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Ask HN: What sites do you use to find contract work?

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Re: Ask HN: What sites do you use to find contract work?

#161

Post by gspyrou »

jcsnv wrote: post #59
quackware wrote: post #32

I get my clients primarily through gigster ( http://www.gigster.com ), referrals, and my website.

I'm having issues with Gigster. I did the first interview and passed. The subsequent follow ups (4 already!) have all been either postponed, interviewer no shows (yes really), or setup with the wrong interviewer. I understand there are growing pains, but not one of my emails have been responded to regarding this issue.

A interview with Gigster was scheduled for today , I was waiting for 30 minutes in their conference tool but no one showed up.

Re: Ask HN: What sites do you use to find contract work?

#162

Post by sixQuarks »

learc83 wrote: post #124
sixQuarks wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I hire through Upwork, I ignore all the low hourly rate freelancers. I use a high hourly price as my first requirement. Few years ago, this worked quite well, but now there are some idiots that charge a high price for low quality work just to try to take advantage of people like me. So, now it takes some more time to filter through, but still works pretty well.

What do you consider a high hourly rate. Last time I looked, I didn't see anything above $50 an hour.

Are you kidding me? There are lots of high hourly workers. I consider $40/hour as minimum, generally $65/hour or higher is where the line starts to separate between pros and average freelancers. I've seen as high as $150/hour.

Re: Ask HN: What sites do you use to find contract work?

#163

Post by peter_l_downs »

nbrempel wrote: post #66
decasteve wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever just reached out to someone you don't know this way and had success? Cold calling or knocking on doors? I haven't been in a position to have this need but this whole comment thread made me think about doing it the "old-fashioned" way, rather than browsing the web meat/meet markets.

I've never reached out to someone I've never met but I've reached out to a lot of people that I met _super_ briefly. It let me go "remember me?" in an email I sent and it breaks the tension. People are surprisingly willing to help. I found that it wasn't the first degree connections that led to work but the second degree connections. Get your immediate network to introduce you to others and drum up work from them.

Not sure if you're aware of it, but this is a well-studied phenomenon. Check out Mark Granovetter's seminal paper "The Strengrth of Weak Ties" [0] [1], it's pretty interesting reading.

[0] http://www.jstor.org/stable/2776392?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Granovetter

Re: Ask HN: What sites do you use to find contract work?

#164

Post by chrishn »

Nursie wrote: post #148
millak wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested to hear how you made the jump to contracting? I find myself wanting to make the jump from my permanent job (in London) but being anxious about whether or not it's the right time to do so, if my skill set (sysadmin/devops) as it stands will provide value to clients, if I have the right mix of personal qualities to make a success out of it, etc.

Bloody-mindedness mostly. I worked permanently for various companies in and around London for about 10 years, then got sick of London, moved to Australia, did a couple more years permanent work there, then decided to move back to the UK. At that point I was sick of being an employee and had a vague offer from a friend to help bootstrap a startup, which fell through. So in lieu of having an idea to start up a company…

What's the work like? Is it mostly legacy code or are you creating new projects from scratch? What's the usual contract length? I'm really interested in contracting this year and I see a lot of 3 month contracts for my stack, I'd prefer to do a 1 month contract to test the water first. Do you feel you have enough time to connect with the employees, etc?

Re: Ask HN: What sites do you use to find contract work?

#165

Post by Nursie »

chrishn wrote: post #164
Nursie wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloody-mindedness mostly. I worked permanently for various companies in and around London for about 10 years, then got sick of London, moved to Australia, did a couple more years permanent work there, then decided to move back to the UK. At that point I was sick of being an employee and had a vague offer from a friend to help bootstrap a startup, which fell through. So in lieu of having an idea to start up a company…

What's the work like? Is it mostly legacy code or are you creating new projects from scratch? What's the usual contract length? I'm really interested in contracting this year and I see a lot of 3 month contracts for my stack, I'd prefer to do a 1 month contract to test the water first. Do you feel you have enough time to connect with the employees, etc?

I'm a bit of a dinosaur in some ways, my main saleable skill is C, with some C++11 thrown in and various other bits and pieces.

The work varies. I've been brought in as a 'resource' little different to an employee by a few places, tinkering at the edges of long-established products and having to take technical direction from senior staff, with little to no input to designs myself.

OTOH in other places I have been brought in during the very early phases of product development, and even more or less taken ownership of direction for entire products. These companies also tended to treat me more like the consultant I'm trying to portray myself as. You can probably guess I prefer these ones :)

Contracts have varied from 1 year (with no exit clause, regretting signing that one but it's over next week!) down to 2-months, but then that was renewed on a monthly basis several times. Mostly due to hysterically over-optimistic delivery estimates by the guy running the project...

I've made some connection with the employees pretty much everywhere, and have been in contact with a few since the end of contract, sometimes they've even been enquiring whether I'm free for a stint at some new place they've moved on to.

Re: Ask HN: What sites do you use to find contract work?

#166

Post by mbelsky »

imaginenore wrote: post #104
ThePhysicist wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at Toptal you can set your own rate in advance

I know, but that's not what I'm asking. Do you see any offers? I started registering on TopTal, but then got too lazy jumping through their hoops and not knowing what the upside is.

I have a bad news for you: Toptale pays not by your skills but by the country where you're living. F.e. for Russians it's $25/h

Re: Ask HN: What sites do you use to find contract work?

#167

Post by elbear »

122333444555666 wrote: post #127
elbear wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it worth to you to keep this client? What are the advantages?

They baited "us" with a long term relationship. They have a ton of cash so it seemed rational to take a hit on the effective day rate. So ostensibly they are like perfect for this but the amount they are willing to pay for the type of milestones is pretty low. Like it hurts them.

They don't sound like the kind of client I would like to deal with. I would recommend trying to find better customers and then ditching this one.

Re: Ask HN: What sites do you use to find contract work?

#168

Post by Nursie »

osullivj wrote: post #160
dmitri1981 wrote: post #24

For those who are London based, I recently launched a mailing list for members of the London Hacker News Meetup, which sends out contracts based on your language preference. It's averaging about 10 jobs a month at the moment however I am working on getting it to about 100 pm by the end of the year. The current sign up page is at http://eepurl.com/byq7Af

No C# or C++ on signup page language list?

Nor C, unfortunately. The list seems a little more narrowly targeted than I had anticipated.

Re: Ask HN: What sites do you use to find contract work?

#169

Post by err4nt »

qp9384btv_2e wrote: post #112
err4nt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno about others, but I sure do! I have CSS stylesheets in 7 colour themes, a dozen bootstrap-like JS plugins that add common interactive elements I can drop into any site, and tons of parts and pieces of layouts (like an order form, signup form, pricing chart, or media player) isolated and ready to re-use. I also maintain a big snippets file, filled with HTML, CSS, JS, and command-line snippets and tricks so I c…

How do you incorporate this re-use into your contracts?

I make the stuff and put it under MIT :) Everybody (including me) is free to include it in anything, so long as you don't sue me for having used it.

Re: Ask HN: What sites do you use to find contract work?

#170

Post by err4nt »

mattmccarthy wrote: post #113
err4nt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno about others, but I sure do! I have CSS stylesheets in 7 colour themes, a dozen bootstrap-like JS plugins that add common interactive elements I can drop into any site, and tons of parts and pieces of layouts (like an order form, signup form, pricing chart, or media player) isolated and ready to re-use. I also maintain a big snippets file, filled with HTML, CSS, JS, and command-line snippets and tricks so I c…

This sounds really helpful. I'm just beginning my contracting. Would you be willing to share these libraries and snippets?

EQCSS is for element queries, scoped CSS, IE8 support, and a whole ton of other goodies - check it out at http://elementqueries.com

Most of the other plugins and things are included in https://github.com/tomhodgins/template-factory

My HTML/CSS/JS/CLI snippets file is located here: https://gist.github.com/tomhodgins/27c29ecb4aceaefe5cdf

My responsive testing tool is located at: https://github.com/tomhodgins/speedtest You can use your keyboard keys 1-0 to test a variety of widths quickly, or use the buttons on mobile to test widths your phone or tablet can't physically emulate

If you're looking for a 'view source' tool for mobile, check out https://github.com/tomhodgins/sourceror It's a simple PHP proxy that loads the requested site and displays it as content on the page. For example, I have it hosted at http://staticresource.com/inspect so I can append a URL after a '?' and see the code formatted nicely. Like http://staticresource.com/inspect/?http://staticresource.com...

You can also check out my CodePen profile, here's my collection of 'Front-end snippets', but I've got plenty more on there you can feel free to use or expand on: http://codepen.io/collection/nNqyvZ/

Hope that sets you off to a good start :)

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