It's interesting that the other thread was 364 days ago, which would have been exactly this same Monday last year (ie: the beginning of the third week of Jan.)
Have you had success replying to those posts and asking 'Would you consider a freelancer for this position?' or how do you go about it since these threads seem to implicitly indicate that they're looking for employees?
I definitely don't do that. I posted once in the who-wants-to-be-hired thread, but I don't do that anymore, because I had one guy get really angry once he realized I didn't want to be his employee, he accused me of bait-and-switching him to outsourced development (LOL). I was open to perm/ft work at the time for the right fit (which this guy wasn't), but his response was so visceral that I decided it was just a bad form to post there knowing for 95% of inquiries there was no chance of me going perm and that for the longshot 5% i would probably find them through another channel.
Don't ask, tell. Tell them your credentials and how you're going to solve their immediate problem. Don't beg them "please hire me even though I'm remote!", spell out that you're a seasoned veteran, here's my code on Github and my open source projects with the air of confidence that if "you don't hire me, someone else will."
I've been contracting, consulting & freelancing for the last 10 years (5 years completely remote). My advice is to avoid "searching contract work", but reverse the situation completely: make your new clients find you instead. I wrote about this in depth here: https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/how-to-have-clients-find-you....
Sites /can/ work (I know people who make a good living off certain sites), but nothing will beat self-managed marketing on the long run.
Feel free to email me (see profile) if you have specific questions.
Your blog and twitter feed are very helpful. I was doing part time consulting, mostly web-related, for a number of years. Getting myself focused in this new phase of life has been challenging. You are clearly focused in your online presence. Clear "Hire Me" call to actions among other things, too. Time for me to do them. Thanks!
I used to do a lot of contract work. I can't tell you what you should do - but here is what i did and it worked for me
Two approaches:
1) Work for one large client and essentially become an employee (consider this. a lot of startups pay good money for remote employees)
2) Work for multiple clients
Focusing on #2 here
Core rule: You want to be paid premium for quality and service.
Avoid marketplaces - it's very hard to compete on quality here.
Niche - the more focused you are on a (profitable) niche the better you can charge premium for domain competence
As thibaut_barrere mentioned - Build a brand - i would even go further - create an agency like brand. At the point is stopped saying "I" but said "we" i was able to charge more.
Dont charge by the hour but by the value - most developers charge their time - you want to charge the value you provide to the client. Read up on "willingness to pay"
Most important: Deliver as promised and always try to over-deliver in service, quality, etc. Eg try to understand why the client asks for features and not only what features she/he asks for - you might be able to come up with better solutions or anticipate future requests. Any successful project should usually lead to improved reputation and more projects and clients.
This sounds like a recipe for disaster to me without a lot more explanation. Time is the main cost to a provider, so it's very natural that time would also be the driver for billing. "Charging for value" sounds like you're trying to say "fixed price" without actually saying it. I have many, many issues with trying to do fixed price projects of any appreciable size (say, more than 20-40 hours).
What do you mean, precisely, by "charge by the value"?
Really depends on the client. If your client is able to agree on tight specs and project plans, everyone is better off with fixed project fees. The client can more easily plan financially with a fixed budget. You can charge more, because instead of charging $DAILY_RATE * $DAYS, you can charge $REVENUE_CLIENT_WILL_MAKE_WITH_FEATURE - $THEIR_MARGIN, and the latter figure tends to be significantly higher. You can also deliver the project more quickly because now it's in your interest to do so. Everyone wins.
That being said, if the client is unable to commit to tight specs and project plans, you need to revert to invoicing on a time & materials basis. But even if you do that, you should really charge a daily rate, rather than an hourly rate.
>You can charge more, because instead of charging $DAILY_RATE * $DAYS, you can charge $REVENUE_CLIENT_WILL_MAKE_WITH_FEATURE - $THEIR_MARGIN, and the latter figure tends to be significantly higher.
That's really going to depend on the type of work you do and the type of clients you can find. In my experience, it's difficult to get contracts with larger businesses unless you know someone already or have some sort of "in" with them. And smaller business tend to be poorly run and are barely making any money on their products and services, so they have very thin margins or are even losing money.
A good example of "charging by value" is productized consulting - where it's a particular task, etc. that needs done for multiple customers.
Say you're really good with Postgres, instead of just hanging out a shingle for "any Postgres stuff?" you offer something like a one time $2500 "Postgres Performance Audit".
You get really good at this one thing, have a set bunch of scripts, very deep knowledge, predone report template, etc. and providing a bunch of value. So at the end of the day who cares that it only took you 5 hours (effectively making $500/hr).
Except that you are making your services a commodity. A large part of what makes my services valuable is that I can't approach every situation with a pre-fab script and report.
No it's a commodity if it's non-differentiated from others. You can still have non-commoditized work that operates at scaled efficiency. You just have to have something that makes you better or different.
Some clients are rich. You could charge by what you feel you're worth, say $50/hr. Or you could charge by what they value the work at - at that might be 4x as much. They might be used to paying $200/hr, and are happy to do it.
It's vague, because it's a high level idea. I want to earn more than I can by time, therefore I have to get clients to start thinking about how much value they are getting and paying for that.
Practically I've had success recently by charging weekly. I keep this rate deliberately lower (about half my old full time consulting rate). Then I send them a weekly report along with the invoice every week. They get to see exactly what they got for the money. It usually takes me 15-20 hours to deliver enough value for the weekly rate.
So there are lots of things to try. Small changes in billing can have a large impact on your relationship with your client.
You can charge by value when you understand the scope of work, have the ability to manage it, and manage risk. The customer gets a fixed price for a fixed scope with a fixed process.
The problem with charge for value is now your a product not a service. Not that that's a problem per say but it's a whole different animal than trying to being a contractor.
Avoid marketplaces - it's very hard to compete on quality here.
Have an upvote. I don't work in software, but I am a grant writing consultant, and I've never met a successful consultant of any kind who relied on or even used marketplaces.
A huge part of many consultants's lives consists of marketing and pitching. I know that we've found email marketing to be our biggest strength in this regard. Consultants who can't get deal flow or close deals won't survive.
> I've never met a successful consultant of any kind who relied on or even used marketplaces
You have now. I started on PeoplePerHour. Once I had a few good reviews on my profile, I could get jobs more easily; eventually got some big clients off them, which pushed me to PPH's top 5 and I was able to get whichever job I would bid on from then on; I'd always seek the large ones that would last a few months.
At the time of course, PPH was a fairly newish marketplace. It's very different now; polluted with low grade jobs and low grade bidders that promise the world for $100.
But to me, this tells that the problem isn't "the marketplace" but the target audience.
In any case, big +1 to GP post. To reiterate two of their points:
1. Do avoid most marketplaces, unless you can find one where you can easily compete on quality (and if you do find one, tell me about it, heh).
2. Charge fixed price by the value. This means choose your jobs and clients carefully. If you pick a bad client, or a job where you need more time than you anticipated to complete it, you might end up underpaid - Roll with it and learn from it, don't make the same mistake twice.
The way I screen a client is by getting them to write a brief in an email. The reasons I do this is;
a) Its easy for clients to blurt stuff out over the phone without a second thought. It's impossible for me to take accurate notes on this, only to get an impression of what they're after.
b) A written brief tells a lot about someone's communication capabilities. When a written brief is poor then I have a better idea on how to deal with a client like this, i.e. I have to do a lot more hand holding and depending on my existing workload I can either decide to let them go or not.
Also, watch out for clients who bring carrot danglers, i.e. they will suggest that you should do this project either for cheap or free because they have a lot of other projects coming up in the near future (they don't). In this scenario simply reply that you have to charge 100% for this project but that you might be able to give a discount on a future project, you won't hear from them again since they want cheap or free.
Also, never lower your hourly rate but give a discount instead. This means that clients still see what you'd normally charge and if they come back in the future you actually can charge them your normal rate.
Estimating your own prices is something even I have trouble doing after 10 years, so I won't be too much help there. But to avoid bad clients, you really just have to make sure you talk to them and fully understand the project before accepting the job.
Bad clients will always have red flags early on. If you talk to them for 30 minutes and the job is already twice the size you initially thought it was, you might be with someone who will want to ask for more along the way.
If there is any doubt:
- Ask for a small % in advance or a larger % in escrow. Clients that can't handle that are unlikely to be easy to deal with come time of the bill.
- If the project is unclear, ask for sketches/photoshops before signing the final contract. You can also do those yourself and ask if this is what they have in mind.
- Make sure to have a written transcription of exactly what you will do, alongside the contract. Emails, transcribed/recorded calls, etc.
If you're a core part of your client's product, they will more than likely be willing to hire you for more work, or as an employee for continued maintenance.
And don't be afraid of saying no to shitty contracts. One really good client can easily bring you a year's worth of work.
Make that two. I started in the translation industry by responding to everything that matched my skills on ProZ.com. It was years before I got to the point where I didn't need to because I'd established myself, and I still keep my membership current (more for old times' sake than anything, these days).
Without that job board, I would not have been able to make the switch from programming into translation.
Since the work has no value, charging by value rather than time means that the client who doesn't pay because they are not going to use the work is justified in doing so.
Which is another way of saying, the general problem isn't a good billing model. It's good clients. Unfortunately, most contractors/freelancers starting out and looking for advice won't have good clients (even when they have clients at all) and will have trouble distinguishing good clients from people who look like good clients until the invoice arrives.
You don't tell them: give me what you value it for. You do your best to estimate what success will be (in value) to them. Then you negotiate from that.
If your best professional opinion is that the business is going to go under irrespective of your great work, then the ethical choices under the value model are:
1. Don't take the work at any price.
2. Do it for free.
Again, if a person has experience and great clients, the choice of pricing model is a problem. If a person lacks experience to judge what the value is in the client's domain and/or the client isn't proven to be good, pricing model doesn't matter as much.
The value model price isn't based on what the work is worth, it's based on what the freelancer believes the client believes the work is worth. Under the value based pricing model, if the client is deluded it's reasonable to fleece them...and deluded clients who pay well are good clients.
It's been over 10 years since I had my own business, but when I did, I tried to use "we" instead of "I" and paint the business as a business offering services rather than one person trying to get work. It became very frustrating dealing with recruiters (the people who typically contact you for work). A typical conversation would go something like this:
Me: I see you're looking to fill a position involving a lot of graphics work. We could help you out.
Them: Please send the resume.
Me: I'm not offering the services of just a single developer. We have a variety of services we offer. Please see our web site at <http://www.example.com/>.
Them: Please send the resume.
Me: I'm unclear what resume you want me to send. I'm not offering you a single person, but a full-service solution.
Them: Please send the resume.
Me: ...?
I'm sure I could have spent time coming up with some response for these people, but it wasn't worth it. I ended up only working with clients I could deal with directly as it was much easier to have a conversation with them.
So just be aware that you'll have to deal with this type of nonsense from time-to-time.
Recruiters recruit people, so of course they want a resume. If you aren't a person a person that wants to be recruited or wants to recruit someone, a recruiter is the wrong person to talk to.
Unfortunately, many times the 'default' gatekeeper to anyone else worth your time in the org IS the recruiter. Using social engineering and/or linkedin you are sometimes able to figure who you need to speak to and access them directly.
On the flip side, I recently was hiring for a senior engineer position, where I specified individuals only, and was inundated with emails from firms who were sure they could "help me out" with a "full-service solution." Maddening.
Contracts
Do this. Get familiar with contract law and make sure your customers execute one that's favorable to you getting paid. Also, ensure you assign at least a license to the client paying you to avoid any problems down the road if you intend to reuse code.
Big projects
If you intend to tackle big projects you usually need to deal with net terms. Find an invoice factoring company to help you cashflow those deals. They base interest on the loans on your clients.
#1 is where it's at, in my personal experience. I find it hard and less than optimal to work for multiple clients because of the time it takes switching from project to project. Having just one client is inherently riskier from a standpoint of financial stability, but I think the benefits outweigh that risk.
Came here to agree with and support this method of contract work. I currently have a contract that consumes roughly 50% of my time in a given month and generates 80% of my income. Initially it was for 12 months, but things are going well and it has been extended essentially indefinitely. These type of contracts might be kind of rare (not sure?), but if you can find yourself one, it gives you all kinds of flexibility with figuring out what to spend the rest of your time on.
Domain experience and expertise are also key. I have a rare blend of experience and technical capability that align perfectly with my primary contract. This limits some of the risk that is associated with relying so much financially on a single entity since they'd have a really hard time ending things with me and swapping in another programmer. I'll also go above and beyond for this client as it's needed. It's a two way street.
Anyways, best wishes on finding a good source of contract work but I'd recommend investigating any major/long term contract. They can simplify your life and be extremely rewarding.
I am 25. Two years and one month ago I created a company called Pixelmatters (http://pixelmatters.com).
I basically did everything more or less the way you described. Which is something absolutely hard to do. As a result, in Aug 2014 we were 2 but today, as I write this, we are 14 and growing.
Company is profitable, has no VC money and is fully self-funded (initially, by my computer and...a decent internet connection).
Do you mind if I contact you for a couple quick questions? I'm essentially in the process of trying #2 as OP mentioned and would eventually like to transition into building a team. Would love to ask you a couple things and maybe get some advice. My contact info is in my HN profile if you prefer to reach me instead.
Depends on what "major contracts" are for you. I can tell you that we don't have any "major contract". We to have several "very nice" ones.
The main way clients came to us is through our website, Dribbble, Behance but also through referrals - people that worked with us in the past, and that recommend our work to a friend. This latter is the oldest but definitely the best marketing you can get!
Re. 1: never ever put all your eggs in a single basket like that, it may work for some but it is a huge risk and there is no real reason to take that risk. Two is a bare minimum, three clients is stability.
Hey, I'm a Web developer living in UK, and English is not my first language, I can speak okay and also i'm studying to speak fluently. Iv'e been working in the industry for past 6 years,
Considering i'm not a native speaker, Do you have any suggestion that i can improve my chance of securing contracts ? Is it possible to keep all communication in email ?
I recently made it through the Toptal (http://www.toptal.com) screening process but haven't taken on any work through their site yet, the hourly rate that you can ask there seems to be quite reasonable though compared to sites like upwork.com, where you will mostly compete with people that are willing to work for 10 $ / hour (which for someone living in a developed country is just not possible).
For Germany, Gulp (www.gulp.de) is a very good site where you can actually find clients that are willing to pay a reasonable hourly rate (they even have a rate calculator on their site).
Do you think having accounts at Gulp (and XING?) would help for a person outside Germany (and non-German speaker)? Are [prospective] clients on those sites interested in remote consultants?
which is pretty middle-of-the road as far as rates go there. rarely takes me more than 2 weeks to find a new job on there. and that includes rejecting jobs I dont think i'd like.
the biggest benefits IMO are that they screen their clients very well (they know they're getting top-tier quality and arent afraid to pay top-tier rates) and negotiate to get you the rate you want. Also, they handle the billing very well, so even if the client is acting janky, you'll get paid.
I went through the admission process end of November but before completing it I got offered a project through my network which I'm still working on today, so I will probably only start using the service next month. There is of course some amount of marketing in their claims, but I think compared to other freelancing websites they actually provide a good deal for freelancers. Also, they do the invoicing for you and make sure you get paid regularly, which I find is a valuable service.
As a freelancer it's of course always better to get gigs through your own network, but I think sites like these are a good way to get started before having this kind of connections.
I've never used a website. Reach out to everyone you know. Buy them a coffee, mention you are getting into contracting, ask who else you should talk to, thank them, repeat.
Have you ever just reached out to someone you don't know this way and had success? Cold calling or knocking on doors? I haven't been in a position to have this need but this whole comment thread made me think about doing it the "old-fashioned" way, rather than browsing the web meat/meet markets.
I've never reached out to someone I've never met but I've reached out to a lot of people that I met _super_ briefly. It let me go "remember me?" in an email I sent and it breaks the tension. People are surprisingly willing to help.
I found that it wasn't the first degree connections that led to work but the second degree connections. Get your immediate network to introduce you to others and drum up work from them.
Not sure if you're aware of it, but this is a well-studied phenomenon. Check out Mark Granovetter's seminal paper "The Strengrth of Weak Ties" [0] [1], it's pretty interesting reading.
I'd like a way, similar to the first of month feature (where employment possibilities are posted on HN) where you could post requirements for a software project and get responses from the hacker news community (or at least links to either relevant profiles or reputable hackers as suggestions).
Edit: I mean on HN similar to the first of month feature not a site (I know these are out there obviously).
I would avoid sites like Upwork (aka: odesk), elance, and anything similar like the plague unless working for less than minimum wage and dealing with morons is your idea of good contract work.
I suspect the secret to contract work success lies in having really good networking skills and a Rolodex of contacts from having worked in a given industry and having a reputation as someone who delivers. If you don't have that then you would probably have better luck finding reasonable work by going to meetups or similar industry events to build a network of professional contacts. The only way I know of to do this online is to become a notable contributor to prominent open source projects and then use that to leverage paid work.
I disagree. I love Upwork, and I pay my contractors well. What Upwork provides me with is an incredible ability to keep payments maintained and work honest. There's a sense of honesty when using the oDesk application, where both parties can say, "we feel confident that parties will get paid, and work can be reviewed."
Neither my contractors nor I would want to move to any other platform because no other platform provides that kind of honesty and confidence between Contractor and Employee.
Would you be willing to share with us the average $/hr rate you pay your Upwork employees? I'd be willing to bet it is quite low.
As an employer I can totally see why you would love it, it's an effective way to pay bottom dollar for simplistic computer tasks.
From the stand point of someone looking to get into software engineer contract work it's lame. The guaranteed payment thing you are talking about is only for projects that are billed hourly. If you bid on a flat rate project there is no such guarantee. The hourly pay rate guarantee also requires you to install a spyware app on your computer to monitor your work.
I use upwork to sub-out work that I don't have time to tackle or for tasks that I lack expertise in. Once I've found someone on the platform that is really talented at what they do, I return to them for subsequent projects that need their skillset. The challenge on that platform is finding the people that stand out since there are so many low-bar contributors.
Examples of work that I use it for are simple html/css stuff that just needs to get knocked out prior to integration into an app. I'll pay between $300-500 from some straight forward design to html/css conversion. I want it to be worth their while.
Also, I've use it frequently for GIS work. I'm just not proficient in it and would rather pay someone that is. I managed to find an incredible person on upwork and give him the specs for each project before I quote my customers. He sets the price for the GIS components and I routinely encourage him to charge more.
So to be clear, I don't use upwork to find a deal on the project (no doubt a ton of people do). I use it because it is a platform that can keep talented people busy and available for the next time I need to rely on them. I'd hire a full time GIS expert if I had steady work for the, but I don't so going with a subcontract makes a lot more sense.
That's because there are so many low-bar employers.
Many of whom are also hanging out places like HN, complaining that there are no good developers while praising anything which drives down wages.
To know why there are few good developers, look no further than the market price. It doesn't justify top effort. I could sweat blood competing on price and throughput with people who have a cost of living that is a small fraction of mine, hoping against reason that someone will spontaneously give me a raise out of the goodness of their hearts. Or... not.
Most of the people who would eat your projects for breakfast don't want to be worked like pizza delivery drivers, delivering as cheap and fast as possible and hoping for tips. So they aren't on these sites. These sites are where careers go to die.
I think we're on the same page. I don't use the platform to get work for myself, but I don't think it's a completely useless platform. That's all I was trying to convey.
It has its place and I do my part to make sure that the qualified people that I hire on it are well compensated with clear expectations and no need to hope for tips. Maybe I'm doing them a disservice by offering a glimpse of sunlight on a platform that otherwise stacks the cards against them. You have me wondering.
I 100% agree with you that it's mostly a crap shoot of competing with people that have a cost of living that is so utterly different that ours that it's impossible to make a living. But I do think there are some niche skills where this is not the case and people with a high cost of living can still thrive on the platform.
I don't doubt that if you look hard enough you can find both good contractors and good clients. I think it's the rare exception and not the rule though. The last time I looked at Upwork was when it was called Odesk so I was curious if anything had changed so I went back and looked this afternoon. Here is a sampling of job postings that came up searching for Python jobs...
1) "Image Viewer - Python: In search of a python developer to build an application which cleanly display and organizes many images (200+) as thumbnails on one interface. The interface will display approx 6 data fields contained in two tables."
Budget: $50 (This client has previously hired 7 other people and spent $477 in total on Upwork)
2) "Python Help: I am looking for help in my python code, searching feature and fixing. Its a assignment if you can do this quickly let me know. Coding is almost completed, you need to correct logic and searching features. Hardly 35-50 line code, small assignment."
Budget: $10 (This client has previously hired 9 people and spent $284 in total on Upwork)
3) "Parse Fields from HTML file: Parse fields from HTML document Required language: Python (Python package BeautifulSoup is allowed/preferred.) Input: Python function that accepts file name (2 HTML files) Output: Python dictionary. All listed fields should be a separate key. Addresses should also be a dictionary so that city, state, and zip are separate Fields to pull out: First Name, Last Name, City, State, ETC ETC roughly 20 fields between two different HTML document types/formats."
Budget: $60 (This client has previously hired 23 people and spent $3,791 on Upwork, they pay an average of $10.10 per hour)
So based on those I don't think it has improved at all.
I have been working exclusively through upwork for 2 years and make a good living off it (I also live in Australia, it's not like I can charge 10$/h). I would highly recommend people give it a try, you will be surprised that there are lots of client out there looking for talent who are ready to pay correctly or premium.
Maybe you can share your strategy then because I dabbled in it a few years back and found it to be full of people willing to work for less than $10 per hour.
The majority of projects advertised seemed to be things like web scraping, homework cheating, people who wanted computer software to pick a magic lottery number, etc...
Yes I agree that 90% of all the projects advertised are what you describe and not worth anything. No-one should waste their time on it. But there is also this 10% of really quality work. There seems to be a shortage of talent in some areas of the world and the technology is here for teams to be distributed so some CEO/CTO give these freelancing sites a go.
When I first had a look I got quite pessimistic about my chances of finding work and money through it but decided nonetheless to give it a fair go.
I passed a few tests that gave me an initial edge as a newcomer, and decided to follow most freelancing advice I found on the internet: don't down-value yourself with a bad hourly rate, and apply to jobs professionally. It took me a few weeks to get a first contract, and after a month or so I was working 60h per week. I also read "The Freelance Pricing Guidebook" by Glenn Stovall which is a simple pdf of a dozen of pages which really gave me a good think of how to approach being independent and potential pricing strategies.
I also try to get out of the platform once I built the relationship with the client but it is not without risk if they run out of money, you don't have that nice guarantee that the platform offers. It happened to me that a client owed me 5 digits amounts and I regretted for a while having gone directly to him (he ended up paying, he had just ran out of cash).
If you find an USA client and you are not in the USA, with the strong USD it can be really advantageous for both parties. If you are in the USA I'd still say you can do well (I think Australia is more expensive than USA).
Maybe I really got lucky, or necessity forced me to succeed since my girlfriend got sent to a rural area with no work for me. Now days my work is so much more interesting, better paid and I met some amazing people thanks to that platform.
When I hire through Upwork, I ignore all the low hourly rate freelancers. I use a high hourly price as my first requirement.
Few years ago, this worked quite well, but now there are some idiots that charge a high price for low quality work just to try to take advantage of people like me. So, now it takes some more time to filter through, but still works pretty well.
Are you kidding me? There are lots of high hourly workers. I consider $40/hour as minimum, generally $65/hour or higher is where the line starts to separate between pros and average freelancers. I've seen as high as $150/hour.
Does anyone have good place to look for contract work in field of UX & Product design? I'm UX designer currently living in Prague, looking for remote work (and I'm open to relocate). My portfolio: http://podorsky.cz/
I had never done any app making as of January 2015. I had done some wordpress stuff, but just the basics.
And I had (and have) no CS degree.
I now make a living on contract work. I did it by going to local meetups and introducing myself as a freelance web developer. Nevermind that I hadn't done freelance web development ever. I kept going to meetups for month and still attend a monthly hacker meetup. I participated in hackathons without really knowing how to program.
But all along the way I met people more experienced than I am and picked up two clients along the way. I think one thing that I do differently to most is that I charge a high rate (I always quote $150/hr). I am willing to negotiate lower than that but its a starting point. I have been paid that in the past for less complicated work like hiring developers and being a project manager.
What am I saying? Your questions is what sites to use? Just one: meetup.com
I want to add a bit to your comment - it's important to try and identify the kind of meetups you'd like to attend that will help you meet your desired customer base, and the kinds that will help you get known in your local community (ie: meetups for web devs to connect).
I find that meetups can sometimes become circle-jerks for people in a similar field to just get together and talk/humblebrag. Which is fine, but if that's not your goal you need to look at different meetups which serve that goal.
Some meetups I went to were the exact circle-jerk/humblebragfests you're talking about.
The one I consistently go to (shameless plug [OpenHack Syracuse](http://www.openhacksyr.com) is a monthly meetup for developers to talk about what projects they're working on and to spend time together working on projects, ideas, and sharing info. It's really just an organized hangout/hack session. And it's these types of meetups which are best for getting contract work (because contract work isn't the goal)
Whether it be business opportunities, employment prospects, or romance, there seems to be a consistent theme: improving your prospects often comes as a result of improving the relevant factors you can presently control. With that being said, all three seem to benefit from enhancing your network.
Seconding this question, this is baffling to me. I could see maybe getting through the door with some less-saavy clients and collecting a pay check for a few weeks, but I can't imagine that working for long. How long are you typically employed? What happens if you encounter projects you are unable to solve, is it a fake it until you make it sort of thing?
I was offered $150/hr to manage a project once and so I accepted. I figured it out along the way and delivered the results.
Since then, I start with an estimate of $150/hr when I'm calculating price. I've had one person balk and say thats crazy. one.
Everyone else has either came back and said that they can't afford that, that they'd like to pay $XXX instead. Or they've said yes to $150/hr.
What happens if you encounter projects you are unable to solve, is it a fake it until you make it sort of thing?
With just about every project I do I don't know exactly how I'll solve it to begin with. Before I start billing I always have a research phase, either a day or a week, but never more than that, to figure out how I'll do it. I don't bill for hours that I study, just hours that I work on their project.
I hope this is helpful, but essentially, I deal fairly with all clients. As long as terms are understood upfront I find everyone is happy.
I know people with more than a decade of experience struggling to get $75/hr (granted, they don't do PM work - just coding). It is amazing that you pulled it off in less than a year. Neat!
I can't speak to the employment side of things, but the work side of things is disappointing. Their recommended gigs are scattershot and a lot of the ones they push ("in conjunction with gun.io" or similar verbiage--sounds like premium postings) are six-month, monopolize-all-your-time contracts at a low hourly rate. And they don't seem to respect their own site's rules, at least not the spirit of them: every once in a while I'm spammed with a '$1,000' offer from gun.io themselves that's really "we'll pay $100 for a blog post".
Unfortunately I'm not sure that anybody else is much better! I still get most of my work through interpersonal connections and the occasional email from Hacker News readers.
I tried to register for Gun.io and the first thing they want me to do is to write proposal to see if I could communicate, for skillsets that I don't have in a field that I have no knowledge of (GRE over IPSec). I make another try and now it's to write proposal for framework that I never used with explicit "no 'willing to learn' proposals" in the body text. Maybe I'm just unlucky, but if they're asking me to BS on the proposal just to see if I could communicate, then I have to say this is definitely not a good first impression.
Good luck getting paid on gun.io, if the buyer just decides they want the work for free then they can take it and wander off. Gun.io doesn't care because who is bringing them money?
For those who are London based, I recently launched a mailing list for members of the London Hacker News Meetup, which sends out contracts based on your language preference. It's averaging about 10 jobs a month at the moment however I am working on getting it to about 100 pm by the end of the year. The current sign up page is at http://eepurl.com/byq7Af
My way was working at several successful startups, and then going into contracting. So I had contacts at every level of Silicon Valley. Might not work for everybody.
Hey thats a really good idea! How long does it take to get started with that? Do you find a long lead time from signing up to building a reputation to getting a lot of gigs?
Depending in the gigs you offer your experience may differ, I do python/perl/sh scripts and sysop tasks and after a month I started receiving enough gigs a month (5-8) to pay my digital bills.
I think logo designers, web developers and translators get a lot more traffic. I just recently was upgraded to 1st level seller after 3 months, so I think it's relatively fast.
Got to disagree here. Even if your task takes only 30 minutes, by the time you add getting client's requirements and browsing for jobs each task will take 1 hour. You should not be working for $5 / hour.
I'm having issues with Gigster. I did the first interview and passed. The subsequent follow ups (4 already!) have all been either postponed, interviewer no shows (yes really), or setup with the wrong interviewer.
I understand there are growing pains, but not one of my emails have been responded to regarding this issue.
Yeah that's unfortunate... They are growing very quickly in terms on onboarding devs right now. They're also putting a lot of effort into building better tooling for interviewing / onboarding. I fortunately jumped on before the growth really got crazy.
In short, to answer your question, I never used any sites to find contract work. I got all my leads through face-to-face interaction with real humans in the real world, and a good deal of it came from word-of-mouth because of exceeding my clients' expectations.
Contracting sites marginalize developers and the type of clients who troll them are typically the kind who will try to squeeze as much work out of developers for as little money as they can. On top of that, developers are generally a pretty introverted crowd, so the number of introverted and talented developers who troll those sites looking for work is far greater than the number of outgoing, personable developers in your local area. Which group do you want to compete against?
I have a different approach to finding contract work, particularly as I don't have much work experience. Upwork and similar websites have not worked well for me.
Instead, I browse job boards and when I find an interesting role I contact the company. If they are interested in my background and the fit is right, I sell them on setting up a contract relationship instead of full-time employee. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. The important part is being honest that you are looking to work as a contractor, not an employee.
I tackle this sideways by going to Meetup or Eventbrite. Specifically I go to meetups and events that potential buyers go to and let them know what I do (I don’t try to sell my services on first contact). It takes some pruning but after a while my preferred clients are the ones I keep in contact with and we start working. I get less work through this than just by referral though.
Depending on your living situation and time available I’d recommend trying to establish your own identity so you don’t have to go through a marketplace for contract work. Instead you’ll have the contract work come to you and not filtered through a middleman that would take a cut out of your work. I would never recommend someone go through fiverr, Upwork or these other marketplaces unless they were just moonlighting.
What's the context?
Which country are you in?
What are your skills?
If you're in the UK...
I've been contracting about 3 years now and started it the simple (and probably dumb) way - stick a resume up on jobsite.co.uk, wait for agents to call. Lots will. Be nice to them on the phone but be firm about what rates and locations you're willing to work. You'll get lots of useless ones who haven't even bothered to read it, but no matter, you'll learn to filter them out pretty quickly. Remember the good ones. Rinse, repeat.
I've had two contracts now through reputation, which is quite nice, but getting contracts from previous workmates isn't a panacea. One of them was the most boring thing I've ever done in my life (worse than shelf-stacking in a warehouse) and I quit after three weeks because I was literally unable to complete the work it was so dull. I told the client that I was poor value for money and a recent graduate would be a better choice. The other one was good though!
Also, make sure you're prepared for some time off between contracts, it's pretty much going to happen.
I'd be interested to hear how you made the jump to contracting? I find myself wanting to make the jump from my permanent job (in London) but being anxious about whether or not it's the right time to do so, if my skill set (sysadmin/devops) as it stands will provide value to clients, if I have the right mix of personal qualities to make a success out of it, etc.
I worked permanently for various companies in and around London for about 10 years, then got sick of London, moved to Australia, did a couple more years permanent work there, then decided to move back to the UK. At that point I was sick of being an employee and had a vague offer from a friend to help bootstrap a startup, which fell through. So in lieu of having an idea to start up a company myself I decided I was going to be a contractor, set myself up a limited company and started throwing my CV at anyone that asked. I have got most of my contracts through agencies that called me, not through contacts.
Making the leap can be tricky - if you have a notice period longer than one month you may have to quit your current job and then look for contracts afterwards. A lot of people want contractors to start now. You may not find one for a month or more, I've had dry patches lasting a couple of months before, and it might be another month after you start before you can invoice, and it could be another month again before you get paid, so you need a financial cushion.
As soon as you get your first contract you'll need an accountant. These come in at about £100 per month. I use Nixon Williams, this is not necessarily a recommendation, they deal with hundreds of contractors, the service is streamlined but pretty basic and if you need anything out of the ordinary they probably won't do it.
Errr.... time of year may have an effect, like a lot of things it seems to be easier to find work in the first few months of the year, though I have had two start in November/December.
What's the work like? Is it mostly legacy code or are you creating new projects from scratch? What's the usual contract length? I'm really interested in contracting this year and I see a lot of 3 month contracts for my stack, I'd prefer to do a 1 month contract to test the water first. Do you feel you have enough time to connect with the employees, etc?
I'm a bit of a dinosaur in some ways, my main saleable skill is C, with some C++11 thrown in and various other bits and pieces.
The work varies. I've been brought in as a 'resource' little different to an employee by a few places, tinkering at the edges of long-established products and having to take technical direction from senior staff, with little to no input to designs myself.
OTOH in other places I have been brought in during the very early phases of product development, and even more or less taken ownership of direction for entire products. These companies also tended to treat me more like the consultant I'm trying to portray myself as. You can probably guess I prefer these ones :)
Contracts have varied from 1 year (with no exit clause, regretting signing that one but it's over next week!) down to 2-months, but then that was renewed on a monthly basis several times. Mostly due to hysterically over-optimistic delivery estimates by the guy running the project...
I've made some connection with the employees pretty much everywhere, and have been in contact with a few since the end of contract, sometimes they've even been enquiring whether I'm free for a stint at some new place they've moved on to.
It depends on my arrangement with a client. Work-for-hire contracts make reuse impossible, and so I tend to price higher, whereas a perpetual, transferable, etc. license to the code I work on has a better chance of being useful down the line and so I may knock a couple bucks off.
My thought was to develop a library for code re-use among clients. It would cover common problems/features. In your experience, do many contract workers have such a thing?
I dunno, but I wouldn't want to have such a thing in a stack. I reuse code like "hey, I've got this super nice Vagrant setup that makes life easier" or "I've got this Chef cookbook that's a little too specialized to meaningfully open-source but I can turn it around to help," rather than application-level code. If I had a library for application code-reuse, I'd just find a platform-appropriate library like Guava or something and try to get it in there, or open-source the whole thing myself.
I dunno about others, but I sure do! I have CSS stylesheets in 7 colour themes, a dozen bootstrap-like JS plugins that add common interactive elements I can drop into any site,
and tons of parts and pieces of layouts (like an order form, signup form, pricing chart, or media player) isolated and ready to re-use.
I also maintain a big snippets file, filled with HTML, CSS, JS, and command-line snippets and tricks so I can grab them from anywhere.
I dont know how any freelancer or contractor doesnt have a bag of tricks like this.
My responsive testing tool is located at: https://github.com/tomhodgins/speedtest You can use your keyboard keys 1-0 to test a variety of widths quickly, or use the buttons on mobile to test widths your phone or tablet can't physically emulate
You can also check out my CodePen profile, here's my collection of 'Front-end snippets', but I've got plenty more on there you can feel free to use or expand on: http://codepen.io/collection/nNqyvZ/
170 comments
[ 675 ms ] story [ 3657 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8908279
It's interesting that the other thread was 364 days ago, which would have been exactly this same Monday last year (ie: the beginning of the third week of Jan.)
update: I post my pitch in the freelancer thread and potential clients contact me, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9998249
Sites /can/ work (I know people who make a good living off certain sites), but nothing will beat self-managed marketing on the long run.
Feel free to email me (see profile) if you have specific questions.
Good luck!
Two approaches:
1) Work for one large client and essentially become an employee (consider this. a lot of startups pay good money for remote employees)
2) Work for multiple clients
Focusing on #2 here
Core rule: You want to be paid premium for quality and service.
Avoid marketplaces - it's very hard to compete on quality here.
Niche - the more focused you are on a (profitable) niche the better you can charge premium for domain competence
As thibaut_barrere mentioned - Build a brand - i would even go further - create an agency like brand. At the point is stopped saying "I" but said "we" i was able to charge more.
Dont charge by the hour but by the value - most developers charge their time - you want to charge the value you provide to the client. Read up on "willingness to pay"
Most important: Deliver as promised and always try to over-deliver in service, quality, etc. Eg try to understand why the client asks for features and not only what features she/he asks for - you might be able to come up with better solutions or anticipate future requests. Any successful project should usually lead to improved reputation and more projects and clients.
Good luck!
This sounds like a recipe for disaster to me without a lot more explanation. Time is the main cost to a provider, so it's very natural that time would also be the driver for billing. "Charging for value" sounds like you're trying to say "fixed price" without actually saying it. I have many, many issues with trying to do fixed price projects of any appreciable size (say, more than 20-40 hours).
What do you mean, precisely, by "charge by the value"?
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/
That being said, if the client is unable to commit to tight specs and project plans, you need to revert to invoicing on a time & materials basis. But even if you do that, you should really charge a daily rate, rather than an hourly rate.
That's really going to depend on the type of work you do and the type of clients you can find. In my experience, it's difficult to get contracts with larger businesses unless you know someone already or have some sort of "in" with them. And smaller business tend to be poorly run and are barely making any money on their products and services, so they have very thin margins or are even losing money.
Say you're really good with Postgres, instead of just hanging out a shingle for "any Postgres stuff?" you offer something like a one time $2500 "Postgres Performance Audit".
You get really good at this one thing, have a set bunch of scripts, very deep knowledge, predone report template, etc. and providing a bunch of value. So at the end of the day who cares that it only took you 5 hours (effectively making $500/hr).
Bunch of examples: http://www.christophengelhardt.com/ultimate-badass-list-of-p...
That mentality is similar to charge by value.
Practically I've had success recently by charging weekly. I keep this rate deliberately lower (about half my old full time consulting rate). Then I send them a weekly report along with the invoice every week. They get to see exactly what they got for the money. It usually takes me 15-20 hours to deliver enough value for the weekly rate.
So there are lots of things to try. Small changes in billing can have a large impact on your relationship with your client.
Have an upvote. I don't work in software, but I am a grant writing consultant, and I've never met a successful consultant of any kind who relied on or even used marketplaces.
A huge part of many consultants's lives consists of marketing and pitching. I know that we've found email marketing to be our biggest strength in this regard. Consultants who can't get deal flow or close deals won't survive.
I also learned a lot about assertiveness and saying no by being a consultant: http://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/07/how-i-learned-about-assert....
You have now. I started on PeoplePerHour. Once I had a few good reviews on my profile, I could get jobs more easily; eventually got some big clients off them, which pushed me to PPH's top 5 and I was able to get whichever job I would bid on from then on; I'd always seek the large ones that would last a few months.
At the time of course, PPH was a fairly newish marketplace. It's very different now; polluted with low grade jobs and low grade bidders that promise the world for $100.
But to me, this tells that the problem isn't "the marketplace" but the target audience.
In any case, big +1 to GP post. To reiterate two of their points:
1. Do avoid most marketplaces, unless you can find one where you can easily compete on quality (and if you do find one, tell me about it, heh).
2. Charge fixed price by the value. This means choose your jobs and clients carefully. If you pick a bad client, or a job where you need more time than you anticipated to complete it, you might end up underpaid - Roll with it and learn from it, don't make the same mistake twice.
These things are easier said than done. Could you share a bit about what you've learned in the way of avoiding bad clients and estimating your work?
a) Its easy for clients to blurt stuff out over the phone without a second thought. It's impossible for me to take accurate notes on this, only to get an impression of what they're after.
b) A written brief tells a lot about someone's communication capabilities. When a written brief is poor then I have a better idea on how to deal with a client like this, i.e. I have to do a lot more hand holding and depending on my existing workload I can either decide to let them go or not.
Also, watch out for clients who bring carrot danglers, i.e. they will suggest that you should do this project either for cheap or free because they have a lot of other projects coming up in the near future (they don't). In this scenario simply reply that you have to charge 100% for this project but that you might be able to give a discount on a future project, you won't hear from them again since they want cheap or free.
Also, never lower your hourly rate but give a discount instead. This means that clients still see what you'd normally charge and if they come back in the future you actually can charge them your normal rate.
Bad clients will always have red flags early on. If you talk to them for 30 minutes and the job is already twice the size you initially thought it was, you might be with someone who will want to ask for more along the way.
If there is any doubt:
- Ask for a small % in advance or a larger % in escrow. Clients that can't handle that are unlikely to be easy to deal with come time of the bill.
- If the project is unclear, ask for sketches/photoshops before signing the final contract. You can also do those yourself and ask if this is what they have in mind.
- Make sure to have a written transcription of exactly what you will do, alongside the contract. Emails, transcribed/recorded calls, etc.
If you're a core part of your client's product, they will more than likely be willing to hire you for more work, or as an employee for continued maintenance.
And don't be afraid of saying no to shitty contracts. One really good client can easily bring you a year's worth of work.
Without that job board, I would not have been able to make the switch from programming into translation.
Which is another way of saying, the general problem isn't a good billing model. It's good clients. Unfortunately, most contractors/freelancers starting out and looking for advice won't have good clients (even when they have clients at all) and will have trouble distinguishing good clients from people who look like good clients until the invoice arrives.
YMMV.
1. Don't take the work at any price.
2. Do it for free.
Again, if a person has experience and great clients, the choice of pricing model is a problem. If a person lacks experience to judge what the value is in the client's domain and/or the client isn't proven to be good, pricing model doesn't matter as much.
The value model price isn't based on what the work is worth, it's based on what the freelancer believes the client believes the work is worth. Under the value based pricing model, if the client is deluded it's reasonable to fleece them...and deluded clients who pay well are good clients.
Me: I see you're looking to fill a position involving a lot of graphics work. We could help you out.
Them: Please send the resume.
Me: I'm not offering the services of just a single developer. We have a variety of services we offer. Please see our web site at <http://www.example.com/>.
Them: Please send the resume.
Me: I'm unclear what resume you want me to send. I'm not offering you a single person, but a full-service solution.
Them: Please send the resume.
Me: ...?
I'm sure I could have spent time coming up with some response for these people, but it wasn't worth it. I ended up only working with clients I could deal with directly as it was much easier to have a conversation with them.
So just be aware that you'll have to deal with this type of nonsense from time-to-time.
I think you just described what 'sales' is.
Contracts Do this. Get familiar with contract law and make sure your customers execute one that's favorable to you getting paid. Also, ensure you assign at least a license to the client paying you to avoid any problems down the road if you intend to reuse code.
Big projects If you intend to tackle big projects you usually need to deal with net terms. Find an invoice factoring company to help you cashflow those deals. They base interest on the loans on your clients.
Domain experience and expertise are also key. I have a rare blend of experience and technical capability that align perfectly with my primary contract. This limits some of the risk that is associated with relying so much financially on a single entity since they'd have a really hard time ending things with me and swapping in another programmer. I'll also go above and beyond for this client as it's needed. It's a two way street.
Anyways, best wishes on finding a good source of contract work but I'd recommend investigating any major/long term contract. They can simplify your life and be extremely rewarding.
I basically did everything more or less the way you described. Which is something absolutely hard to do. As a result, in Aug 2014 we were 2 but today, as I write this, we are 14 and growing.
Company is profitable, has no VC money and is fully self-funded (initially, by my computer and...a decent internet connection).
The main way clients came to us is through our website, Dribbble, Behance but also through referrals - people that worked with us in the past, and that recommend our work to a friend. This latter is the oldest but definitely the best marketing you can get!
For Germany, Gulp (www.gulp.de) is a very good site where you can actually find clients that are willing to pay a reasonable hourly rate (they even have a rate calculator on their site).
I started registering on TopTal, but then got too lazy jumping through their hoops and not knowing what the upside is.
which is pretty middle-of-the road as far as rates go there. rarely takes me more than 2 weeks to find a new job on there. and that includes rejecting jobs I dont think i'd like.
the biggest benefits IMO are that they screen their clients very well (they know they're getting top-tier quality and arent afraid to pay top-tier rates) and negotiate to get you the rate you want. Also, they handle the billing very well, so even if the client is acting janky, you'll get paid.
As a freelancer it's of course always better to get gigs through your own network, but I think sites like these are a good way to get started before having this kind of connections.
I found that it wasn't the first degree connections that led to work but the second degree connections. Get your immediate network to introduce you to others and drum up work from them.
[0] http://www.jstor.org/stable/2776392?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Granovetter
Edit: I mean on HN similar to the first of month feature not a site (I know these are out there obviously).
I suspect the secret to contract work success lies in having really good networking skills and a Rolodex of contacts from having worked in a given industry and having a reputation as someone who delivers. If you don't have that then you would probably have better luck finding reasonable work by going to meetups or similar industry events to build a network of professional contacts. The only way I know of to do this online is to become a notable contributor to prominent open source projects and then use that to leverage paid work.
Neither my contractors nor I would want to move to any other platform because no other platform provides that kind of honesty and confidence between Contractor and Employee.
As an employer I can totally see why you would love it, it's an effective way to pay bottom dollar for simplistic computer tasks.
From the stand point of someone looking to get into software engineer contract work it's lame. The guaranteed payment thing you are talking about is only for projects that are billed hourly. If you bid on a flat rate project there is no such guarantee. The hourly pay rate guarantee also requires you to install a spyware app on your computer to monitor your work.
Examples of work that I use it for are simple html/css stuff that just needs to get knocked out prior to integration into an app. I'll pay between $300-500 from some straight forward design to html/css conversion. I want it to be worth their while.
Also, I've use it frequently for GIS work. I'm just not proficient in it and would rather pay someone that is. I managed to find an incredible person on upwork and give him the specs for each project before I quote my customers. He sets the price for the GIS components and I routinely encourage him to charge more.
So to be clear, I don't use upwork to find a deal on the project (no doubt a ton of people do). I use it because it is a platform that can keep talented people busy and available for the next time I need to rely on them. I'd hire a full time GIS expert if I had steady work for the, but I don't so going with a subcontract makes a lot more sense.
That's because there are so many low-bar employers.
Many of whom are also hanging out places like HN, complaining that there are no good developers while praising anything which drives down wages.
To know why there are few good developers, look no further than the market price. It doesn't justify top effort. I could sweat blood competing on price and throughput with people who have a cost of living that is a small fraction of mine, hoping against reason that someone will spontaneously give me a raise out of the goodness of their hearts. Or... not.
Most of the people who would eat your projects for breakfast don't want to be worked like pizza delivery drivers, delivering as cheap and fast as possible and hoping for tips. So they aren't on these sites. These sites are where careers go to die.
It has its place and I do my part to make sure that the qualified people that I hire on it are well compensated with clear expectations and no need to hope for tips. Maybe I'm doing them a disservice by offering a glimpse of sunlight on a platform that otherwise stacks the cards against them. You have me wondering.
I 100% agree with you that it's mostly a crap shoot of competing with people that have a cost of living that is so utterly different that ours that it's impossible to make a living. But I do think there are some niche skills where this is not the case and people with a high cost of living can still thrive on the platform.
1) "Image Viewer - Python: In search of a python developer to build an application which cleanly display and organizes many images (200+) as thumbnails on one interface. The interface will display approx 6 data fields contained in two tables."
Budget: $50 (This client has previously hired 7 other people and spent $477 in total on Upwork)
2) "Python Help: I am looking for help in my python code, searching feature and fixing. Its a assignment if you can do this quickly let me know. Coding is almost completed, you need to correct logic and searching features. Hardly 35-50 line code, small assignment."
Budget: $10 (This client has previously hired 9 people and spent $284 in total on Upwork)
3) "Parse Fields from HTML file: Parse fields from HTML document Required language: Python (Python package BeautifulSoup is allowed/preferred.) Input: Python function that accepts file name (2 HTML files) Output: Python dictionary. All listed fields should be a separate key. Addresses should also be a dictionary so that city, state, and zip are separate Fields to pull out: First Name, Last Name, City, State, ETC ETC roughly 20 fields between two different HTML document types/formats."
Budget: $60 (This client has previously hired 23 people and spent $3,791 on Upwork, they pay an average of $10.10 per hour)
So based on those I don't think it has improved at all.
The majority of projects advertised seemed to be things like web scraping, homework cheating, people who wanted computer software to pick a magic lottery number, etc...
When I first had a look I got quite pessimistic about my chances of finding work and money through it but decided nonetheless to give it a fair go.
I passed a few tests that gave me an initial edge as a newcomer, and decided to follow most freelancing advice I found on the internet: don't down-value yourself with a bad hourly rate, and apply to jobs professionally. It took me a few weeks to get a first contract, and after a month or so I was working 60h per week. I also read "The Freelance Pricing Guidebook" by Glenn Stovall which is a simple pdf of a dozen of pages which really gave me a good think of how to approach being independent and potential pricing strategies.
I also try to get out of the platform once I built the relationship with the client but it is not without risk if they run out of money, you don't have that nice guarantee that the platform offers. It happened to me that a client owed me 5 digits amounts and I regretted for a while having gone directly to him (he ended up paying, he had just ran out of cash).
If you find an USA client and you are not in the USA, with the strong USD it can be really advantageous for both parties. If you are in the USA I'd still say you can do well (I think Australia is more expensive than USA).
Maybe I really got lucky, or necessity forced me to succeed since my girlfriend got sent to a rural area with no work for me. Now days my work is so much more interesting, better paid and I met some amazing people thanks to that platform.
I didn't bid to low quality jobs and once I finish my job I offer them an maintenance contract outside upwork.
Few years ago, this worked quite well, but now there are some idiots that charge a high price for low quality work just to try to take advantage of people like me. So, now it takes some more time to filter through, but still works pretty well.
I came into Syracuse knowing nobody and nothing.
I had never done any app making as of January 2015. I had done some wordpress stuff, but just the basics.
And I had (and have) no CS degree.
I now make a living on contract work. I did it by going to local meetups and introducing myself as a freelance web developer. Nevermind that I hadn't done freelance web development ever. I kept going to meetups for month and still attend a monthly hacker meetup. I participated in hackathons without really knowing how to program.
But all along the way I met people more experienced than I am and picked up two clients along the way. I think one thing that I do differently to most is that I charge a high rate (I always quote $150/hr). I am willing to negotiate lower than that but its a starting point. I have been paid that in the past for less complicated work like hiring developers and being a project manager.
What am I saying? Your questions is what sites to use? Just one: meetup.com
I find that meetups can sometimes become circle-jerks for people in a similar field to just get together and talk/humblebrag. Which is fine, but if that's not your goal you need to look at different meetups which serve that goal.
Some meetups I went to were the exact circle-jerk/humblebragfests you're talking about.
The one I consistently go to (shameless plug [OpenHack Syracuse](http://www.openhacksyr.com) is a monthly meetup for developers to talk about what projects they're working on and to spend time together working on projects, ideas, and sharing info. It's really just an organized hangout/hack session. And it's these types of meetups which are best for getting contract work (because contract work isn't the goal)
Since then, I start with an estimate of $150/hr when I'm calculating price. I've had one person balk and say thats crazy. one.
Everyone else has either came back and said that they can't afford that, that they'd like to pay $XXX instead. Or they've said yes to $150/hr.
What happens if you encounter projects you are unable to solve, is it a fake it until you make it sort of thing?
With just about every project I do I don't know exactly how I'll solve it to begin with. Before I start billing I always have a research phase, either a day or a week, but never more than that, to figure out how I'll do it. I don't bill for hours that I study, just hours that I work on their project.
I hope this is helpful, but essentially, I deal fairly with all clients. As long as terms are understood upfront I find everyone is happy.
Typical projects are 4-6 months I'd say.
Just start quoting double. It's a negotiation.
Unfortunately I'm not sure that anybody else is much better! I still get most of my work through interpersonal connections and the occasional email from Hacker News readers.
(I've been contracting for about 3 years now, some in London)
I think logo designers, web developers and translators get a lot more traffic. I just recently was upgraded to 1st level seller after 3 months, so I think it's relatively fast.
I understand there are growing pains, but not one of my emails have been responded to regarding this issue.
> in less than 5 minutes the project was fully spec'd and underway.
Honest question: why would I need a top '1% developer' for a project that can be fully spec'd in less than 5 minutes?
In short, to answer your question, I never used any sites to find contract work. I got all my leads through face-to-face interaction with real humans in the real world, and a good deal of it came from word-of-mouth because of exceeding my clients' expectations.
Contracting sites marginalize developers and the type of clients who troll them are typically the kind who will try to squeeze as much work out of developers for as little money as they can. On top of that, developers are generally a pretty introverted crowd, so the number of introverted and talented developers who troll those sites looking for work is far greater than the number of outgoing, personable developers in your local area. Which group do you want to compete against?
Instead, I browse job boards and when I find an interesting role I contact the company. If they are interested in my background and the fit is right, I sell them on setting up a contract relationship instead of full-time employee. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. The important part is being honest that you are looking to work as a contractor, not an employee.
Job boards to consider: AngelList, WeWorkRemotely etc. If you're looking for a list of job boards (http://nodesk.co has lots and so does this article by teleport http://teleport.org/2015/03/best-sites-for-remote-jobs/)
Depending on your living situation and time available I’d recommend trying to establish your own identity so you don’t have to go through a marketplace for contract work. Instead you’ll have the contract work come to you and not filtered through a middleman that would take a cut out of your work. I would never recommend someone go through fiverr, Upwork or these other marketplaces unless they were just moonlighting.
If you're in the UK...
I've been contracting about 3 years now and started it the simple (and probably dumb) way - stick a resume up on jobsite.co.uk, wait for agents to call. Lots will. Be nice to them on the phone but be firm about what rates and locations you're willing to work. You'll get lots of useless ones who haven't even bothered to read it, but no matter, you'll learn to filter them out pretty quickly. Remember the good ones. Rinse, repeat.
I've had two contracts now through reputation, which is quite nice, but getting contracts from previous workmates isn't a panacea. One of them was the most boring thing I've ever done in my life (worse than shelf-stacking in a warehouse) and I quit after three weeks because I was literally unable to complete the work it was so dull. I told the client that I was poor value for money and a recent graduate would be a better choice. The other one was good though!
Also, make sure you're prepared for some time off between contracts, it's pretty much going to happen.
I worked permanently for various companies in and around London for about 10 years, then got sick of London, moved to Australia, did a couple more years permanent work there, then decided to move back to the UK. At that point I was sick of being an employee and had a vague offer from a friend to help bootstrap a startup, which fell through. So in lieu of having an idea to start up a company myself I decided I was going to be a contractor, set myself up a limited company and started throwing my CV at anyone that asked. I have got most of my contracts through agencies that called me, not through contacts.
Making the leap can be tricky - if you have a notice period longer than one month you may have to quit your current job and then look for contracts afterwards. A lot of people want contractors to start now. You may not find one for a month or more, I've had dry patches lasting a couple of months before, and it might be another month after you start before you can invoice, and it could be another month again before you get paid, so you need a financial cushion.
As soon as you get your first contract you'll need an accountant. These come in at about £100 per month. I use Nixon Williams, this is not necessarily a recommendation, they deal with hundreds of contractors, the service is streamlined but pretty basic and if you need anything out of the ordinary they probably won't do it.
Errr.... time of year may have an effect, like a lot of things it seems to be easier to find work in the first few months of the year, though I have had two start in November/December.
Anything else you want to know?
The work varies. I've been brought in as a 'resource' little different to an employee by a few places, tinkering at the edges of long-established products and having to take technical direction from senior staff, with little to no input to designs myself.
OTOH in other places I have been brought in during the very early phases of product development, and even more or less taken ownership of direction for entire products. These companies also tended to treat me more like the consultant I'm trying to portray myself as. You can probably guess I prefer these ones :)
Contracts have varied from 1 year (with no exit clause, regretting signing that one but it's over next week!) down to 2-months, but then that was renewed on a monthly basis several times. Mostly due to hysterically over-optimistic delivery estimates by the guy running the project...
I've made some connection with the employees pretty much everywhere, and have been in contact with a few since the end of contract, sometimes they've even been enquiring whether I'm free for a stint at some new place they've moved on to.
I also maintain a big snippets file, filled with HTML, CSS, JS, and command-line snippets and tricks so I can grab them from anywhere.
I dont know how any freelancer or contractor doesnt have a bag of tricks like this.
Most of the other plugins and things are included in https://github.com/tomhodgins/template-factory
My HTML/CSS/JS/CLI snippets file is located here: https://gist.github.com/tomhodgins/27c29ecb4aceaefe5cdf
My responsive testing tool is located at: https://github.com/tomhodgins/speedtest You can use your keyboard keys 1-0 to test a variety of widths quickly, or use the buttons on mobile to test widths your phone or tablet can't physically emulate
If you're looking for a 'view source' tool for mobile, check out https://github.com/tomhodgins/sourceror It's a simple PHP proxy that loads the requested site and displays it as content on the page. For example, I have it hosted at http://staticresource.com/inspect so I can append a URL after a '?' and see the code formatted nicely. Like http://staticresource.com/inspect/?http://staticresource.com...
You can also check out my CodePen profile, here's my collection of 'Front-end snippets', but I've got plenty more on there you can feel free to use or expand on: http://codepen.io/collection/nNqyvZ/
Hope that sets you off to a good start :)