What if freelancers are just prostitutes for code? 🤔

To all young freelancers in low-income countries: I want to share my experience, of 6 years working for a piss-poor country, and 6 years working in freelance, and then emigrating. Here's what you should watch out for, and what to expect:

My first salary was barely 1.5$ per hour. I lived in a piss-poor country that taught me a lot (like why it's piss-poor).
The main thing to note when you're a developer in such a country, is that you're being fucked. Your employer might scream at you and tell you how bad you are, while barely paying you. That is you ... being ... fucked. Gain some confidence with the help of friends and family, and a great effort from yourself, look at what freelance gigs you can find, and ditch anything related to jobs in your country.

Being a somewhat able developer, but with modest experience, I started my freelance gigs for 5$ per hour. Because I was lazy, and freelance gigs weren't exactly being thrown at me, I was making 100$ per week, AFTER the companies I worked for appreciated what I did and offered themselves to up my pay to 12$ per hour. Yep. I was lazy. You will likely get lazy in freelance too, so be prepared for this.

My luck changed when one of my clients became a full-time employer, at 15$ per hour, with a well organized team where I actually worked for 40 hours per week (I had already amassed 8 years of experience...). For people in first world countries that will seem laughable, but in my country I was king of the hill, getting paid more than government CEOs that ended up in the news as the "most well paid".

That was the top of the pyramid for international indie freelance, as I would later find out.
I didn't do stuff that was very difficult. In fact, I felt like my abilities were rotting while I worked there. I had to change something. So I started looking for better offers. I contacted many companies that were looking for a senior developer, and the interviews went well, and all was fine, except for my salary demands. I was asking for 25$ per hour. Nobody was willing to pay more than 15$ per hour. That's because of my competition - tons of developers in cheap-to-live countries that had the same, or more to offer, for the same rates. Globalization.

So I moved to Germany. As soon as I was legally able to work, I was hunted down by everybody. I was told that it takes a month to pass the whole hiring process in Germany. My experience demonstrated that 2-5 days is enough to get a signed contract with "Please start ASAP".
There is freelance in Germany as well. And in the US. And everywhere else. A "special" kind of freelance, where you have to reside locally. The rates that this freelance goes for is much, much higher than international freelance. I'd say that 100€ per hour is ok-ish. Some people (newbies, or foreigners who don't speak the language well) get less, around 60 or so. Smart experienced locals get around 150-200 or even more.

It's all there. Companies want good developers to solve their business problems with IT solutions, and they'll beg you to take their money if you can deliver that.

So code!
Learn!
Accummulate experience!
Screw the scumbags that screw you for 1-2$ per hour!
Anyone able to write something more than "Hello World!" deserves more.

Do the climb! There's literally room for everybody up there! There is so much to do, that I feel like there will never be too many developers.

Thank you for bearing with my long story. I hope it will help you make it shorter and more pleasant for you.

"I bought a cup of coffee, I live here now"
- freelancers in coffee shops

My very first rant. I will try to make it count!

Recently my company had restructured with new GM who fired those who he didn't like and hired those who he did.

All ok I guess. And then...

We did a project for a big sportswear brand, interactive installation using WebSocket. My team developed the server with game engine and we also developed "shell front-end" with example code how to connect and interact with server.

Then we realized that our company was actually not hired by sportswear brand, rather by GM buddy-from-the-army tech vendor, who was hired by actual client.

Then, we also realized there is another company, that GM hired as freelancers, sitting at our office doing 'something'. And this 'other company' actually has same employees and address as GM's buddy company (meaning they are one entity with two names).

So.. what happened is that we get paid by party A, then we pay exactly the same amount to party B (which is actually same party A), and at the end... all our work was for free.

And then, this GM tells me I have to fire 2 developers from my team because we don't have enough business.

How did this guy even get to a position of this level?

I once woke up to a $65k invoice from AWS and almost puked in my pants.

2 years ago I was cycling through freelancers on upwork to find a decent candidate. I guess i hired the wrong guy because even after revoking access, they got into my AWS account and spun up 1000's of ec2 instances in multiple locations.

I was a newly wed and feared for my life. How do I tell my wife I gota pay $65k with barely any savings.

I contacted AWS. And they started off by saying "we see some suspicious activity on your account, don't worry, we will handle it". I was like "yehhh cuz I've been paying pennies for the last couple of years. No way I can rake up a bill like that."

Since I was going through so many devs, it was impossible to figure out who. But even if I did find out, what am I gona do. I'm just a code monkey.

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"

So, my UpWork account request is rejected, with a reason that
"already many freelancers with a similar skillset to yours".

In skills I entered
"AngularJS, ASP.NET MVC, .NET Framework, C#, jQuery, Semantic UI, Bootstrap"

Then I resubmitted the request with by adding blockchain and Ethereum.

Again rejected.

What should I do 😫
I guess I never can start freelancing.

Helpful tip to all you freelancers or those with the authority:

Never let a client dictate anything in how you do your job, no matter how simple.

Even if they ask you to make yourself available at a specific time, don't. Instead, tell them times you have available so they have to work with you.

If you give a client an inch, they will always take a mile.

So my office manager decided to ban kitchen utensils in the office. Part of the reason was that there was too much stealing. Apparently too many mugs, knives, plates & spoons have gone missing for it to be just through loss.

I tried to reason with this office manager. I asked if we really want to create a culture of mistrust where we ban basic utilities like we’re children.

I appealed to the business logic do we really want freelancers going out to grab a coffee 10 minutes a day over a period of a year.

I tried to appeal to the digital nature of the office can we “source the solution from the office”

The other office have to bring in their own utensils but the other office has a canteen.

Essentially I feel like this was a power issue a decision was made I’m not allowed to question it.

Apparently my “behaviour” has been flagged with the CTO. 🤣🤨

I have to stir my tea with a knife unless I put stuff in my desk.

As a solution I decided to reach out to several green companies that provide disposable cutlery and kitchen where they agreed to send a sample which I put in the kitchen. I have a feeling this will be taken as hostile move in of what is: a solution.

Seriously W T actual F.

Boss: -We're firing one of our freelancers and you are taking over one of his projects.
Me: -OK, what is it?
Boss: Old POS project written in Java.
Me: -But I'm C# developer. I haven't touched Java in years!
Boss: -You'll manage...

FML I've managed to finish and fully refactor this piece of shit project.

I see loads of students here.. and loads of freelancers and startup joiners.. all varieties...but one.. Anyone has a 'normal' 9-5 or sth (dev) work? Does that even exist?! Anyone stands up when the 8h are up and can leave the work behind?
I can't.. even when I leave the office I have algos & code stuck in my head..trying to solve the problem I worked on..

How do you handle non dev life? Is there anything left in a day?
I usually work monday-friday on avg 9h/day and have no idea how to manage not being fucked up at the end of the week. :\ I am trying to get back climbing, but usually I am just soooooo tiiiiireeeeeed after work.. I wanna sleep but when I close my eyes I see the code.. at least one core still left working..

Most of us can and have gotten freelance work before, but I've only met a couple of alleged full time freelancers, and the idea has always fascinated me. For those of you who actually are able to pull it off, what's a typical day like, and how do you maintain a steady stream of clients?

Wk24: getting your invoices paid (for us freelancers anyway)

Freelancers, how do you deal with clients who seem to refuse to pay on time? This is just the last few rows of my account balances and as a student that kind of money is huge!

!question to freelancers:
So do all of you have own built websites (of you) to show your skills, self-marketing and so on?

I don't know how you freelancers and contractors do it.

Why most of the Indian developers code so bad? I face it very often, with my colleagues, with the freelancers we hire, even with our clients.

I am an Indian, and I feel so much disgusted (& sad as well) when a client tell us that they have a dedicated team to rework on the code which they outsource from India. If you visit a freelancing website you will see that the Indian developers have the least price, and they bid on literally anything even without understanding what they need to do. And finally when they get a job, they complete it, but with a fully f*cked up code and the worst architecture possible.

I have a lot of friends working in IT, and I personally know that they do not have any passion about programming. They just work for money, nothing else. I don't understand, why? My 7 years of IT career is probably not long enough to find a suitable answer for this 'why'.

To the freelancers.

Do you offer web-hosting? What are your experiences? Where do you rent servers? What do you charge?

Thanks in advance

My worst legacy code experience was when I worked as a freelancer and got a tiny job to improve a VBA module in some Excel file for a very big company. So what's worse than VBA? Having to change parts of VBA code that was passed around to other freelancers before like the cheapest dockside whore. After meddling in there for about half an hour I felt like all those cheap ass punter, so I decided to write the whole thing from scratch. What a relief, after 3 hours I was very proud of the thing and it looked clean and well maintained again so I let it back on the streets. 😉
To the coder who comes after me: Please treat her (the code) nice or I will burry you alive in dog poop and burn the whole thing!

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

So I'm a freelancer celebrating my second year at this one client (yes, times are good). When I first got to my current (not customer-facing) project, lots of "externals" (other freelancers) had come and gone, "internals" had been assigned and reassigned to and from this project and nobody knew exactly what was in the (angularjs) codebase.

One of my first
"quick win" assignments was to see if load times could be reduced. After some looking around it turned out someone had used moment.js (with locales, 67k gzipped) for some feature that had since been abandoned... and then accidentally dropped it into the source folder, checked it into source control (svn!), from whence it was happily packaged by the CI job and released every month.

Removing it reduced the pre-render javascript by about 40%. (also yes, that said "nobody knew exactly what was in the client-side codebase")

This is a question for freelancers. How did you get your first clients? Did you just walk into small companies who didn't have a website or did you mail them or how did you do it?

So I have a question.

How do you freelancers keep motivated? I'm a web developer and that's all I do. However i made a mistake of dedicating myself a little too much.

I moved to a new country and started with all these new projects that started becoming successful however when I started making friends in Uni and out , those friends were less of friends and I treated them more like workmates who I can share projects with and work on new orojects. Because of this, my career overtook me to the extent that that was all I ever worked on. Literally.

It was only recently that I realized that I have been missing out too much. I miss having a life and being with friends. recently I lost my creativity and productivity. Gave up on an insanely huge project because I have not been able to work on it. Lost a job because Im not productive. My life has started falling apart and I don't know how to keep it controlled. I feel I can't bother my friends because we're not totally close and most are only friends on campus.

I don't know what to do where to start or how to be productive again.

Freelancers should be considered genies at this point.

Management proposed to work with external freelancers, to "pick up speed so we can release these new designs sooner". We agreed, but of course we (the home team) can't have time to review their work because we need to develop other new features and bugfixes and such...
Weeks later, turns out that their changes are largely incompatible with the work we have been doing on the main branch. We are now rebasing/rewriting huge chunks of their work, probably taking as much time as it would have cost us to develop the design ourselves in the first place.

Mainly for freelancers: Don't be afraid to take on projects you know nothing about. You can learn whilst doing the job, plus you're getting paid for it.

How to get the rest of the content you need to finish a freelance website...

Invoice them. They'll respond faster than a cat can lick its own ass with its tongue already on the hole.

Only one goal : earn more money.

- Not to work for friendship, equity, kindness, craziness, etc. Code more for sole purpose to earn more
- Accept more projects whether I can develop or not to earn more
- Learn to manage and work with freelancers and agencies to earn more
- Work for anyone and any type of project suitable for my knowledge as long as the offer is good to earn more

Etc. You got the gist.

My language for 2020 is money :3

(well I'm trying to, anyway)

Sometimes when I read old code of mine I'm ashamed. But more often when I read others I just feel better.

(I'm talking about other webdev freelancers, not OS projects or so...)

I once went to a client to get a brief for a website (the twat can't be bothered to write it, so he gets me to do it). I wrote all the details down and fired as many questions as I could. When I got back I wrote up the notes into a brief and sent it back to check before I costed it. He said it was spot on, so I sent an estimate. A few days later he must have shown it to another director, they both call me on speaker phone. Them: Will it do this, will it do that? Me: "It" doesn't exist, if you want to add some requirements then write or extend the brief and I will re-cost it.
They ignored that and rang a little later. Them: We have been discussing it, will it do .... and will it do.... Me: I repeated what I had said earlier, but my tone of voice had changed to reflect my annoyance. I never heard from these pathetic twats again. Moral: I always do background checks on a company, as well as accounts and financials check it's good to tap in to your network of colleagues, designers, freelancers. It can set the alarm bells going long before you commit any time.

Any former freelancers who decided to move to traditional employment?

I have been doing freelance since I finished University. 8 years now. I really liked the flexibility and opportunity to work on different projects and people, but my enthusiasm is wearing thin. I'm currently updating my cv and setting up my LinkedIn profile, but it's hard to "prove" my experience, and many projects I worked on are private.

I am not sure if I can mention the companies I worked for, or how do to it... Feeling lost and doomed to keep freelancing.

Anyone made this transition before? How did you do it?

!rant

TL;DR one year on as a react dev, I want to go at it self employed, humbly seeking advice as this community seems to have its fair share of knowledgeable freelancers.

I have 1 year professional experience now as a Meteor, React and Apollo developer

The dream is to become self employed. I figure a good market would be small businesses that want a website that are more featureful than a diy wix site.

Only I am more of a developer than a designer, so rely heavily on things like Bootstrap or Material ui. So I wonder if Upwork, Fiverr or simply my own freelance website would be better.

As you guessed javascript is my biggest strength, not sure if nodejs is the best backend for small businesses as hosting prices are more than eqv php stack.

Also want to build own projects on the side to monetize. Bigger dream would be to be client-less and develop and sell personal projects.

Seeking advice from those who are self employed. Am I dreaming too big?

Shall I keep the office job for a bit longer then take the plunge? Or do you think I can just go for it. Are there lucrative areas I am missing?

Thanks in advanced

During the "how to install WordPress" the professor tells us to use the root user of the database.... Wooooooo yeah! Let's get fucked!

And he never even notes to them "DON'T use root in production!"

I can just imagine every one of the 40 people in attendance that day wondering how their website could POSSIBLY get hacked...

And they are are going to entering the industry, some of them as freelancers from the onset, thinking all that is ok.

Well, my country aint very bright at least for me.

So you have few options, i will arrange them from generally percieved as shittiest place to best place.

You are student or whatever and work in small company. Thats where lot of people are stuck. Like me. Pay is... Sigh. When you hear dev can earn more than 1k$/mo its like "yes, yes, gimme, gimme". Forget about beeing just dev. If I left my company it would collapse within week, but bosses greed is insanity. Oh well.

Than you have that middleground that I would love to be in. Freelancing. Here freelancers can live really well if they can find contractors willing to pay for their services. Wuthin this space there is most profit but also that uncertanity. But its my goto.

Than you have miniscule group you **really** want to be in, medium companies writing software, usually b2b. Well, here you get often 2k$+ and bonuses for working your ass off etc, and benefits are minor but there is usually *something*

And than you have corporations. They often pay a lot, lot of benefits, but.... Its corporation, all ypu learned in small companies usually goes through the window, their expectations are high etc.

In my country everything is like everywhere else but pay is much less, especially in small company space, and somewhat smallish in medium company/corpo. Freelancers are least affected.

I have nothing against freelancers but this guy... He stinks. He is literally smelly. I don’t think he owns a shower, soap a toothbrush or a shaver.

He looks and smells like he belongs on the streets. And i have to work with him :(

Worst of all is that is is owning way more then i am.

*Dev is non-native english speaker

Dev: we need the VPN ip.
Me: the server ip or the connected device ip.
Dev: the server.
Me: gets the ip.
Dev: this doesn't work, is this the VPN ip ?
Me: Gives the device ip. Works.
Dev: OK. Works now.

Could have just asked for the client IP in the first place but s/he didn't know how to.

I have been trying to freelance for people who don't speak english as a first language and getting the Requirements is the hardest part of the job. 😫 .

P.S. Suggestions needed from remote freelancers. What's your workflow like.

I hate UpWork and Freelancer.com fees and policies about the privacy (or lack) for your projects. But I grudgingly admit they offer protections against fraud. If you're a freelancer, or if you employ freelancers, and do so without the fraud protections of these types of services, how do you guard against being taken advantage of by clients or freelancers? I mean, anyone can write and sign contracts but in the end they're just paper promises not worth anything if the people you're working with or for are "dogs on the Internet" who can simply disappear.

I need you guys' help.
As mentioned earlier in one of my rants, I trade stocks part time, make a little money. But I am too tired from my full time work. So it is badly affecting my health. My broker is providing us with an API and docs at a monthly fee to develop software to automate trades.
I posted a job on Upwork, a few freelancers bid but their price was way beyond my budget.
Hence I decided to take up programming.

I was initially inclined towards C#, but seeing as how complex it is, I was thinking of going for python. Do you think it is a reasonable decision?

2020 will be either the greatest or the worst, depending on whether the newly elected government in the UK decide to continue to shaft freelancers and Contractors

I always promise myself that I won't take any freelance projects during that specific semester because I need to study for college and already have projects to do.

I always fail and get stressed out later with the amount of things that somehow I got involved with and delivery dates are always close.

I feel such a sadomasochist when I accept this freelance projects and hate myself for doing it.

The promise for fast/simple projects (that always becomes complex later) and the quick $$ get me.

This is how #freelancers like when they're working on a project in home:

This is a general question to freelancers or devs who works on only projects, is this worth only £100 pounds:

A survey website with 19 pages. Questions changes based on previous answers. Must have drag and drop, mix and match functionality. It must be mobile friendly as well.

And we have to parse the data we get from survey to a nicely rendered webpage so the client can see it.

The deadline is 2 days

Bunch of freelancers invented new Git flow 😂🤣

So after school i was kinda roaming around, taking the odd paid programming job for clients, not really making any money, but also quite struggling because I was walking around with undiagnosed ADHD, for about the last 2ish years, not really making any money.

Since this February friends told me I might have ADHD, so I had it checked. Turns out I have been walking around with severe ADHD all my life :P That explained a fuckload... and now I got medication that works, yay!

Flash forward to 3 weeks ago, still not doing any work, all of sudden I get poked on linkedIn "hey we need a developer, wanna work for us?"

I wasnt really looking and since it was a message on linkedIn I figured it was just another of those overpromising recruiters, but it was very close to where I live so I decided to call them directly to check it out, expecting literally nothing, nor was I looking for work.

Roughly a week after that call I got a job as team lead backend developer...

Wait I was a total mess in the last 2 years, how did I end up as lead over an intern and 2 contracted freelancers?!?! HOW DID THAT HAPPEN!?

Sofar I am enjoying it.

@all freelancers

How did you get your first work, I am struggling from a month to get one.

Amy suggestions??

Not a rant but sort of a rant.

Getting REAL fucking tired of the corporate rat race.

Thought Bubble ...

{If I quit this stupid job I could do freelance sites}

Then I realized that I have no idea what skill set it takes to be a freelance developer. I only know my one little corner. Once I commit my code it goes off down the assembly line for others to worry about testing, deployment, hosting, security and other things I have no idea about.

So tell me freelancers, is the grass greener? What additonal skills do you have to have the us enterprise folks would have no idea about?

Or are you making huge bucks where you overcharge for Wix sites that do not suck?

Boss hired a freelancer to work on a new reporting dashboard. Freelancer also built a backed. Boss wants me to work on fixing that backend. I check out the DB first only to find plaintext passwords. I threw up a little.

Guys ! Need some help !

I am a final year CS undergraduate;will graduate in 2017 . I have been working with a team of freelancers developing websites and apps for the past couple of years. The thing is our client base is very small and the income is unstable because of our poor marketing and lack of good developers. Our team lead only doesn't maintain any version control,no code comments,sub standard code, and spends all the savings(we keep some money aside for expenses like meetings,traveling as a team etc) on movies,hangouts etc . I cannot tell it to his face but I have been looking to move out for sometime.

Should I continue freelancing by myself or apply in jobs ? And if I apply in jobs, do I apply as a fresher or a someone with a couple of years of experience ?

And if I continue as a freelancer,where do I start ? I checked upwork and freelancer.com but they have some cut-throat competition out there .

I am going to go freelance (starting a company and will be my own first employee) at the end of the month.

Was wondering what software some of you, who are also freelancers, are using to manage everything.

Quotes, invoices, jobcards, etc.

The bank through which I will be registering the company appears to offer some sort of online service for that purpose, but I have not seen it yet.

Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.

For you freelancers out there, I've been working on trying to make some income with it locally, making single page static sites for some local businesses and restaurants so that I can get a couple hundred for making the site and a little over the cost of hosting each month residually, offering like one free menu change per month, but all redesigns and support being hourly.
I want it to be accessible pricing cause like 5 of my favorite places to eat have defunct sites that I think weren't worth the cost anymore, and I'd love to be able to see up to date menus and hours and I'm certain others would too.
Basically, I'm trying to figure out what hosting would be best for this and if I'm being realistic enough with pricing. I like the idea of surge.sh, but I feel like 12/mo for a custom domain SSL, which is good for SSL, is higher than some of the other alternatives for a lightweight one sing page site.
Any help would be great, Have a great new year guys!

Freelancers!

How do you create your invoices?

I love toggl and want to build a service to automatically create and send invoices to my clients based on the times in toggl. Would this be of any use to you guys? Could do the same for other time keepers

How do you freelancers make sure that your websites are not down?

To all the freelancers, are you able to wake up in the early cold morning to work? i find it really difficult

Do any of you, especially freelancers, get paid in bitcoin? How do you set that up so it’s easy for clients to pay and for you to get paid? How do you convince clients to pay that way?

When freelancing, do you charge for estimations?

Situation is that I'm a sole android developer (4 years experience) and each time I encounter some agency or a client I feel like I'm between a rock and hard place.

Some of the clients come with ready with list of requirements and ready backend/design sketch and they want me to give them a rough estimate.

It's as if they expect me to take only 2-3 hours for estimation and that's it. But actually this was the second time where I had to spend around 10 hours investigating everything so I would be able to give a half decent estimation at least.

This particular client's project turned out to be a mess and I had to spend 10+ hours to estimate only 70% of his project. I asked him if he would be able to pay under a reduced tarrif and the client was shocked, started doubting my competence level and so on.

In the end I gave him a rough 400 hours estimate and he started complaining that others estimated only 200 hours for his project. So in the end I just wasted my time.

Now it's my bad that I voluntarely invested too much time in this estimate without notifying client prior that I might ask to pay for estimation, next time I will try to do this ahead of time.

It feels like only big agencies who have free resources have a competetive edge against sole freelancers, it really sucks wasting so much time to estimate half baked requirements and assets. Also most of these clients and agencies are purely lazy and most of the time they don't even plan signing, all they need is someone to estimate their work for them.

I'm thinking of starting to charge for estimations and communications in a form of consultations. Is that a good idea?

Basically,

- No such thing as specialty, you are either a full stack dev who develops all aspects of a project and deploys it or your a jobless dev. Its asking too much of companies to pay more than one dev for one project regardless of scale. Paying minimum wage for a single dev is more than enough!

- You develop for a company, if by any chance you find someone willing to hire freelancers, your insane if you ask for more than 500 USD on a full fledged e commerce system coz a couple of wordpress companies do it for less !

Basically, dont be a dev in Lebanon.

Hey everyone,

When I was in college, I used to wish to do some freelancing work to earn some amount.
But I never did it due to lack of experience and knowledge.

Now, I've been working in a Small IT company for one year and I'm confident enough that I can do it.

I'm interested in making APIs as a freelancer.
I've few doubts here,
Once the API is developed is it a freelancer's job to deploy it in some cloud instance or they just need to share the code?
If the client wants the freelancer to deploy it on their behalf then do the freelancer have to create his account for example in AWS for deployment?

Also, Do freelancers have to set up and maintain all the DB for the APIs?

Thinking about freelancing, any freelancers here who can help me get started?

I have a bit of experience freelancing being a designer but not yet as a programmer. Im currently a student but have made a few programs.

What do you guys think?

I want to freelance when I'm not doing my full time job. To those that are freelancers, how should I get started? What is your experience? How do you guys get customers?

I really feel lost in the world of freelancing, I mean I literally have three jobs on the go so barely any pressure and yet I'm cocking up my time estimations and mixing up code for each site, and giving incorrect predictions for completion, so basically I keep ending up working for free. Freelancers of the depths of devRant, please help! How do you manage to maintain a work life balance? Is accurate predictions and time management just something that comes with experience?

Also huge props to you for being able to keep your mentality!

!rant

Well kinda, more like first world problems.
I started freelancing almost three years ago, it took a lot of hard work, sweat blood and tears to get this whole thing running.
I am currently in a very good place, have a lot of retainer contracts and the awesome freedom that comes with being a freelancer.

Two days ago I got an offer from one of my clients, they really want to have me on board, full time, it's a small, already established startup company, that has big clients, they want me to go into partnership with them, see still haven't talked numbers but they are very "generous".
the idea is to get me ASAP full time on board and start working on a partnership contract specifying all the small details.

I love being a freelancer, the freedom is amazing, client acquisition is Eons away from being a problem, but I miss the team work, and I miss working on products and building teams, freelancers are kind of a lone wolves.

I love working with these clients, there is a lot of mutual respect, they are very transparent and we really are on the same wave.

This could be an amazing opportunity for the next steps in my carrier.
I'm having a hard time making a decision, I'm basically changing my mind about it every two hours...

I mean I guess I'm planning to open my own company at some point anyways... so maybe going into a small but stable company is the way to go..

What would you do?
Would you take the offer? Or would you keep freelancing?

Do you feel ok opening up a project to remote freelancers? What precaution(s) do you take?

Looking for collab for making a dev portal just for Start-ups to collab with freshers and freelancers.

Web Freelancers of DevRant:
How did you start getting clients and deal with shitty things like the client dragging things out forever.

Also, do you use a contract you found online or did you make your own? What do you think is most important to include in a contract?

Cheers!

For the freelancers here:
do you guys ask hourly or fixed price?

Okay, so this is more like a question, than an actual rant, but what site(s) do you freelancers use?
Lately i have some serious free time, and thought, why not try to make some side-money?

Fellow Freelancers, can you recommend a platform you use to track and share project progress with your clients?

What do you typically use to keep clients updated about project status? There a Fancy SaaS solution or do you use a simple excel file??

Would like some ideas and recos!

Freelancers/self-employed IT-consultants, how much do you charge per hour? Also, do you have any certificates or other things that boost your pay?

When the company hires freelancers who proclaim themselves craftsman and they don't care about quality.

Bloody Liers.

Freelancers, what's it like?

Would you recommend it?
What stacks are must have?
What's maintenance like?
What's dealing with hosting like?
Is it mostly webdev? Is there any market for anything else really?

I'm thinking about going that direction. I've been burned by one company too many. I don't know how I can trust a company again. I also that if I have to really manually earn every last cent, might be the best way to make myself care about my work

I'm thinking about it

Freelancers, how many hours would you charge your client per small projects?

Situation is that I am leaving country but will still work as a freelancer android dev in my company at hourly rate 27EUR/hour.

Now from experience I already feel that most specifications of tasks/ux-ui sketches will be not clear/vague. Also there is a question of overall app architecture, prevention from crashes, memory leaks and etc.

Basically they will give me some spec and I will have to evaluate how long it will take to do it. I never worked as a freelancer so I need some advice on how to deal with problems like this. If I guess that something might take 5 working days to be done (40h) should I charge for 60h and etc.?

!rant Freelancers of devRant, how do you find your clients? I have 2 years experience and I am thinking of starting out with Upwork.

Hey guys,

I need your advice about deciding wether to work as a freelancer for a startup or no.
So this French startup is couple years old and they decided to build a team in my country. I went to the interview few weeks ago and we discussed the projects, details, potential salary and everything seemed great.

Couple days ago I received a service contract from them and now I need to decide to work for them or no.

Plan is for them to come to my country, rent an office and I should go there and work for them.
The salary that they offered is medium level and they will not have any legal entity in my country. However it’s not a problem for me since I have my own LTD company so I would pay salary on my own.

However there are some cons:

My team members are being hired as freelancers, however salary is defined with a daily rate instead of hourly and we are allowed to work maximum 20 days a month. It is not clear how many hours a week/month they will expect us to work and at this point I’m afraid to rock the boat with my questions. I understand that I shouldn’t receive any health insurance, sick leave pays, vacation days, home office, pension contributions and so on. But it’s so weird that they pay per day instead of per hour. It screams with unpaid overtime.

Payment time is 30 days after invoice has been sent. So If I started working from September 01, I will send them invoice at September 30, then I will work all October and will receive my money only around end of October. Working 60 days to receive my first salary doesn’t seem nice.

Notice period is 30 days. Which is fine on my end since I can be completely free after initial notice. But in their case if they want to fire me I guess they will simply not give me any work to do and since I’m charged per day I won’t be able to send them any invoice. No employment safety, which means if after 2-3 months they don’t have anything to do I can get royally screwed. But it’s startup nature I guess?

They don’t provide a laptop to work with. I’m lucky since I have a laptop for developing mobile apps, and they said they will at least provide office to work in and a monitor.

All this situation is sending vibes of "we want to save money so we came to your country for cheap labour and now we gonna exploit you"

What complicates matters is that my sister will be working with me and It’s her first job. They agreed to pay her a decent salary and even be flexible with her studies. However this deal for me does not seem too great as I will be receiving mid level salary with no benefits that I would otherwise get.

On the other hand maybe I'm just overthinking this I can just try it out for few months and see where it goes.

Any thoughts?

Upwork isn't allowing new freelancers . Wtf

Some freelancers give a bad reputation to the community. There are genuine amazing developers but clients source to companies instead because of their bad experiences.

Things such as reviews and such don't mater much anymore.

When seeing all those rants about freelancers whose clients just "disappear", I wonder why a library /framework that purges / blocks the application hasn't been made already.

Just to be clear, I don't mean web apps in particular, but more like desktop applications

Hi )

I was wondering how do you guys who work or have worked as freelancers price your websites/projects.
I never had a client before and I don't want to spoil my first chance by pricing too high or too low.
I've heard people asking for 500 dollar or 2000 dollars, depending on how much work and time is involved.
How much would you ask for a simple personal website or a restaurant website?

Thank you very much for your time )

Why do freelancers write 20 lines of documentation and then leave the project?

I'm on vacation.
A friend asked me if I could work on a freelance web project. I was getting bored of summer vacations so I said yes.
It was a website for online lottery and it was already developed by some freelancers.
Owner wanted more freelancers to revamp design and administration panel.

I looked at the site and knew that I had seen the worst design and code of my life.

Frontend was made of two colors only, black and yellow. Out of both, black was more prominent. Moreover it had nothing related to Js as if it was developed as a challenge to be accomplished without java script.

Admin panel and backend was much worse than that. No security practices and deprecated essential libraries.

The nightmare is about to end as I have inducted a much better design from themeforest for frontend.
Backend is in my homebrew php framework.
(Good luck future freelancers 😆)
I'm positive that next edits will be features additions only and no one will blame my code.

Freelancers: How do you get your Clients? How do you convince them of what you can do for them? Any articles, tips, experiences and stories appreciated!

I never worked as freelancer, but I'm thinking to start as far as I keep studying, and I was wondering... How do freelancers charge their client when they get paid x per hour?
How do they assure the client they worked for a certain amount of hours?
Do they do it by prediction or they say they'll work y hours per day?

Feels like a dumb question...

I’m having this issue for the online marketplace I’m working on the side. It’s blockchain tech where you can purchase normal goods and services(no, not like Amazon or Fiverr, eww, this one’s more inclined with promoting organic growth for small businesses and freelancers).

I’m stuck with what solution is in the best interest of the user and the business for the long-term.

The dilemma about anonymity, online freedom and privacy is yes, it protects users from predators and attackers, but then, it’s harder for authorities to hunt down people who uses platforms for malicious intent, and also, digital footprint is helpful during litigation as evidence.

You don’t know who to trust.

-There is nothing to differentiate normal users with spammers, scammers, etc.
-There is no accountability for if they break the rules. They can easily delete and create a new account.

Platforms, communities big or small are plagued with these.
There are a lot of people out there who would rather project their insecurities on other people than to seek therapy.

Also, how platforms uses psychology tricks to make platforms addicting, it’s safe to assume that it’s bound to get toxic. Fixation on these platforms, leads to other needs being neglected or people forget to stay present.

Another thing, automated moderation is not that effective as there are still biases in data and human verification is still required. But then, human moderators get exposed to extreme violence, gore, etc that leads to poor mental health. (see Facebook got sued by moderators)

Also, I’ve had a recent experience where some unstable dev was stalking and harassing me. During that turmoil, I’ve found the many loopholes in every platform out there and how crappy their support is. Like they’ll just say, “make your account more secure”, bitch it’s your platform not providing enough security, your blocking feature means nothing coz anyone can still create accounts and message anyone.
It happened like February-August (it ended coz I quit going online and made private all my accounts). UGH I MISS ALL MY FRIENDS THO. FUCK THAT DUDE. He deserves to be in jail TBH

Lol if this product booms, now u know the back story lololol

Went onto a highschool that had a focus on computer science. Met almost all of my current friends there and I am even working with two of them as freelancers today. The teachers on this school were the best I ever had. You could see that they had fun teaching us and were excited to work at this place. I am really happy that I decided to go to this school because I had some great years, found lot of friends and decided to study applied computer science afterwards!

Do you have that one person you work with that you just can't stand for whatever reason?

I've been having a tough time with this one project at work and been falling behind because we hired a junior dev and 2 inexperienced freelancers. So to help me out my boss let me use his office for the day to avoid all of the noise.

I had been under the impression lately that I didn't like my job due to the constant context switching and being isolated for the day was a really nice refresher.

Then the project manager starts harassing me at 430pm saying the client is now expecting something deployed in the morning with no warning or requirements. Way to set client expectations.

That one moment made me realize that the context switching wasn't what I disliked about my work. It's that one person. They're so bad at what they do that it makes my job so much harder.

Is there any decent and less time wasting website gauging for freelancers looking for gigs? (Upwork is trash for newcomers)

How do you deal with a peer who wants to write a bad code just because he doesn't understand the better way to write it or he just doesn't want to?

Suppose you're not in a company, so there's none above you two, like you're freelancers or in a uni team for a project

Question to the freelancers here.

How long did it take you to make a living with freelancing and did you start freelancing fulltime right away or 20-40% besides another job?

I'm thinking about freelancing for a while now, but I guess in the beginning the money coming in will be really unpredictable, right?

About me, I'd call myself a senior level developer (Java, JS, SQL and stuff like that).

Just completed half of the website for a client with number of meetings and after last meeting he says I'm bored with this design now change it and make something new with new components and new Colors. I haven't replied yet, best comment will be my reply xD

!rant

There seem to be a lot of freelancers on here, how much experience do you all consider necessary to get in to freelancing? Is there anything you would say to someone who wants to get in to freelancing? How do any freelancers in the UK find their next contract?

Hi!, Greetings fellow ranters,

I got into thinking this past few days. Because over the years, i really wanted to start my career as a freelance web/mobile developer, i'm not planning to quit my job(yet), but i want to slowly but surely build my freelance career. I just need some advice from you on how i should optimally or best approach this goal, and where/how should i find clients or what sites should i find clients, i know freelancer.com but I've heard other freelancers who had nightmares with it, upwork is also kind of overcrowded.

I have a question for the freelancers out there. When getting work, do you usually go through some sort of vetting process from the person or group hiring you? It seems that the company I work for doesn't do anything if the sort and I want to know if that is something a company should do.

Freelancing is overrated, all that hype about being your own boss and working on your own timings.

But your clients are your bosses and you still have to meet their deadlines.
All that advertising was to get more ppl into that business and now they have, there are just way too many that freelancers outnumber clients.

If ya know what I mean ;p

Solo developers of devRant (not freelancers, sorry)

How do you handle being the one-man-army for your company?

How do you stay sane with no one by your side to bounce ideas off of, and to talk through problems with?

My partner was let go almost 2 years ago, leaving just me to deal with everything, and I'm at my breaking point. What do you do to keep yourself together when everything is crashing down around you, and you alone...

TL;DR how much do I charge?

I'm freelancing for the first time; regularly, I get paid a salary.

I'm freelancing as a donation: the hours I put into this work directly translate to deductions in my tax. I don't get paid any money directly.

I'm doing some web-based enterprise software for an organization. Handling the whole process from writing responsive front-end code to setting up the server and domain for them and even managing myself. So full stack plus dev ops.

My normal salary is $31 an hour and at work I do less. I largely do maintenance for existing applications plus some very minor new systems design. I don't do any server management (different team) and I damn well didn't buy the domain names for my company. So I think it's safe to say I'm taking on a drastically larger role in this freelance gig.

My moral dilemma is the organization will basically say yes to any price - because they don't pay it, the government will (up until the point I pay 0 taxes, I suppose)

I've done some minor research on what other freelancers charge for somewhat similar things and I get pretty wildly varying results. I've seen as low as $20/hr but I really doubt the quality of such a service at that price.

I'm thinking around $50 USD an hour would be a fair price. For even further reference besides my actual salary, I will say that I am in a urban / suburban part of Florida, where developers are very hard to find locally.

Is $50 too high? Too low? This is a very complicated system with (frankly excessive) security practices and features. Before this they had a handful of excel spreadsheets in a OneDrive folder.

Co-worker (in another department) has a friend in LA that hired someone in another country to build them an exact replica of another company's site. The developer is having trouble and he wants me to get on the phone with them for "just 5-10 minutes" to help them.

So- you refuse to support local business and freelancers to save money, then expect me to help you for free when they can't deliver. Got it.

For my thesis.

Hello, I am currently looking for freelancers to interview for my thesis. I need three more interviews, it's email-based.

I really appreciate everyone who responded in my previous rant. And I would really appreciate anyone who responds in this one too!

You can email me at uzair.hayat@benilde.edu.ph
I only need three more interviews, but I would really appreciate as many as possible!

One criteria that you have to meet: you should be a freelancer that has transitioned from a desk job.

Looking forward to your email!

How many hours do you work daily as a freelancer or remote developer?

Anyone else get told their rates are too high (by potential clients)? Too low (by fellow freelancers)? How does one put a value to their time and still stay market competitive?

Details: USA only. Not on any platforms such as freelancer, upwork, or fiver. Cost of living is Portland Oregon standards. Ask for any other details.

Looking for thoughts, recommended readings, any helpful input would be awesome.

Not a Rant,

I'm just searching freelancers! I used this site when I was just starting my career. I still have the stickers on my (now old) Notebook I got 2016-ish for having... I don't know how many likes on here (user:chrome).

If one of you knows something about: Laravel, PHP, Bitcoin Core, BTC LN, Ads, Marketing, Social Media, CSS, HTML or JS - hit me up!

Maybe just send a mail to: admin@lahuge.com
I would love to find a team on this site. I hope the Community is still well. Back in the day it was really fun to watch this site grow.

Greetings,
Chrome aka. LaHUGE

PS.: If you're from Germany that's a Plus, but not needed ;P
(copy pasta because this Account is bigger, maybe it helps?)

all of you freelancers, how do you manage to get enough projects to make stable income

Any U.K. / EEA devs with substantial Angular experience?

Asking for a client, it’d be remote work with visits to the office every so often.

Contract work too, so ideal for freelancers.

Why are apple so fucking back assward and stubborn when it comes to their app review process?

So, at work I made an app. It's a simple one, but it's an app.
It makes it so that the user doesn't have to enter their credentials to sign in to a system developed on our platform.
If you give it a hard oded config it will only connect to that server, if not, it fetches a list of available servers and the user has to select which they want to connect to.

I've uploaded basically the same fucking app thrice, twice with and once without a config.
Two of them when somewhat smoothly through the review, but the last one has been stuck for almost two fucking months! And guess what it's one of the ones with a config!?!

How is that in any way consistent?
They fill us with shit like "your screenshots aren't representative", so I update them.
They go "this is not an AP for the public", I tell them I give less than a steaming pile of fresh dung from a retarded donkey, the intended users are freelancers, so just fucking greenlight it.
Then they go "your screenshots aren't representative", so I tell them to pound sand or specify which screenshot is wrong or what they think is missing.

How are they so fucking inconsistent with their process? Isn't is this process that they used as of defence for their shittastic monopoly, that they don't want to call a monopoly?
I'm so fucking tired.

I suck at front. I lack some front-related stuff in my project and I seriously struggle with all that css.

I'd love if I could find someone to do those small pieces for me, but I really don't feel like paying someone a whole month salary for a two days job.

How can I find devs who could write parts of the code I lack skills to write myself? Do freelancers take on tasks that small? How do I know they won't be stalling the task just to get more €s out of me?

How can I find someone to help me out? How do you guys do that?

I may have asked this before...

Freelancers, what do you do wrt marketing / how do you find clients?

Are there any freelancers from the UK around here? I'm going it alone and I could do with some advice on finding filler projects whilst I wait for a client to look at funding

How are nomad freelancers doing?

careermove.io

me: 26yrs. old, Indian man, jobless
learning frontend. i want to start freelancing.

what kind of freelancers are paid a lot of money?
someone please give me some idea of the freelancing landscape.
where freelancing is going, its future?
where is a lot of money?