>22 year old college student
>Apply for a QA internship
>Interview goes well,they see I have plenty of experience and doubt it's real
>Hard questions are thrown
>Answer them and they admit the position is for manual testing

I honestly don't care I need the money, plus manual testing doesn't usually strain me.

>A week goes by
>A month goes by
>Call them
>...Sorry we were looking for someone with less technical and dev experience.

My fucking face when I don't have a title, still overqualified, fighting with WordPress devs on freelancer.

How the fuck did clients convince themselves they can have a developer build an Amazon, booking.com, Facebook, Airbnb or site of the sorts for 500 bucks on FUCKING WORDPRESS?!

So uh... I got fired today. I asked them what could be the reasons. They told me that I am "capable" and a bunch of positive things. I asked them can't the reason they fire me is due to all the positive things. Is there a particular reason?

I asked them the reasons again and again. They say was all fine.

Then the email stated I am fired due to "Not working, not contributing and underperforming". Which I asked them to clarify.

They say they prefer someone who has a corporate mentality and is obedient. As more ideas will cause "unrest" for the company.

I am genuinely confused.

Anyway, I am back to freelancing.

> Amazon like website - 9 dollars
> Webdev homework. - 50 dollars
> Spelling mistakes. - have no price

Freelancing can be so bizarre, I'm 50 bucks wealthier now tho.

~ Freelancer.com Week #1 ~

Project: I need someone to debug an application's code and review it. Budget 30 bucks.

Bid: I am an experienced developer I can probably review it in an hour.

client: Hi, need you to check if app is contains virus [link to scam website]

me: sure, download supposed "social Bitcoin miner" and run some AV tests...8+ positive flags for a Trojan virus.

>Me: It's a Trojan virus mate it's not legitimate😟

>Client: Can you remove the Trojan virus so that the legit not stays?

Me: Umm there is no bot mate it's just a virus 😕 I wouldn't open it outside a sandbox

Client: But here it says Bitcoin faucet bot [links shitty how-to youtube video]

Me: 😒 it's not real dude you are about to get scammed, I can test it in a VM if you. . .

Client: I opened it already, it's working

Me: 😮 r u sure?

Client: yes, can you install VM for further testing?

Me: sure, in your computer?

Client: yes

Me: just download the windows image and text me when it's done

Client: My disc is full! Only 3 gb left

Me: 😑 call me when you clean it

Client: [ offline ]

I was just browsing for freelancing jobs, found a NodeJs one that didn't sound like crap.

> Plz download attached project description

Ok *download and open PDF*

>Comic sans all over the place with blue and purple font color

NOPE!

In my last job they required us to turn on a task timer for every little thing. Remembering to do that, and to turn it off, was a royal pain. First I had to look up which task it is, start the timer, stop the timer, find the next task and repeat, then flip back to the first task. Lots of open browser tabs within tab groups to keep track of it all. And if I came up short or went over on budget, there was a “conversation” with management to account for discrepancies. Then I had to go by memory and try to reconstruct the “missing time” accurately enough to be convincing.

Now that I’m freelancing, I try to keep up the habit because it does have merit for tracking estimates and actuals, but now it’s just me to answer to for discrepancies and I can fudge the numbers as I see fit. The time records did, however, save my bacon in a recent dispute.

Harsh truth:

My side SaaS project made more money in its first month (built late winter last year, MVP released after ~3 weeks of development) than the sTaRtUp I work for over its total lifetime so far (built over 3+ months, MVP released in May last year)

...is it time to rage quit?

Often I have dreams of going full-time solo dev, leaving every idiotic, clueless, fumbling clown behind, but I feel like I just don't have the financial runway to do it. However, even from just a few months in 2021 while I was on the job hunt, I created some side revenue streams which I'm still receiving decent revenues from (selling courses, saas products, minor freelancing). I'm just not 100% sure if I was "lucky" during this time period, or if a few more months going at it I'd be able to scrape my way towards a meager (though livable!) income.

Give me biased views, devRant!

!rant
tl;dr; quit my job last monday. going to grow my side hustle into full time freelancing.
I am so exited.

---
Story time:
I am working full time as a jack of all trades and also have a side business where I coach people on an ERP for doors/fenestration and also write custom software in c#.
I was able to manage both over ~4 years, with customer amount slowly growing (only doing B2B).

Last month I opened an account at a freelancer website just for the lulz and damn after a short amount of time the orders exploded. I had to shut it down again because I cannot manage the amount of work. But did manage to win a fair amount of customers that will keep me busy for the next year or two.

Spoke to my employer and told them about the situation (they know about my side business and it's all mentioned in the contracts). Said that I would need half the amount of hours with my business to reach the same amount of money and that working as an employee makes no sense for me in terms of money. I would however like to work 1 to 2 days in a week for them because working there is fun, even when its financially uninteresting.

they took one week to prepare a position and then invited me to a meeting. "we offer you 32 hours a week. if you want more, you have to make a descision. As a self employed person you have risk and we as an employer do not want to carry that risk for you and we do not want to finance your self employment" (etc.)

Thought I am in the wrong movie. I took that into the weekend and thought a lot about what has been said.

And last monday I invited to a follow up and told them

"sorry, I think I was not clear enough. Working for you is of no interest in terms of money. You do not finance me, it's the other way around. Sadly we do not come to an agreement, as 8 hours less does not fit the need. You said I need to make a descision. I do not want to do this but I'm quitting".

They responded with "Oh that is sad to hear. Is there anything that we can make so you do not leave?"

"Either pay me the same I would make as a self employed or follow my conditions"
Did not get a response on that.

I now have three months to prepare myself for self employment.
Currently working 40h + growing side business + getting the whole german bureaucracy shit together.

Tough time but hell this feels so damn good.

Just wanted to share this :)

So recently I completed side gig from random freelancing site where I had to shadow troubleshoot performance problems over teams call with random Indian guy on his client's AWS account. Long story short you can autoscale new instances all you want but it's not gonna help if your FIFO sqs has only one message group ID. This architecture is running an online game, which is basically limited to processing ONE event at the same time for ALL players xD
What's even better, basing on naming convention I realized it's a company that I interviewed for like 4 months ago and they told me "we need someone with more experience". Well good luck, thanks for quick cash

So, some years ago, my old firm was bought by a much larger company.

A couple years later, my CTO resigned, as he needed a week deserved break. I acted as interim CTO for half a year, with the full support of the CEO.

But then higher management removed my CEO for a politician 🤡. His first move is to ask my ex-CEO who to consider for CTO.

He adamantly vouches for me, but in the end, I'm not "political" enough. (Sure I admit I'm not the most organized person, and do not sweeten arguments to suits, but I had won the full trust of my previous superiors *and* fellow devs, and had people to cover for organizational stuff, and have successfully navigated situations with the world's biggest tech orgs).

So I'm again a dev, and they hire this new CTO at twice my salary. But as you can probably guess, who ends up still doing all the CTO work on top of his dev work? Yeah.

That drove me to quit, not because of the demotion, but for a denied minor raise when I was doing the work of someone with twice my paycheck.

As could be expected, once I quit, the CTO barely lasted 6 months.

Fun part is, I've been freelancing (successfully) from them on, and I've been contacted by this CTO, trying to hire me to do some work in his new company...

I'm torn whether to tell him to bite me, charge him a shitton of money or any other funny ideas.

Mind you, I don't dislike the guy, and he's not particularly annoying to work with, so I guess this doubles as a rant against corporate clowns, and a bit of advice seeking.

I used to do some freelance work for a nonprofit. I’d do some website stuff and gallery sitting.

My friend was the gallery director. When she left, I decided to stop freelancing there and I dropped off the keys with the new director. I told them they could contact me later if they have questions about some things I implemented on the website. The new director thinks I’m a random freelancer and starts to BADMOUTH MY FRIEND, the former director.

Over a year later, the gallery assistant emails me asking about SSL warnings and cc’s the new director. WTF.

1) Those warnings were happening long before I left and long before I even started. 2) I am not your website support. I only invited contact for things I worked on. 3) The assistant already contacted Squarespace and Go Daddy for help and they gave her instructions.

I told her I didn’t set up their website and it sounds like she has the resources to resolve this on her own and she should contact Squarespace and Go Daddy if she needs more help. After all, you pay those companies for their services support and my time isn’t free.

I really invested into this work from home lifestyle, moving in an appartment where i could have my own office, upgrading my personal workstation, leaving overpriced locations close to subways behind.. so i do hope it will remain like this for at least a few more years (or why not, even forever for dev roles)

It's way better than a shitty office placed in location equally incomfortable for everyone

Otherwise.. well, there is always the option to go freelancing from home

Freelancers should be considered genies at this point.

Is it me or freelancing jobs at Freelancer are incredibly vague.

Jobs titled "build me a website" with descriptions like "I need an expert dev to work on a python website".

How the hell can you put a price and time to it?!
Am I missing something here? I'm totally new at this and it's kinda baffling.

This new job has more work than I can possibly complete in a day, week, or month. Deadlines pile up and I’m thoroughly exhausted all weekend. My mind feels lethargic and dull. People around me seem to be getting stuff done and I feel like I’m making too many mistakes and holding everyone back. Not sure I can stick with this job for the long haul to retirement. But freelancing absolutely sucks because nobody wants to pay you enough to feed yourself and it doesn’t scale to a full time salary for me. I simply don’t have the mental capacity to do the equivalent of four peoples’ jobs to design, code, QA, launch, and do all the digital marketing, advertising, writing, and maintenance for enough sites to make up my salary.

I was just browsing some projects to bid on and I couldn't believe my fucking eyes.

"I need website - Wix"

I just can't believe it, can we sink any lower as a species?!

I got a contract with this schools to build a student portal,

I do all the needful and the project whatever guy insists that I use their current shared hosting to host this MERN stack application.

first of all, cPanel is my least favorite place when it comes to deploying, I actually dont do deploying I just hand it over to whoever is the IT guy there.

I discovered there's no provision for nodejs in their current plan, I go through all the stress of contacting the shitty customer support and the process of squeezing out useful information from them.

I'm only doing this because the project whatever has refused to pay me until their site is deployed. throughout the process of creating this project I had setup continous deployment on heroku and netlify and I had to beg this guy to look at the changes and review them.

well, today I asked the former guy that built the current site for the login details to the schools dashboard on the hosting providers site and he says he used his personal details for it, according to him projects from other organizations are there too.

I swear I'm going to loose my shit, freelancing sucks

I accidentally forgot to stop my EC2 instance.....

No joke, I have had to use all of my money that I made through freelancing(20 bucks)

Spent years ranting about being a contractor and freelancing. Finally got a job at a big company. Now I'm hating it and missing my old flexible work life. Hello dev rant, I'm back!

I fucking hate my job

Man it’s been a year now freelancing and just working like a dog day and night for a scammy dating app and I just wanna shoot myself in the face at this point. Just another horrible day after the other dealing with a bunch of assholes.

Apart from freelancing what are some side hustle for coders?

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?

My respect for anyone goes up 10x when they mention that they have been a freelancer dev their entire career so far.

Partly because I tried freelancing early on, and I felt ashamed of asking money from clients over and over (they never made on-time payments) and that was the factor that made me jump onto a full-time job for companies.

Started freelancing via agency as android dev for this client. The product is a kyc mobile sdk with a flow of around 20 steps for identification. My job is to maintain the sdk/fix bugs/add features and so on.

Communication seems to be so fucking terrible.

For example the product owner is not technical and sucks at defining issues.
QA sucks at testing and providing feedback. Backend sucks at documentation and seems to live in a parallel universe, swagger docs are outdated. Previous android dev whom I replaced gave me 2 hours of his time during his last month in the company, answered some questions and then left today (which was release day) with around 6 bugs hanging. Now because we are behind schedule the PO is grilling my ass so I would provide hourly estimates, while I dont even know the codebase yet since I spent maybe 30 hours on it in the last month.

What a clusterfuck. I feel like Im in a kindergaden where people are either lazy or incompetent. It seems that sweet gig of 40 hours a month will become much more hours or my output will be low :)

So, I got hired as an independent contractor and the first thing they do is put me on a trial period which will be paid if I am able to complete the tasks. But, they said they'll pay me if I complete the tasks provided each day and not hourly. which is fine except the tasks for one day is impossible to complete in a day. Now, I am not sure if it is a big prank or they don't know how much time it takes to implement something like that. Or are they willingly trying to fail me to see my limits? because as far as I can tell, the tasks are impossible to complete in a day and I don't know what am I gonna report in the next meeting. I don't have much experience being in these kind of situation. So, what should I do? should I tell them that it's gonna take more time? are they expecting me to tell them that or should I just shut up and try my best to finish it in a day? is this fairly common?

I have been coding since 2016, am I overthinking applying for jobs because Im not that "current"? (my React experience is not that deep, I have been working on our startup whos stack doesnt use React or any other front-end framework (only simple handlebars templating))

I have built an actual stable working web platform and mobile app through ionic, is this enough to get a decant non-junior job?
I have never actually worked at a company, its been freelancing and startup (we failed, moving on). Am I overthinking how good I need to be to get a job? I like this one local company but I dont want to screw it up, Im sort of delaying applying there because of it

Which is the best platform to earn from freelancing?

Got kind of lucky. Previously worked in the company I am at now as an analyst. I then left to freelance/ try starting my own business. After a while I then decided to go back working full time as I got tired of always being broke. Applied for a position and interviewed, then told I was just waiting on the approval to start from the execs as every position as 3 rounds of approvals all the way to the VP’s of this massive organization(which is why they struggle to find decent talent as well since no one wants to wait 3 months to hear back). Well after 2 months of still freelancing the hiring manager calls me and says the position fell through due to a company wide hiring freeze.

Fast forward 6 months of still freelancing, the hiring manager calls for a different more senior position to ask if I was still interested in working for the company. Gave me an offer which I accepted and took 3 weeks to get started.

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

What's everyone second source of income?

Curious on how you started and money per month of average for it. Feel I should start working towards it in case of layoffs or just need of extra money.

Is freelancing on upwork worth it?

When you are so happy with your job you feel the burning need to make it a freelancing contest

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

Question about hourly rates.

As remote EU based senior frontend dev (I do android native) how decent is 45usd/hour rate?

This is what a US based company is offering me. Im freelancing currently in a local agency and Im getting same hourly rate locally.

I work under an individual business licence which means I will be paying around 18 percent of taxes.

Questions to other freelances out there.
I suppose it's a common occurrence to be involved in some project, asked to add some feature or modify something, and then looking at the source and find an unmanageable burning mess.
If upon such a discovery you decide you're not taking the job - for example, given the situation you need to charge quite a lot more and the customer cannot pay the appropriate amount - how do you go on explaining your reasons?
You just go out directly telling them about the dire situation of their codebase? Try to find a nice way of telling the truth? Make some excuse (cannot because personal reasons)?

Just curious

Clients told he is switching to wix, because he don't want the website anymore? Why? Damn the project was wasted and mine time also .....

So I am pretty fair dev at Java and have been doing freelancing for sometime apart from normal full time job.
Got a client , a well funded one, who raised a decent chunk of money recently.
Got me do a couple of different areas right from refactoring and bumping their performance to all the way setting up AWS Services like RDS,Lambdas,Dynamo,SQS.
It was going good , money was coming in for the initial part.
Thinking that money is not the concern here , I accepted work at runtime and gave quotations about the additional work.

However now that all is done and deployed , the client simply refuses to pay me the money and has ghosted me horribly than my ex ever did.

I have access to their GitHub,AWS(I setup myself).

Need suggestions of whats the best way I can fuck them up if they decide to not pay even after a few more professional polite attempts I do .

sidenote : They had a pretty dumb db design and blindly had resorted to services in AWS and the pricing is still a major point of concern for them.

FE freelancing. Worth it? or just a bigger depressed state?

My last post entails how my company moved me to a freelancing role upon completion of my task (VoIP micro service: incoming and outgoing calls, voice mail drop, voice mail greeting, call forwarding, sms, and a couple more features) — app is now live and used by company’s agents to contact leads on our other products (designing), so boss tells HR to tell me (I realized this from HR’s slack screen when on huddle with me) to add WhatsApp integration. I responded that since I’m a freelancer I would charge $30/hour for it. HR said he’d get back to me and it’s been 3 working days now.

They are also trying to have the app on Apps*mo so they cash out for other companies to use the app.

It’s been 2 weeks and a day since the end of my probation (I’ve been with them for 3 months) and no one has acknowledged this — I also wrote to my boss asking why management won’t acknowledge this but three days after probation they changed my role. Same company that held off my offer later to two months later in the job to offer a Senior Python Developer role as “HR has Covid and could not send it until now”.

He has not responded to my message. Pretty much no salary for me these past few days.

I’m now looking for other jobs. Meanwhile, I’m building from scratch AGAIN a VoIP micro service and I plan on making it public and free upon completion.

BUT I feel the company might take action against me. Do note that I did not sign the offer letter as the link had 3 days expiration and HR said he would send a new one but never did, even after I reminded him at least 2 days in a week.

____
While typing this, I got the urge to proceed regardless any circumstance.

My latest question on what to do to start freelancing didn't get any traction. My guess is that the question was put incorrectly or was too broad.

Anyway, I'm still interested on working as a freelance

How do you deal with multiple git identities?

Im working fulltime + freelancing + working on my own projects and all of them are on different gitlab emails. It was very annoying to keep remembering to set my git email to a proper one each time I switch to work on another project.

Right now I came up with something easier:

I started using just 1 gitlab profile (personal one) and added my both company e-mails as secondary emails to my personal gitlab profile.

This way I can keep my git identity the same (personal e-mail address) and if I push to company1 repo or company2 repo the commit author e-mail addres is shown email@company1.com and email@company2.com as these emails are given access to private repos and they are added to my personal gitlab account.

Just wondering if these companies will see my commits to other repos by viewing my personal gitlab profile or no? Or if there is an easier way to handle multiple git identities without having to switch between them each time I open another project and want to push some commits.

Any android devs freelancing/working anywhere in Europe?can you post your hourly rate (before tax), years of experience and country where you worked on? I have 2 years exp as android dev and worked in france remotely for 20eur/hour but that was 2 year ago. Wondering how much I should charge nowadays if I have 3 years experience? I guess i should go for atleast 25 euro/hour?

Is it only me or is it bloody hard to get into freelancing or remote work ?

I am a CS graduate, I have worked for a company that owns an online business. I didn't last a year with them for various reasons but let's just say work in my country is not so great. So I have been trying to get a remote position for few months now without a shadow of a success. I've built a Portfolio with a couple of projects while trying Upwork and some remote working websites with no luck.

What are your thoughts on this, what do you recommend me to do ?

In your opinion, is it a good decision to migrate on freelancing on blockchain development as a fullstack web developer, by a financial point of view? I guess there is an increasing request and income for blockchain-based projects.