I think you - and a lot of other people - overstate how hard this is. It's really not much of a churn to get leads in todays market. Even for someone who keeps working at small companies (whoops) in a tech backwater like me.
Also clients are really not like bosses at all - even for me who is on the "software pro" - to use the Daedtech terminology [0]- end of the self employment spectrum.
- There's no polite fiction that I'm going to stick around indefinitely
- The 'interviews' are way shorter, because it's so much easier to fire me. I'm backing myself to deliver which is a show of confidence
- It's just a much more honest and less un-equal conversation. I can survive without them, they can survive without me, but we have a mutually beneficial relationship. Not one based on power or desperation.
I was a consultant for 8 years and burned out, in part because of the context switching between sales and delivery. It can be exhausting.
More specifically not the sales per se but the extensive amount of in depth relationship work at very sophisticated clients. Or the cheap clients that always want something for nothing. You can have a lot of inbound, but how many of those clients are qualified?
Then there’s the complicated contract negotiation process, which is its own huge headache with months of legal negotiation extending well beyond the desired project start time. Often from big companies that role your eyes at you when you say you want to negotiate.
Then when it’s all said and done, chasing payment. They promise they’ll pay in 30, 45, 60 whatever days, but there’s always an excuse for not getting paid. Often made up ones that actually violate your contract with them. But what are you going to do, sue? You can stop work, and we did, but then you’re maybe burning bridges and disrupting the tech colleagues you work with day in, day out…
Relationship work is important in any work. And you’re _always_ selling and communicating value. But when it becomes all about administriva like contracts or being paid, it’s no fun. I don’t think it’s a valuable use of smart peoples time.
Finally, there’s a certain type of company that hires lots of consultants. And they often aren’t the ones you would choose to work with. They hire consultants because they have bigger organizational dysfunction but lack awareness to tackle that dysfunction.
This is no panacea, as it also means you have no employer paying Social Security taxes on your behalf, not to mention not getting any employer-provided benefits either.
I live in Brazil so things might be different. I have to fill taxes monthly and the system to do it sucks. I have to clear cookies each time I visit it or log in wouldn't work. I'm probably overreacting because I find it extremely boring.
Just use a private browser window if it's so bad? Most of the browsers have a mode like that that won't store cookies for the sites that you visit in it. Nor should that mode give any of your already present cookies to the private session. You shouldn't have to clear all of your cookies to just make one site not persist session data.
Thanks but who does not know about incognito mode? :)
It's not a big deal, I just have to clear/remove cookies for just that site. I though it wouldn't work in incognito mode because theoretically it would require access to my client certificate which I believe wouldn't/shouldn't work in a private window. Anyway I tried and it worked because the site is not using it in the end.
> Thanks but who does not know about incognito mode?
Just felt like the perfect use case for it, not sure why it wasn't considered previously. Your update makes sense and clears things up, though. Thanks!
Oh, yeah, that does sound like a pain. My interaction is limited to signing into the tax system once a year and dropping my total amount of income and expenses.
Especially now that I’m not elligible for any startup discounts any more (and sole proprietor, so no employees) the thing has become almost automatic.
This is why I got an accountant who set up the aspects of my side-hustle business I'm too stupid^H^H^H^H^H^H lazy^H^H^H^H busy to sort out. Yes I could have done this all myself but could I have done it myself the correct way from the outset? Not a chance. I would have screwed up some detail.
Its silly, lots of people do their own taxes but forget what they normally charge per hour and how slow they do the taxes makes it not worth it. No one would hire them to do taxes at those rates.
this of course only works if you spend the time in exchange for billable hours.
if you do it during down time or in your free time, you of course save money.
I wish to do so, I approached a few and will definitely hire one when I incorporate as a one person company.
The issue is that I did not find one with experience in my activity as it is very particular when compared to that of their average client. And I was reasonably scared that the ones that I could hire could screw me. So I ended up studying how things should be done for this particular case and I think I'm better doing it myself.
I always found companies with disfunction are the ones where you can get most benefit for yourself. You do have to make sure you work their disfunction to your benefit, not getting crushed by it. They usually have a lot of problems, some are solvable, some are not, you have to pick solvable ones and do good job and you will have a good time.
The idea that this sort of thing is easy is precisely why most startups fail. Sure the ideas and tech and implementation are hard, but that happens to be what most of us are good at. But guess what? The administration of the business is also hard (harder?).
This is just the inverse thought process of a couple of business students with an app idea for which they plan on outsourcing the programming for $5 an hour. It's a simple app, no problem!
> The idea that this sort of thing is easy is precisely why most startups fail
Most small businesses fail, too, but a small business such as a boutique consulting services company does not have the same risk profile as a startup.
I never said it's easy, but it's certainly not as hard as building a unicorn. The difficulty is commensurate to the risk and the scale, I hope you can appreciate that?
If you don't want to delegate, then the other only alternative is to put up with doing these jobs (marketing & sales, finance & accounting, etc.) since they are not going away regardless of your technical expertise.
> So the solution to people working for a boss and not themselves is to hire people to work for you
Your comment is not only facetious, but also quite unintelligent.
I was not replying to the idea that "everyone should work for themselves". You've just taken that idea and replied to yourself, not to anything I was saying.
I do apologise, my comment wasn’t really directed at you at all. I was simply lampooning the idea, apparently held by some here, that working for others is an inherently abusive relationship. That employers are exploiters.
I did not say it was easy to run. I was implying it's the only way to avoid doing marketing and sales, finances and accounting, operations, etc. by yourself since those jobs are never going away.
Also, as astonishing as this may seem to a lot of HNers, most modern economies are built upon SMEs. There are good, normal people working in small businesses all over the world. You could run an operation with half a dozen people and focus on technical delivery and strategic sales (I don't think you can ever delegate high-level sales). This poses its own set of challenges but it really is a middle ground between having to do everything as a sole trader and living stressed out of your tits trying to build a unicorn.
> - The 'interviews' are way shorter, because it's so much easier to fire me. I'm backing myself to deliver which is a show of confidence
I've never found this to be the case. Interviewing for an employee position was usually < 4 hours. But I have to spend way more time than that meeting with clients and putting together proposals before winning a contract.
I think there's a certain type of person who has no trouble selling themselves and therefore finds this sort of thing easier than those of us who are most decidedly not salesmen.
Surprisingly (at least for me) I find that freelancing has made it much easier to solicit business than the hiring process as an employee.
When freelancing neither side has the expectation that this is forever. We both understand we have our own businesses but will benefit from this particular time-limited engagement.
In contrast, in employment there's this whole charade where the company pitches it as a brilliant opportunity and you're supposed to play the game and pretend to care about their values, how exciting the work is or be enthused by their mission to change the world when ultimately the only thing that should matter to you is the paycheck.
I was extremely surprised how low Upwork's fees are.
In vanilla software consulting it's not uncommon for the middleman to take 20% or a third off the top. Or even more extraordinary amounts in the more traditional places like Booz.
Upwork's taking less than 10%.
It's extraordinarily good value for money compared to many recruiters and other middlemen.
The downside is of course there's a very good community of talented international developers on there.
> The downside is of course there's a very good community of talented international developers on there.
There is a far larger community of horribly bad developers on there, many of them working at low rates to get high ratings. I am on both sides; hiring and getting hired and the hiring part is far more beneficial imho. What is a huge PITA as well; once someone who is rather mediocre (junior with some promise for instance), after a few good reviews they hike the price up so far that it makes no sense at all hiring them. I have used upwork (and before than Elance and others) for 20 years with 100s of people and almost always people overplay their hand and come back begging for another chance.
I actually freelanced for a while during college, in parallel to studying CS, before i found local part time employment as a developer.
Admittedly, there's a large amount of project postings that have unclear or unrealistic requirements (feature or estimate wise), almost always you can expect either some outdated or obscure stack in pre-existing codebases/platforms, typically some badly developed WordPress site that you're supposed to fix or use for things that WordPress isn't really suited for (advanced CRUD), you'll almost never find projects with documentation, any sort of a quality control/code review, or even separate test environments.
There are good projects there every now and then too, but be prepared to compete in a race to the bottom price wise, knowing that many of those potential clients shall pick the cheaper developers, which sometimes will result in similar neglect of the codebases, because if you accept multiple projects you only have so much time for each (and the clients won't necessarily know any better). Sometimes the developers are simply in a lower CoL area, but depending on where you live, you'll also have to cope with that, some projects will just be below your living expenses.
I'd probably say that in my limited experience, around 90-95% of the project postings on the site as a web dev were like that at any given time, whereas around 70-80% of the projects that i got to work on weren't satisfactory in regards to how easy or even "safe" the development process and communication was, even if i tried avoiding the red flags for the most part. I got to work for some people that were decent, however the code quality wasn't satisfactory, nor was anything surrounding the code itself.
There are circumstances in which freelancing through them can work, you can also be even more selective with the projects that you undertake, but unless you have a wide variety of skills, you might find yourself missing out on anything reminiscent of a stable income. The best idea would be to somehow manage to find a few good clients and build a longer term business relationship with them, which is probably one of the better outcomes for everyone.
Yes, there are many. https://mission.dev/ is one I've spoken with but haven't had an opening to work with (I think this is the one, they were called GSquad before). When you get past the marketing site and hear from the people, it sounds more like a self-organizing software co-op.
Could worker cooperatives serve that purpose? I suppose there's a trade-off between security in numbers and individual freedom, but maybe working conditions could be better (despite the constraints of a permanent job) if employees shared equally in the business without any non-employees holding voting shares.
At first blush, I might guess "a tech backwater" would be easier to find leads. A tech hub will have so much noise and competition for those leads, even if the leads are more plentiful.
I do miss the days when every teenager who "knows computers" was thought to be more technically competent than adults with 10 years of industry experience and every small business and sole proprietor in existence was looking for a 100% custom website design and was willing to pay an 8th grader rather than a web design firm. Such were the early 00s / my teen years.
As someone who has been on the web site/app dev entrepreneur grind for quite some time now getting leads is a tougher game now more than ever. Social media is fraught with scammers and people with risky black-hat inspired SEO goals that I'm not willing to be a party to at all.
I get lots of emails for jobs and generate estimates at least twice a month only to find out that the person is a scammer posing as a customer. I also get tons of spam that I have to sift through to make sure no customers are missed. It's far easier to go door to door at real business establishments than to get cold leads over the net now.
I can't really complain though, it's still much better than working for warehouse development shops... Far better work-life balance, and I'm in better control of project quality, client management, and the types of projects I agree to complete.
Also clients are really not like bosses at all - even for me who is on the "software pro" - to use the Daedtech terminology [0]- end of the self employment spectrum.
- There's no polite fiction that I'm going to stick around indefinitely
- The 'interviews' are way shorter, because it's so much easier to fire me. I'm backing myself to deliver which is a show of confidence
- It's just a much more honest and less un-equal conversation. I can survive without them, they can survive without me, but we have a mutually beneficial relationship. Not one based on power or desperation.
[0]: https://daedtech.com/a-taxonomy-of-software-consultants/