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Drawbacks of Freelance Web Development

114 点作者 altern8超过 9 年前

12 条评论

old-gregg超过 9 年前
Another disadvantage of freelancing is generally lower bar of requirements and less interesting work. There are always exceptions, of course, but it&#x27;s usually mind-destroying disposable CRUD work or building iOS clones of existing web apps, don&#x27;t expect to eat &quot;rich programmer food&quot; [1] as a freelancer.<p>Besides, you will rarely have an opportunity to learn from other&#x2F;smarter people, so growing professionally will be a challenge. I may even go as far as to say it&#x27;s very easy to see your programming skills deteriorate unless you apply a conscious effort to mentally stay in shape.<p>There are always exceptions of course (especially for a specialist vs generalist) but this has been my experience being on both sides of the table.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;steve-yegge.blogspot.com.tr&#x2F;2007&#x2F;06&#x2F;rich-programmer-food.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;steve-yegge.blogspot.com.tr&#x2F;2007&#x2F;06&#x2F;rich-programmer-f...</a>
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s3nnyy超过 9 年前
Switzerland is very close to Italy. I don&#x27;t know if you are willing to move but if you are, you could easily work here 3-4 days a week (60%-80% emploment), make more than enough to live, have no clients who call you at night and build your own product&#x2F;company in your spare time.<p>At least this is what I am doing right now.<p>If you look for a tech-job in Zurich, check out my story &quot;8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT&quot; on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@iwaninzurich&#x2F;eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to-switzerland-to-work-in-it-c7ac18af4f90" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@iwaninzurich&#x2F;eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...</a> or send me a mail to the address in my HN-profile.
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hayksaakian超过 9 年前
Another angle is to progressively fire your smallest clients and get referrals from your larger ones.<p>You can scale to 880$ per hour or whatever it was using this strategy.<p>It could be hard emotionally to fire nice clients, so keep a good list of devs handy who you can send your undesirable work.<p>Last thing is to read patio11&#x27;s guide about freelancing -- its a very relevant read.
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michaelbuckbee超过 9 年前
In the context of HN: a huge upside of freelancing is that it puts you into direct contact with the types of problems that would make great B2B and bootstrapped startups.<p>I know a number of developers that were able to shift themselves from freelancing to running a SAAS via productizing their consulting work.
pmontra超过 9 年前
In my freelancing experience it&#x27;s possible to scale the job by creating teams of developers per project and coordinating them. The problem (if it&#x27;s a problem) is that your not a real freelancer anymore: you have obligations to those developers and you have to care about them, so you&#x27;re more like a company boss. You might also have to become a real company, if your country&#x27;s fiscal legislation favors that. Still, you can&#x27;t have more than a few projects at the same time. I didn&#x27;t make so much extra money when I had a couple of loose teams over the Internet: the profit is linear with the number of the developers. I think one must go all in and become a real company with as many devs as possible, but that&#x27;s a different life.
mhassaan超过 9 年前
I have been doing freelancing for last 3 years and i agree with you but i think you can avail opportunity to scale your business if you are lucky to get big clients because you become a business for others and as every business man wants to scale his business so i think its solely you who can show a big picture to a client. If his business grows following your picture so as you.Its my point of view though i am not that much experienced as you are but i think that should work in this way (mutual benefits). Above all i am happy to see a post in English by an Italian :p . Its my 2nd month here in Italy and its hard to find an english speaker here. :-(
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misiti3780超过 9 年前
I have been freelancing for 5 years and agree with most of this. Thinking about it all the time is absolutely true, and my clients call me at weird times also.<p>I think you can make more money free-lancing than you can working for someone else if you are good at business development, and although it is difficult to scale, if you have talented friends, building a consulting business in a major metropolitan area (NYC,SF, Chicago) is probably easier than building a startup.<p>It would be mucher harder to do from Italy because of the time difference and a lot of high-paying clients expect you to be on site at least some of the time.
einarvollset超过 9 年前
The main drawback to freelancing is defining yourself as a &quot;$$ by the hour&quot; worker. It&#x27;s very common to do so, but it invariably leads to burnout. It&#x27;s not terribly hard to shift your mindset to do something different, but it&#x27;s not necessarily obvious how to do so.<p>The main things to do are:<p>- understand that recurring revenue is unsurpassed in terms of LTV of your customers.<p>- realize that it&#x27;s easy to become a world expert in an extremely narrow field<p>..then combine the two: what niche thing (much narrower than you&#x27;re thinking) can you become a world expert in and charge a recurring fee for?
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EGreg超过 9 年前
Why not re-use software you made or others made. Use open source platforms like Wordpress. At our company, we didn&#x27;t find any good platform for building modern social apps out of reusable components and have the whole thing be maintainable (Drupal came the closest) so we built our own. It has been open sourced so everyone is free to use it. Get a project, assemble it from pages and tools, collect the overhead :)<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qbix.com&#x2F;platform" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qbix.com&#x2F;platform</a>
CM30超过 9 年前
I agree with much of the article, but I also sort of question the idea you&#x27;ll automatically make money being a freelancer. Because you see, a lot of small companies and individuals don&#x27;t really respect freelancers and single developers as much as they do companies, and often see them as a cheap way to get things done. An awful lot of them think you can pay someone a couple of hundred quid for a clone of Facebook or the likes.<p>Agencies may pay their employees less individually, but they tend to be able to negotiate prices better, since there&#x27;s a certain perception of &#x27;leigitimacy&#x27; that individuals don&#x27;t have. The same company that pays them ten or so grand for a site might think they can pay the random freelancer a couple of hundred quid with a few extra beers thrown in.<p>This gets even worse if it&#x27;s someone you know (like say, a friend of a friend) asking for a site done, since the price usually ends up dropping even further (from a couple of hundred quid to less than a hundred quid or free). Working freelance is an easy way to make people think you&#x27;ll help them with their &#x27;world changing million app&#x27; for nothing.
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timpiele超过 9 年前
I&#x27;ve been a freelancer since 1996. I&#x27;ve made $5,000 a year and $200,000 a year. You scale by charging more, using retainers writing books etc.<p>To fight boredom I&#x27;m selling my home in Seattle in 2016 and moving to Ireland for 3 months, then Sweden then New Zealand etc.
jakemor超过 9 年前
Awesome read, thanks so much for posting.<p>Have you ever hired developers to work for you? How did that go if you did?