem space * the ability to take time off * the distance: I could roll my eyes and say "at least I'm getting paid for this BS" when there was political BS However, after time I joined a team because: * PTO is quite nice * Insurance (in America) is better in general for employees * it was great to be part of a team * the ability to specialize in a way that is difficult as a contractor (I can be further away from direct revenue generation or product creation) Highly recommend everyone tries this out as you'll have a much greater appreciation for all the components of a business when you are doing them yourself (or are responsible for them).
- elwell 3y ago> getting paid for every hour I worked (I billed by the hour) As someone who is (overly?) honest/careful; this could be a con. Also, if you're able to, bill by the day.
- tuukkah 3y agoBilling by the day is not the best for everyone: billing by the hour can give you the flexibility to work incomplete days or switch between clients during the day.
- 93po 3y agoI think maybe the premise is having minimums per day so you can’t be called on a weekend and only bill half an hour for it
- tuukkah 3y agoIt would suck if I was called in on a weekend (without having agreed to be on call). It would suck even more if I was called in for a whole day just because I'd demanded that to be my minimum. Instead, weekend hours could be priced 16 times higher. There could be a quantity discount so that a full day would be somewhat less expensive.
- arrowsmith 3y agoYou make $500k/year from freelance contracts as a solo developer? What kind of companies and tech stack do you work with?
- chiefalchemist 3y agoIt's not clear if that's revenue or profit. Due to that intentional ambiguity I had to presume the latter.
- arrowsmith 3y agoMaybe, but how big can the expenses have been? I've worked as a freelance solo dev (sadly for far less than $500k/year) and the difference between my revenue and profit was close to zero. Expenses included accountancy costs and the occasional new laptop or whatever bit of hardware I could justifiably call a business expense, but it was a tiny fraction of my revenue.
- makk 3y agoThat assumes your time costs zero. But if you assume as I do that your time is the most valuable thing you have, then there’s no way to generate profits when all you sell is your time. You can generate cash, sure. But profits as in selling something for more than it cost you, never. You can never get that time back, and it’s worth more than anything. I would guess many will disagree with this perspective.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- arrowsmith 3y agoMaybe, but that's completely irrelevant to the original question of whether the quoted $500k was OP's gross cash revenue or net financial income.
- jonas21 3y agoIf you're a solo freelancer, there's no difference between paying yourself for your time and paying yourself out of the profits. The money goes to you either way.
- Aurornis 3y ago> Working for yourself at your own pace is. > As an industry we're surprisingly very behind in normalizing this. This is great for people whose own pace is reasonable and matched to their compensation. If you’re paying someone 50th percentile compensation and demanding a 90th percentile work pace and output from them, you’re just going to have endless turnover as you burn people out. Conversely, if you’re paying 90th percentile compensation and you have an employee moving at half the speed of their peers, eventually you’ll get fed up and replace them with someone better matched to the position. But this all breaks down when you get into the weirder ends of the market. Self-pacing works great for you because you can put in the work to deliver $500K/year of value and companies appreciate it. It doesn’t work for many people whose idea of a workday is to put in 1-2 hours of focus and then browse the internet all day, which is a larger portion of the developer population than I would have guessed before becoming a manager. Other people can’t help but wander through tasks, get distracted by rewrites or new frameworks, needlessly refactor working code, or otherwise do a lot of activity without producing a lot of work. Both of these fault modes benefit greatly from the pacing and structure of management. There’s no one size fits all approach. I think solo dev contracting is a great option for some people, but the type of person who can self-manage, sell themselves, network, and retain self-discipline isn’t all that common. I think this is a great example of how different people thrive in different environments.
- jart 3y ago> If you’re paying someone 50th percentile compensation and demanding a 90th percentile work pace and output from them, you’re just going to have endless turnover as you burn people out. Only if they're a 50th percentile person.
- tuukkah 3y agoBurnout does not work like that.
- tomjakubowski 3y agoI don't think burnout would have been any easier on me if I'd been taking home a 90th percentile salary instead of a ~mean one. Burnout is also not only a function of workload. Other factors can contribute too.
- sjducb 3y agoI’d love to know how you did this.
- pxue 3y agoReach out to me on twitter. Links in profile
- manquer 3y ago> VC funded startups are not the only way to break free from the dreadful corporate games. Do people really think this ? VC funded startups are as corporate as it gets, probably worse, just a different kind of corporate. The second you take funding you have a new boss[1]and have all sorts of constraints which become more and more rigid with more rounds . There are only few well understood models of scaling and governance that VCs know to work, if you deviate too much they are going to fire and replace you.[2] It would be rare to have the kind of corporate control Zuckerberg enjoys today for a founder and neither are valuations and preferences terms generous to founders larger you raise . Whether small business or a giant startup the power dynamics is the same . how much money you need to make payroll(including yours in a solo op) and who is funding it , if you don’t need any money at all then you are the king , if you cannot afford even a small short fall everyone else who can bring that money is your boss [1] until you raise funding, there are many bosses you cannot afford to piss off : early users/customers , employees, vendors and so on you don’t have the money to attract the talent you desire or runway to say no to capricious user demands [2] I am not even including the class of funds like a16z who early on will bring in dozens of experts who are on staff and have done scaling many times , imagine part of management, the -1 team reports to your boss also
- pxue 3y agoYes people do think like this - I was one of them
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- czechdeveloper 3y agoYou're giving me hope, because this is exactly my plan now.
- pxue 3y agoyou got this