5 ms·

Freelancing, half a year in.

57 points by Alan01252 14y ago

showsover 14y ago
As someone looking to try freelancing in a couple of years (only been programming for about 2 years) it is reassuring to see that you can make a decent amount of money with almost no network. How do you find freelancing vs ordinary job? Do you have savings for harder times?
- cageface 14y ago
  Freelancing has helped me understand just how much my previous job was paying me that didn't show up on my paycheck. Health insurance, matching 401k contributions, and various miscellaneous other perks are actually quite valuable. So you really have to take these things into account when you set your rates. The other big difference is that a salaried job means a regular paycheck, no matter how busy you might be in any given month. But there can be a lot of downtime between billable hours freelancing so that's another potential dent in your income. Personally I prefer to bid a fixed price instead of an hourly rate for a project. This makes it that much more important to consider your initial estimate carefully but it also eliminates a lot of micro-accounting and haggling over how much a single hour is worth. You also have to be careful not to take on more work than you can handle. Unlike a regular job there's no hard ceiling on how much you can make in a month but it's easy to get in over your head this way. So far I'm really enjoying the freedom and variety of freelancing but I think a regular job is easier in a lot of ways.
  - NickPollard 14y ago
    The OP is in the UK so thankfully health insurance is not an issue as it is state-provided out of your taxes (although some companies do provide subsidised private healthcare, which some people might value highly). You're very right about the other things though - pension contributions, paid sick leave etc. which freelancing doesn't cover, so it's important to compare them carefully.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      Not all companies in the UK will provide paid sick leave and many will impose a strict maximum number of sick days per year which crossing means automatic disciplinary.
    - mseebach 14y ago
      Healthcare is public, yes (although a private insurance is a popular benefit) but the tax that pays for it (up to 13% I think) is deducted separately. Ie. for your employer to give you a salary of £10000, he has to pay £11300. If you're self employed, you have to pay this, so it can bite you when comparing salary and contracting rates.
      - NickPollard 14y ago
        National Insurance contributions are slightly more complicated than that, but the upshot is you generally won't be paying more personally as a freelancer than as an employer. When you're employed, both you and your employer pay NI rates. If you're self-employed, you pay £2.65 a week plus 9% on profits over about £8k, which should work out fairly similarly to the rates you pay (out of your gross salary) when employed. More details on gov.uk.
        mseebach 14y ago
        That's not the point. The point is that you have to charge more than your salary number to break even as a contractor.
      - RobAley 14y ago
        Thats not correct. PAYE (Pay As You Earn) tax for employed people and the equivalent Income Tax for self-employed, along with similar rates of National Insurance for both, go into the general tax pot which pays for healthcare and other government programs. Employers advertise pay rates from which the tax is deducted, so in that way they are the same as contracting rates (the tax is deducted from both). Employers also pay a small National Insurance contribution on top, which doesn't come out of your wages.
- Alan01252 14y ago
  I do now! :) I didn't when I started, in fact I owed a considerably chunk of money to my girlfriend and so priority number one was paying her back. In terms of the lifestyle, I love it. I honest don't feel like I've "worked" in the conventional sense since I've been back. There are a lot of things you have to deal with which are unexpected. Finishing a project and realising you might not see the people you've worked with again ( especially if they've been great people to work with) is depressing. There are times when it can also be lonely. I'm fairly lucky in that I'm currently living with my parents and so there's normally someone around. In the periods between finding work ( where technically you're unemployed ) it is easy to get depressed and wonder whether you're doing the right thing. Having something else to focus on at the same time, be it a side project, or indeed finding more work is a must. The biggest benefit is the freedom. Yes I might have work to do, but I can ( for most clients ) do it from where ever I want to do it. If I need a break from the parents, no problem I move my office to the girlfriends for a week. If I want a change of scenery, no problem I just pack my laptop up and I'm good to go! The second benefit is the amount you learn. I now a much greater understanding of business. Tax, VAT, National insurance, invoices, marketing, chasing payments and how companies operate. Not to mention the technical benefits of freelancing. I've taught myself backbone.js worked with node.js. Played with Symfony, Silex entered ( and come second in ) coding competitions, taught myself some AWS basics. All things I probably wouldn't have had the ability to do if I was working for someone else. All in all the last six months have definitely been a positive experience in my life!
  - smoyer 14y ago
    It's great to get into the habit of saving some of your income ... not just to hedge against slow times but to build an emergency fund and nest-egg. The popular mantra of "pay yourself first" really works (and let's you run the rest of your life by the balance of your check-book). "If I need a break from the parents" Make sure your rate is high enough to provide you with independence too.
jaggederest 14y ago
£20k ~ $31k To save anyone else having to do the math. Also, yes, your rates are still very low, Mr. Hollis, although I suppose it depends on how many days you worked on billable projects. I would expect to see more like £40k for six months given your CV.
- Jabbles 14y ago
  For comparison, top† graduate software engineers (in London) will be on ~£35k/year. †Not like "won IOI" top, but I imagine Google/Microsoft/FB etc. has a graduate starting salary around that.
  - Alan01252 14y ago
    From my experience that's also the very very best graduates. I don't know of anyone who's gone in at that figure. I was earning just less than £35k two years after graduating with a 2.1 ( not sure what the equivalent is in American university terms ). And at that point was earning considerably more than anyone else I knew who graduated at the same time.
    - davedx 14y ago
      I went from GBP 33k to 40k within a year after graduating, in 2001. This was for an investment bank though. (London)
      - Alan01252 14y ago
        Banking/finance does seem to be the industry which breaks the standard, especially in London. I think I've mentioned here before, but I know a friend of a friend who supposedly earns £50k a year as a Java developer for a bank, but didn't know what a constructor was. The mind boggles.
        jiggy2011 14y ago
        Probably because he never used one, all his classes came from factories :)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jiggy2011 14y ago
So, how does one work at all with multiple programmers and no version control? Are you creating patch files and manually merging them (like Linux used to do)? Or are you just using a shared FTP and keeping a spreadsheet of who is using which file at any particular point? The amount of discipline and organisation required to use either of these methods would appear to be far higher than that required to sit down for a few hours to learn a basic VCS like Subversion using a graphical tool.
- ebzlo 14y ago
  I once started at a job where their last programmer had just quit. When I started, my new boss explained to me that I had to check out files by telling him which ones I needed and we updated the production server with me emailing him the modified files. I set up SVN the first day.
- Alan01252 14y ago
  One person works on any one file at a time. To make sure you're working on the latest version you have to remember to download the latest copy from the live server. No I'm not joking, and yes I know how unbelievably terrible this is, but it does happen.
  - joss82 14y ago
    I worked for a very (very) large french website that does not use version control internally. Mostly because most of the code is owned by a single guy and he does not see the problem with that. Note the 'ed' at the end of 'work'.
    - krmmalik 14y ago
      I worked for a small company for the last few years, and although the company was small the codebase was quite big. Despite my many attempts out of desperation, they wouldn't listen. And the irony is, I'm not even a developer - But i knew it was needed. The excuse cited was always that version control was impossible with languages that compile (we were on .Net) - I'm sure there's a response to that, but I didn't know what the response was, and just decided to leave in the end (amongst hundreds of other reasons)
xakshay 14y ago
My other big filter for any project is the technology being used. If its something I want to learn, I try to get a gig in a bigger team, with older code bases. If its something I'm good at and interested in, then I try to get a green field project - solo or in a small team. The rest I skip ;)
jiggy2011 14y ago
What non programming skills have you found most useful for freelancing apart from general business stuff? For example when I have looked at freelance web programming jobs, especially for smaller companies who don't have an in house team they seem to also expect you to do the design work. Do you have other freelancers that you sub-contract out to, do some yourself or stick to strictly scoped (programming only) projects?
- Alan01252 14y ago
  I explain very clearly that I am not a designer right from the start. Again I've lost projects to digital agencies because of this, which is sad, and is another problem I'd like to solve but haven't yet. The biggest non programming skill I have, and something that I appear to be okay at, is in face to face meetings. I've not yet walked out of one meeting where I haven't then got a job. There's probably a few things that have helped here. 1. It's easy to demonstrate my knowledge face to face. 2. I repeat in my head "be confident" throughout the entire meeting. 3. I dress smartly.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    How do you explain the value add that you provide or do you stick mainly to marketing yourself in terms of selling a certain skill per hour? I ask mainly because of recent patio11 posts about emphasizing value in terms like "I can increase sign ups by x% by doing Y". This would seem to require a lot of experience and analytical/stats knowledge that a programmer might not necessarily possess however.
    - Alan01252 14y ago
      When I say I'm not marketing myself correctly, it's exactly this point I'm talking about. At the moment my value add for my clients is my previous experience and my communication skills. I try to reply to emails as fast as I can, that alone sets me apart from most other freelancers. I would love to be able to sell myself in similar terms to the way patio11 does, but as you rightly state it takes a lot of experience that I for one don't have, yet. That being said, I've read so much information about on-line conversions techniques, have run successful (profitable) affiliate PPC campaigns, got on the front page of hacker news multiple times and done other things that maybe 99% of other people on the planet have never done. I'm sure there's something in there that I can sell as a value add.
vignesh_vs_in 14y ago
I have always wanted to do freelancing but refrained from it. Below are my skills, Official: I got 5 years of experience in various fields, 1 year as manual tester for a Mainframe/JSP based application. 2 years as an automation test engineer, which is a fancy way of writing scripts to do automatic tests. 2 years as a tools developer for an automation framework, work involves writing java/Oracle based tools to do a specific task. Non Official: . 2 years learning to code and worked on basic android applications. . 2 years on iOS ranging from games to apps. Side Projects: Android: Personal Finance Calculator (http://bit.ly/STAJ8n http://bit.ly/STAJ8n) helps you to calculate Loan Interest rate. Baby Names (http://bit.ly/STAJ8n)Provides http://bit.ly/STAJ8n)Provides List of Baby names and their meaning Mobile Number Tracker(http://bit.ly/STAIkI http://bit.ly/STAIkI) provides caller info based on the mobile number (Only India). Mobile Number Tracker US (http://bit.ly/PGakKz http://bit.ly/PGakKz) iOS Game: Juicy Fun (http://bit.ly/Ub7IRv http://bit.ly/Ub7IRv) physics game Atom Ace (http://bit.ly/UxZ6F9 http://bit.ly/UxZ6F9) a different kind of puzzle. iOS App: London Tube Map (http://bit.ly/QqAXo7 http://bit.ly/QqAXo7) shows london tube statues. Movie Theaters (http://bit.ly/SwedyD http://bit.ly/SwedyD) shows info about latest movies and movie theaters which plays them. I am not sure what will I be able to charge clients as I don’t have professional development experience, and also living in India doesn’t help things I guess. My big question is, will I be a fool to try freelancing at this stage and with my experience? edit: formatting
- n0mad01 14y ago
  you have to know that by yourself. you'll never know for sure if you don't try it.
  - vignesh_vs_in 14y ago
    Am bit cautious on taking the leap, as there seems to be lot of ambiguity over the earning potential of a freelancer.
- benjaminwootton 14y ago
  Customers will rarely go looking for a shopping of skills such as JSP, automation testing, Java, Oracle etc. Instead, they'll say 'I want a website to do X' or 'I want an application to do Y'. A lot of the time, they didn't even care what you use or how you do it. Your set of published apps in the relatively hot mobile space puts you in a good situation in this regard. The first step would be to build a portfolio of your work.
coob 14y ago
Congrats Alan, can I just say I like the look of http://whensgoodforyou.co.uk http://whensgoodforyou.co.uk - I've had that on my pile of 'implement someday' but you've actually done it. Fantastic.
- Alan01252 14y ago
  Thanks very much coob. It still needs a little more work doing to it before I'm happy with it. At the moment I've got my friends alpha testing it, and have got some good feedback. Hopefully I'll be confident enough to post a SHOW HN soon.
narag 14y ago
What are "digital agencies" and how to find one? (Sorry if the question seems stupid, I haven't heard the term before and it seems a little too general to return meaningful results in Google) Edit: Thank you benjaminwootton!
- benjaminwootton 14y ago
  Web design and marketing companies that specialise in online stuff. They often have more design and campaign work than development, so they will regularly bring on freelance developers to help with projects.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

57 points by Alan01252 14y ago

As someone looking to try freelancing in a couple of years (only been programming for about 2 years) it is reassuring to see that you can make a decent amount of money with almost no network. How do you find freelancing vs ordinary job? Do you have savings for harder times?

cageface 14y ago
Freelancing has helped me understand just how much my previous job was paying me that didn't show up on my paycheck. Health insurance, matching 401k contributions, and various miscellaneous other perks are actually quite valuable. So you really have to take these things into account when you set your rates. The other big difference is that a salaried job means a regular paycheck, no matter how busy you might be in any given month. But there can be a lot of downtime between billable hours freelancing so that's another potential dent in your income. Personally I prefer to bid a fixed price instead of an hourly rate for a project. This makes it that much more important to consider your initial estimate carefully but it also eliminates a lot of micro-accounting and haggling over how much a single hour is worth. You also have to be careful not to take on more work than you can handle. Unlike a regular job there's no hard ceiling on how much you can make in a month but it's easy to get in over your head this way. So far I'm really enjoying the freedom and variety of freelancing but I think a regular job is easier in a lot of ways.
- NickPollard 14y ago
  The OP is in the UK so thankfully health insurance is not an issue as it is state-provided out of your taxes (although some companies do provide subsidised private healthcare, which some people might value highly). You're very right about the other things though - pension contributions, paid sick leave etc. which freelancing doesn't cover, so it's important to compare them carefully.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Not all companies in the UK will provide paid sick leave and many will impose a strict maximum number of sick days per year which crossing means automatic disciplinary.
  - mseebach 14y ago
    Healthcare is public, yes (although a private insurance is a popular benefit) but the tax that pays for it (up to 13% I think) is deducted separately. Ie. for your employer to give you a salary of £10000, he has to pay £11300. If you're self employed, you have to pay this, so it can bite you when comparing salary and contracting rates.
    - NickPollard 14y ago
      National Insurance contributions are slightly more complicated than that, but the upshot is you generally won't be paying more personally as a freelancer than as an employer. When you're employed, both you and your employer pay NI rates. If you're self-employed, you pay £2.65 a week plus 9% on profits over about £8k, which should work out fairly similarly to the rates you pay (out of your gross salary) when employed. More details on gov.uk.
      - mseebach 14y ago
        That's not the point. The point is that you have to charge more than your salary number to break even as a contractor.
    - RobAley 14y ago
      Thats not correct. PAYE (Pay As You Earn) tax for employed people and the equivalent Income Tax for self-employed, along with similar rates of National Insurance for both, go into the general tax pot which pays for healthcare and other government programs. Employers advertise pay rates from which the tax is deducted, so in that way they are the same as contracting rates (the tax is deducted from both). Employers also pay a small National Insurance contribution on top, which doesn't come out of your wages.
Alan01252 14y ago
I do now! :) I didn't when I started, in fact I owed a considerably chunk of money to my girlfriend and so priority number one was paying her back. In terms of the lifestyle, I love it. I honest don't feel like I've "worked" in the conventional sense since I've been back. There are a lot of things you have to deal with which are unexpected. Finishing a project and realising you might not see the people you've worked with again ( especially if they've been great people to work with) is depressing. There are times when it can also be lonely. I'm fairly lucky in that I'm currently living with my parents and so there's normally someone around. In the periods between finding work ( where technically you're unemployed ) it is easy to get depressed and wonder whether you're doing the right thing. Having something else to focus on at the same time, be it a side project, or indeed finding more work is a must. The biggest benefit is the freedom. Yes I might have work to do, but I can ( for most clients ) do it from where ever I want to do it. If I need a break from the parents, no problem I move my office to the girlfriends for a week. If I want a change of scenery, no problem I just pack my laptop up and I'm good to go! The second benefit is the amount you learn. I now a much greater understanding of business. Tax, VAT, National insurance, invoices, marketing, chasing payments and how companies operate. Not to mention the technical benefits of freelancing. I've taught myself backbone.js worked with node.js. Played with Symfony, Silex entered ( and come second in ) coding competitions, taught myself some AWS basics. All things I probably wouldn't have had the ability to do if I was working for someone else. All in all the last six months have definitely been a positive experience in my life!
- smoyer 14y ago
  It's great to get into the habit of saving some of your income ... not just to hedge against slow times but to build an emergency fund and nest-egg. The popular mantra of "pay yourself first" really works (and let's you run the rest of your life by the balance of your check-book). "If I need a break from the parents" Make sure your rate is high enough to provide you with independence too.

jaggederest 14y ago

£20k ~ $31k To save anyone else having to do the math. Also, yes, your rates are still very low, Mr. Hollis, although I suppose it depends on how many days you worked on billable projects. I would expect to see more like £40k for six months given your CV.

Jabbles 14y ago
For comparison, top† graduate software engineers (in London) will be on ~£35k/year. †Not like "won IOI" top, but I imagine Google/Microsoft/FB etc. has a graduate starting salary around that.
- Alan01252 14y ago
  From my experience that's also the very very best graduates. I don't know of anyone who's gone in at that figure. I was earning just less than £35k two years after graduating with a 2.1 ( not sure what the equivalent is in American university terms ). And at that point was earning considerably more than anyone else I knew who graduated at the same time.
  - davedx 14y ago
    I went from GBP 33k to 40k within a year after graduating, in 2001. This was for an investment bank though. (London)
    - Alan01252 14y ago
      Banking/finance does seem to be the industry which breaks the standard, especially in London. I think I've mentioned here before, but I know a friend of a friend who supposedly earns £50k a year as a Java developer for a bank, but didn't know what a constructor was. The mind boggles.
      - jiggy2011 14y ago
        Probably because he never used one, all his classes came from factories :)

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

jiggy2011 14y ago

So, how does one work at all with multiple programmers and no version control? Are you creating patch files and manually merging them (like Linux used to do)? Or are you just using a shared FTP and keeping a spreadsheet of who is using which file at any particular point? The amount of discipline and organisation required to use either of these methods would appear to be far higher than that required to sit down for a few hours to learn a basic VCS like Subversion using a graphical tool.

ebzlo 14y ago
I once started at a job where their last programmer had just quit. When I started, my new boss explained to me that I had to check out files by telling him which ones I needed and we updated the production server with me emailing him the modified files. I set up SVN the first day.
Alan01252 14y ago
One person works on any one file at a time. To make sure you're working on the latest version you have to remember to download the latest copy from the live server. No I'm not joking, and yes I know how unbelievably terrible this is, but it does happen.
- joss82 14y ago
  I worked for a very (very) large french website that does not use version control internally. Mostly because most of the code is owned by a single guy and he does not see the problem with that. Note the 'ed' at the end of 'work'.
  - krmmalik 14y ago
    I worked for a small company for the last few years, and although the company was small the codebase was quite big. Despite my many attempts out of desperation, they wouldn't listen. And the irony is, I'm not even a developer - But i knew it was needed. The excuse cited was always that version control was impossible with languages that compile (we were on .Net) - I'm sure there's a response to that, but I didn't know what the response was, and just decided to leave in the end (amongst hundreds of other reasons)

xakshay 14y ago

My other big filter for any project is the technology being used. If its something I want to learn, I try to get a gig in a bigger team, with older code bases. If its something I'm good at and interested in, then I try to get a green field project - solo or in a small team. The rest I skip ;)

jiggy2011 14y ago

What non programming skills have you found most useful for freelancing apart from general business stuff? For example when I have looked at freelance web programming jobs, especially for smaller companies who don't have an in house team they seem to also expect you to do the design work. Do you have other freelancers that you sub-contract out to, do some yourself or stick to strictly scoped (programming only) projects?

Alan01252 14y ago
I explain very clearly that I am not a designer right from the start. Again I've lost projects to digital agencies because of this, which is sad, and is another problem I'd like to solve but haven't yet. The biggest non programming skill I have, and something that I appear to be okay at, is in face to face meetings. I've not yet walked out of one meeting where I haven't then got a job. There's probably a few things that have helped here. 1. It's easy to demonstrate my knowledge face to face. 2. I repeat in my head "be confident" throughout the entire meeting. 3. I dress smartly.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  How do you explain the value add that you provide or do you stick mainly to marketing yourself in terms of selling a certain skill per hour? I ask mainly because of recent patio11 posts about emphasizing value in terms like "I can increase sign ups by x% by doing Y". This would seem to require a lot of experience and analytical/stats knowledge that a programmer might not necessarily possess however.
  - Alan01252 14y ago
    When I say I'm not marketing myself correctly, it's exactly this point I'm talking about. At the moment my value add for my clients is my previous experience and my communication skills. I try to reply to emails as fast as I can, that alone sets me apart from most other freelancers. I would love to be able to sell myself in similar terms to the way patio11 does, but as you rightly state it takes a lot of experience that I for one don't have, yet. That being said, I've read so much information about on-line conversions techniques, have run successful (profitable) affiliate PPC campaigns, got on the front page of hacker news multiple times and done other things that maybe 99% of other people on the planet have never done. I'm sure there's something in there that I can sell as a value add.

vignesh_vs_in 14y ago

I have always wanted to do freelancing but refrained from it. Below are my skills, Official: I got 5 years of experience in various fields, 1 year as manual tester for a Mainframe/JSP based application. 2 years as an automation test engineer, which is a fancy way of writing scripts to do automatic tests. 2 years as a tools developer for an automation framework, work involves writing java/Oracle based tools to do a specific task. Non Official: . 2 years learning to code and worked on basic android applications. . 2 years on iOS ranging from games to apps. Side Projects: Android: Personal Finance Calculator (http://bit.ly/STAJ8n http://bit.ly/STAJ8n) helps you to calculate Loan Interest rate. Baby Names (http://bit.ly/STAJ8n)Provides http://bit.ly/STAJ8n)Provides List of Baby names and their meaning Mobile Number Tracker(http://bit.ly/STAIkI http://bit.ly/STAIkI) provides caller info based on the mobile number (Only India). Mobile Number Tracker US (http://bit.ly/PGakKz http://bit.ly/PGakKz) iOS Game: Juicy Fun (http://bit.ly/Ub7IRv http://bit.ly/Ub7IRv) physics game Atom Ace (http://bit.ly/UxZ6F9 http://bit.ly/UxZ6F9) a different kind of puzzle. iOS App: London Tube Map (http://bit.ly/QqAXo7 http://bit.ly/QqAXo7) shows london tube statues. Movie Theaters (http://bit.ly/SwedyD http://bit.ly/SwedyD) shows info about latest movies and movie theaters which plays them. I am not sure what will I be able to charge clients as I don’t have professional development experience, and also living in India doesn’t help things I guess. My big question is, will I be a fool to try freelancing at this stage and with my experience? edit: formatting

n0mad01 14y ago
you have to know that by yourself. you'll never know for sure if you don't try it.
- vignesh_vs_in 14y ago
  Am bit cautious on taking the leap, as there seems to be lot of ambiguity over the earning potential of a freelancer.
benjaminwootton 14y ago
Customers will rarely go looking for a shopping of skills such as JSP, automation testing, Java, Oracle etc. Instead, they'll say 'I want a website to do X' or 'I want an application to do Y'. A lot of the time, they didn't even care what you use or how you do it. Your set of published apps in the relatively hot mobile space puts you in a good situation in this regard. The first step would be to build a portfolio of your work.

coob 14y ago

Congrats Alan, can I just say I like the look of http://whensgoodforyou.co.uk http://whensgoodforyou.co.uk - I've had that on my pile of 'implement someday' but you've actually done it. Fantastic.

Alan01252 14y ago
Thanks very much coob. It still needs a little more work doing to it before I'm happy with it. At the moment I've got my friends alpha testing it, and have got some good feedback. Hopefully I'll be confident enough to post a SHOW HN soon.

narag 14y ago

What are "digital agencies" and how to find one? (Sorry if the question seems stupid, I haven't heard the term before and it seems a little too general to return meaningful results in Google) Edit: Thank you benjaminwootton!

benjaminwootton 14y ago
Web design and marketing companies that specialise in online stuff. They often have more design and campaign work than development, so they will regularly bring on freelance developers to help with projects.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]