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Search - "freelance sucks"
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I was 12 years old and it was my first freelance.
I was taking a Web Designer course and my teacher offered me an “opportunity”. He asked me to develop a search engine for a real estate website.
I did it pretty quickly with PHP and MySQL. The amount offered was U$ 20.00 (yeah, I know, it sucks, but it was a good chance to earn experience).
3 months went by, it was the last week of the course and he still hadn’t payed me yet!
End of story: my dad and a couple friends went to the school and had a conversation with him. They said things like: man, you shouldn’t ruin a kid’s dream for twenty dollars. I’m sure he only payed me because he was scared haha7 -
I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.
So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..
So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.
In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.
Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.
At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.
Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.
As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.
Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.
This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.
My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.
During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.
For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;
He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.
I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.
Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.
The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.
Fuck customers.6 -
Upwork:
"Hey freelancer, sorry we can't let you join this website made for freelancers like you as there are too many freelancers like you on this site made for freelancers like you"3 -
My freelance horror story just happened a few weeks ago. Programming final project was due and a classmate payed me to make his project. It was something very simple so I was able to make mine and his different and functional. Grades went up yesterday; he got an A and I got a B+ 🙃 #wk861
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My shit job sucks so much.
How bad, you ask?
Well, let me give you some perspective.
It sucks so bad, that I took a small freelance job ... not much $$$ ... and I actually liked it.
Normally they suck so bad and get so way out of hand that I end up regretting it. Work sucks so bad, it made me happy to something else. -
Freelance client wanted additions to a website I made( which I had already given them a 50% discount, due to being friends with my boss....) sent them a SoW and they complain because the cost...2
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Anybody use Toggl?
I would frown on this in a business environment as far too intrusive... but for a freelancer I wonder if it could help me track my tasks/use/hours more easily.
Because that is one part of freelance that sucks.3 -
Note: In this rant I will ask for advices, and confess some sins. I will tell my personal story- it will be long.
So basically it has been almost 2 years since I first entered the world of software development. It has been the biggest and most important quest of my life so far, but yet I feel like I missed a lot of my objectives, and lots of stuff did not go the way I wanted them to be, and it makes feel frustrated and it lowered my self esteem greatly. I feel confused and a bit depressed, and don't know what to do.
I'll start: I'm 23 years old. 2 years ago I was still a soldier(where I live there is a forced conscription law) in a sysadmin/security role. I grew tired of the ops world and got drawn more and more into programming. A tremendous passion became to burn in me, as I began to write small programs in Python and shell scripts. I wanted to level up more seriously so I started reading programming books and got myself into a 10 month Java course.
In the meanwhile I got released from army duty and got a job as a security sysadmin at a large local telco company. Job was boring and unchallenging but it payed well. I had worked there for 1 year and at the same time learned more and more stuff from 2 best friends who have been freelance developers for years. I have learned how to build full-stack mobile apps and some webdev, mainly Android and Node.js. However because I was very inexperienced and lacked discipline, all of my side projects failed horribly, and all attempts to work with my experienced friends have failed too- I feel they lost a lot of trust for me(they don't say it, but I feel it, maybe I'm wrong).
I began to realise I had to leave this job and seek a developer job in order to get better, and my wish came true 6 months ago when I finally got accepted into a startup as a fullstack webdev, for a bit lower wage but I felt it was worth it. I was overjoyed.
But now my old problems did not end, they just changed. My new job is a thousand times harder and more intensive than the old one. I feel like it sucks all the energy and motivation that was still left in me, and I have learned almost nothing in my free time, returning home exhausted. My bosses are not impressed from my work despite me being pretty junior level, and I feel like I'm in a vicious cycle that keeps me from advancing my abilities. My developer friends I mentioned earlier have jobs like I do and still manage to develop very impressive side projects and even make a nice sum of money from them, while I can't even concetrate on stupid toy projects and learning.
I don't know why It is like this. I feel pathetic and ashamed of my developer sins and lack of discipline. During that time I also gained some weight that I'm trying t lose now... I know not all of it is my fault but it makes me feel like crap.
Sorry for the long story. I just feel I need to spill it out and hope to get some advices from you guys who may or may not have similar experiences. Thanks in advance for reading this.2 -
What is challenging of becoming freelance programmer, is that not only have to deal with stupid requirements from the client, and attitude of certain client. We also need to face the challenges of other freelancer defaming you , bombard you with a bunch of negativity.
So here's the story, there is this guy knowing that I give the service for creating mobile app for 50USD and client happy with the price. While he get NONE of the business as the price is 80USD. -
you know one should tread very carefully when getting a business dealing out of friendship.
if their is a boss-employee dynamics in the business, as in you are the boss and they are being paid to work for you or vice versa, then during work , be prepared to take criticism constructively. as a friend, the relation is different, we say each other anything and it is laughed off, but during work, there is a matter of respect, seniority and professionalism.
another kind of dynamics are the freelance/favour relation where friend is giving you free/paid service/advice or vice versa. this is even more shittier situation and is almost always bound to fuck up.
- the guy receiving service will try to negotiate a better deal because friend factor ('you will take so much money from your homie?')
- the guy providing service will try to offer a bad deal because friend factor ('i know he trust me. let me offer him a bad quote as he don't know anything of this domain')
- the guy providing service may not consider the service/advice as priority because friends factor ('he is a homie. he can wait')
- the guy receiving service may not be satisfied with the product/offerring/guidance because friends factor ('you could have added this x feature too bro, i paid you')
overall friend factor sucks. somehow the boss-employee factor worked for me as i was careful after 1 bad attempt