Devranters who are freelancers, why do you choose to not get a job instead ?

Why? Being your own boss is great. More work though.

@olback for me maybe not. I have terrible self discipline. So many unfinished projects

Because I detest other people/teams and can pay all my expenses just fine, work whenever I want, never be stuck with one fucked up project, not have marketing decide what I do, choose my own jobs, have the freedom of tools/stack/.. you name it.

@JoshBent but finding clients ? Isnt that a gigantic pain in the ass ?

"When you work for somebody else your income is always capped at what they think you are worth"
When you work for yourself if a client thinks you are charging too much you can tell them to move along but when you work for a company you are pretty much screwed cause if you quit and look for another job you will usually be blackwalled

@xecute not if you actually use your skills to create both a bot that notifies you of highly interesting jobs and also create a dashboard to scroll through that caches jobs by criteria and also automatically removes old ones.

@JoshBent everything else on hold. This is my next project. Thank you !

@xecute some keywords that could help you depending on your project:

- telegram bot + nodejs telegram bot API
- Upwork RSS/Atom feed can be pulled without any API key and saved from a search that has already min budget set etc
- if you want to pull how many bids there is and more detailed things, you'll need the API key (it's free to apply though, just make sure to overestimate what you'll need and check their rate limits)

@JoshBent You're a fucking genius my man lol

@xecute You can also stream line your development so you can start/release projects easier. You can create a base repo and have it forked when you take another project. Personally i suggest gitlab where you can have ci automatically setup.

@Stuxnet lol why am I? 😅

@JoshBent The bot and dash board... That's genius!

@Stuxnet haha thanks

@JoshBent what @Stuxnet said. That is fucking brilliant

@AleCx04 thanks, have mentioned it before though, so I am surprised people haven't seen it yet :)

I used to have a job as well.

Job paid very well, but was boring work.

Freelance paid pretty well/extremely well (depending on client), but I could pick and choose interesting projects. Meaning the day job could be boring.

In my country it is almost impossible to find a suitable dev job in parttime.

40h/week on paper is almost always 60h/week (plus commuting) in reality and that's just too much for me. I have only one life to live.

Now I freelance, get my clients from other clients (I don't have a website nor do I promote myself in anyway) and, although I'm broke all the time, have a much richer life than before.

@jAsE Everyone has choice. Albeit at a possible cost.

I make 3x more than the salary I get offered (2 month ago) by a company. (Same working hour)

Money and freedom.

Perm positions are an investment and commitment. You worth is not determined by the work you do but rather how you fit in the company. You could save the company millions and still be paid less than a colleague who is friendly with a decision maker.

With contract, at least, if you dont like a job, you're already planning leaving. If the pay isn't what you want, then you learn for next time to ask for more. Since you decided the price before the job, you feel less like you're getting hustled and more in charge of your own destiny especially when you can say "Well I am here for x, but now you need a, b, c and d...they're not even letters near the job description. I will need this much more to complete."

You get to build yourself as a brand, build connections and actually make a name for yourself outside of your office.

@JoshBent can you please share more info about your own project it's really interesting

@Mba3gar uhm, not sure what to share else, ask away and I'll answer? :)

@xecute this: @CodeBane also reminds me of another thing, I was a digital nomad for some time before, where I would literally just drive anywhere and still be able to work from there and receive (physical-) mail etc. it's a really great thing to do and helps you relax at any point you need, though even though I still have that same option to me available, I settled down and now just enjoy the comfort of my home, but what matters is the option not to be fixed to some contract or overtime for your off-time/holidays.