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Ask HN: Are you a self employed Software Engineer? If so, what is that like?

14 points by sunday_serif ↗ HN
If you are a self employed software engineer… how does that work? What is your schedule like? How do you find work? What do you do?

…For lack of a more precise question, I really just want to know: what is it like?

8 comments

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sema4hacker
Retired now, but was a self-employed programmer for 35 years. Fortunate to get away from consulting and contract work (not recommended) and into developing and selling my own software product (highly recommended). Marketing was much tougher in the old days. Finding a need and filling it was very lucrative. Be ready to turn on a dime. Don't get distracted trying to solve technical challenges you think are cool but for which the market is too small. Focus on what your customers really need (as opposed to what they think they want). If you truly enjoy programming, being your own boss is challenging, but done right can be a hell of a lot of fun.
sunday_serif
That’s great! It sounds like you had a very successful career.

Was it hard to find a niche to fill?

Presumably as an individual selling your own software, you could reasonably find a very small niche and that would be enough to sustain you.

badpun
This is a dream of many developers. Unfortunately, there are tens of millions of developers, and probably only thousands of ideas which can be done as a one-man shop. Also, the market for tools for the one area in which all of us have expertise (programming) have long been been destroyed by race to the bottom price-wise, culminating in everything just becoming open source.
karanveer
thank you for this, im kind of burnt out since a few years in contract work…so i understand this somewhat however i also thank you for briefly providing your 35+ years of xp into a brief para.

if you have more on your journey and how it was different 35 years ago in the software i would definitely be interested to listen and learn more. I’m sure i’m not the only one intrigued..

nagyf
> Finding a need and filling it was very lucrative

Any tips on how to find a project idea? What worked for you?

maxilevi
I sell software products I develop. Like another commenter wrote, you end up building what the market needs and not necessarily what you find interesting.

It's also tough mentally, you could wake up and your revenue is cut in half, a new competitor appears, your software can become obsolete, etc.

Having all this in mind, it's very fun and I love it.

karanveer
ngl , you had me in the “it’s very fun and I love it ”
djellybeans
I stumbled into it by accident as a junior software engineer. They offered me a 3-month contract-to-hire job, but instead it became a 2-year independent contractor job for the company. Most jobs that followed have been cold applying to startup contract jobs from Craigslist or obtaining them from local word-of-mouth. It's very feast or famine, and not everyone can keep the momentum of new clients going. As for myself, I am planning to leave self-employed work for the first time in over a decade, for the relative safety of a full-time job (even with the current market situation).