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Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#51

Post by sokoloff »

jollybean wrote: post #27
leros wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it mostly finding your own clients? I did a bit of asking around last year and I found several opportunities where companies have small average quality engineering teams who need someone to lead an effort in something like a product manager and engineering architect role. Those sounded interesting, though I did not follow up. My main fear is pay. Ideally, I'd like to be able to make at least $300/hr. I have no ide…

$300/hr is the same as $600K/year. As a manager, who are you going to pay that kind of rate to? Why would someone hire a contractor at that rate, when they could hire the top tier Google Engineers? $200-300/hr rates are usually for 'expertise' style inputs - it's where you have industry leading or arcane knowledge in your field, and you bill for your insight, which might just be a few hours. A lawyer who specializes…

There are specialist roles that I’d hire (and have hired) for $2500-$5000 per day. That doesn’t make for a $600K/yr income for those people.

A good rule of thumb is to plan to bill not much more than 1000 hours per year, making $300/hr more like a $300K/yr gross income.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#52

Post by scrollaway »

BurningFrog wrote: post #28
iainctduncan wrote: post #23

It depends what you mean by contracting - which can be anything from "an employee who gets no benefits so a bit more money" to freelancing. If you're looking for ongoing part-time contracting, I have successfully landed multiple contracting jobs by applying to places that were looking for full time work, for whom my skills were an exceptionally good fit, and saying "I know you weren't thinking of part-time remote con…

Employers face the mirrored version of OPs question. They'd be happy to hire contractors for some things, but have no good way to find them.

As both a client and contractor, I like arc.dev / codementor.io. It's well-paid, with a decent amount of high quality people on there.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#53

Post by nickjj »

ushakov wrote: post #49
nickjj wrote: post #35

Having done contract work for ~20 years without using any platforms, I would say start locally to find clients. It'll be harder now due to Covid but with no network or online presence beforehand no one will know you exist. The long haul would be to start blogging about what you plan to do contract work for and build up an audience but this may take years to materialize. Initially I wouldn't worry about business cards…

how do i find anyone if i don’t live in a big city and don’t know anyone? why would anyone read my blog?

> how do i find anyone if i don’t live in a big city and don’t know anyone?

I was in the same position. I lived in the suburbs and started right after graduating high school. I ended up writing about how I got started here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-start-a-successful-fre..., most things still apply today (minus covid restrictions).

> why would anyone read my blog?

A lot of this world revolves around problem -> solution. If you can write about a topic that solves a problem someone might have or at least get them closer to solving their problem then you're in a good spot.

Think about it, if you're Googling for a specific programming problem and you run across a blog post that resonates with where you're at and helps you solve the thing you're struggling with, does it really matter who wrote it? For me it doesn't. Sure credentials help and I tend to ask myself how they applied their solution but I won't discount a post entirely based on the author's credentials.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#55

Post by revorad »

Contracting is a great middle path between 9-5 salaried employment and full-on freelancing.

You can get paid a lot more than regular employment, but you have to take into account that you don't get any benefits. How much that affects your quality of life depends on your location. For example, I live in the UK and have worked as a contractor on and off over the last 12 years. We have free healthcare so it's been easy. I don't care about other employee perks and in fact, even after paying out of pocket, it's still a lot more lucrative considering the work-life balance.

Freelancing sounds very attractive but what most developers don't realise is that you have to do sales from day one. And we all know how good we are at sales. It's too big a leap for most.

Contracting, on the other hand, is a lot easier to get started with because you can find contract work through the same channels as you'd find regular jobs.

In addition to the mainstream job sites (LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.), there are a ton of smaller niche sites where you can find contract work.

Once you get some experience working as a contractor, it's a smaller leap into proper freelancing. Plus, you can build your online profile, network and most importantly, confidence along the way.

I know in the big tech companies in the US, there's a bit of a stigma around contractors. So I'd avoid those and instead focus on the many other remote work opportunities available now.

I covered a lot of the why, what and how of starting as a contractor in these free videos -

1. Why you might want to become a contractor - https://learnetto.com/tutorials/why-should-you-become-a-cont...

2. How to look for contract work - https://learnetto.com/tutorials/how-to-look-for-contract-wor...

3. How to apply for and get contract work - https://learnetto.com/tutorials/how-to-get-contract-work

Having helped a bunch of people get into contracting recently, I know a lot of the struggles are mindset related.

If you need any help, feel free to get in touch. My email's in my profile.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#56

Post by dceddia »

ushakov wrote: post #49
nickjj wrote: post #35

Having done contract work for ~20 years without using any platforms, I would say start locally to find clients. It'll be harder now due to Covid but with no network or online presence beforehand no one will know you exist. The long haul would be to start blogging about what you plan to do contract work for and build up an audience but this may take years to materialize. Initially I wouldn't worry about business cards…

how do i find anyone if i don’t live in a big city and don’t know anyone? why would anyone read my blog?

> why would anyone read my blog?

Because you’d write high quality articles that help people solve problems, share them around as you write them, slowly grow some viewership that way, and eventually start to get organic visitors from search engines. It’s not very fast though, and it helps to know what you hope to get out of it, so you can target your writing.

I know people who get freelance leads from their writing, but I don’t get many myself. Just a few over the years I’ve been writing. I suspect this is because most of my articles are aimed at beginners, though. I would guess that higher-level stuff would attract more leads. One other benefit is that you have something to point to - I can say “Yeah I know React pretty well, I’ve been writing about it for about 5 years and I wrote a book on it.”

Gotta stress that it’s not fast, though.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#57

Post by convolvatron »

ushakov wrote: post #30
akerl_ wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure why you think a company that wanted to hire you for a leadership role would pay you as a free-lancer to do that role. Generally consultant and full-time hiring pipelines and roles are fully separate, for a variety of reasons. Also, just in case it wasn’t obvious, this comment does read as extremely arrogant. A company wanted to hire you, you didn’t want to work there because they’re “average/mediocre”, s…

yeah, pretty hypocrite that the author doesn’t work to work for a company, because it’s not his caliber, but then accepts a freelancing gig if you don’t want to work for a company for any reason, why did you accept the offer?

why is that so hard to understand? this has been a good source of clients for me.

i dont have any faith in your product or your leadership - you really seem to be chasing your own tail, and working for you is just going to be pointless and frustrating for both of us.

however, you want to hire me because i'm an expert in X. actually I am, and if you give me the go ahead I'll basically fix all your X problems in 3 months and be available for ongoing work if necessary later. you really dont need a full time X guy, I promise you I'm going to be bored after that first little bit.

i want the money, the engagement, and the opportunity to grow my network. that works for me. hanging out on slack with your team all day and having a weekly zoom where I remind you yet again that if you dont test you can expect problems later doesnt.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#58

Post by ushakov »

dceddia wrote: post #56
ushakov wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do i find anyone if i don’t live in a big city and don’t know anyone? why would anyone read my blog?

> why would anyone read my blog? Because you’d write high quality articles that help people solve problems, share them around as you write them, slowly grow some viewership that way, and eventually start to get organic visitors from search engines. It’s not very fast though, and it helps to know what you hope to get out of it, so you can target your writing. I know people who get freelance leads from their writing, b…

last time i tried blogging someone stole the content and tried to pass it off as their own

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#59

Post by Schnitz »

leros wrote: post #17
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I did a bit of asking around last year and I found several opportunities where companies have small average quality engineering teams who need someone to lead an effort in something like a product manager and engineering architect role. Interesting. It’s not exactly common for companies to want contractors to be in leadership roles. Leadership roles generally warrant full-time employees who can be more invested in…

Those companies were willing to hire me. Hopefully this doesn't arrogant, but those companies can't hire someone of my caliber. They're mediocre companies that can only hire average/mediocre people. I wouldn't want to join a company like that full time, but I could see it being fun to hop in and help them out with a big project. For example one company was a media company that you've probably heard of. For their next…

> legacy PHP system

That's Yahoo right? :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#60

Post by smugglerFlynn »

jollybean wrote: post #34
akerl_ wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure why you think a company that wanted to hire you for a leadership role would pay you as a free-lancer to do that role. Generally consultant and full-time hiring pipelines and roles are fully separate, for a variety of reasons. Also, just in case it wasn’t obvious, this comment does read as extremely arrogant. A company wanted to hire you, you didn’t want to work there because they’re “average/mediocre”, s…

It's not arrogant if it's true, it's just candid. We would never communicate things like that - that would be arrogant, but if he's giving us the reality, then it's fine. That said - the 'Red Flag' to me is that someone things they are going to 'contract' and 'help out a bit' and 'fix their architecture'. This seems worse the a bit glib, it seems upside down. This seems like someone who might be a good engineer and w…

Funny, but in my experience, under-developed problem statement like “fixing a broken project” is the main reason why companies do not (cannot) offer competitive compensation for this kind of work.

What is the monetary value of “fixing a broken project”? Nobody knows, because the root cause is not known - and if they knew the root cause, the problem would have been defined differently from the start.

So what happens is company tries to hire someone to diagnose the root causes. But diagnostics brings no inherit value to the org until problems are actually fixed. Which means nobody is willing to invest into diagnostics. Which means they try to fill in some flat rate position for these diagnostic purposes, position which fits the project budget, with compensation unrelated to the scale of actual problems at hand.

Another issue is that “fixing a broken project” engagements are usually launched by middle management responsible for success of these (already launched) projects. Proper way to approach this as an external consultant would be to go one level up, take a look at the actual company strategy and this project’s goals, and rework the way whole project is launched. At many times the easier way around is to re-setup, re-steer, or kill this project altogether - but this requires a different level of involvement.

In the end you are stuck on an underfunded engagement where actual proper solution likely lies outside of your area of responsibility (you are being hired by middle management, so you cannot effectively go above their head and reach the actual solution).

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