Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: 6-figure freelancers of HN, what do you do?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 105 posts

Re: Ask HN: 6-figure freelancers of HN, what do you do?

#81

Post by King-Aaron »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #74
King-Aaron wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get into some off-the-plan garbage in an extremely far away suburb on this sort of money, but right now I don't think it's the right time for me to get into property. So I rent about five minutes from Mount Lawley :)

Ok well that you can rent in such a good location on a 70k income (assume USD?) means lifestyle in Perth IS much more attainable than on SFO which might require a 150k income. Rents seem to be 300/W AUD for an appartment there. Nice. Here in Sydney it's double that. 300 gets you a room in a decent location.

Oh no sorry, that's 70k AUD - in USD I think it's about 55? But yeah Perth is quite cheap to rent in. Living costs are kind of high though, but they are really comparable to other states.

Re: Ask HN: 6-figure freelancers of HN, what do you do?

#82

Post by King-Aaron »

otakucode wrote: post #72
mcv wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silicon Valley is fairly unique, and not remotely comparable to the rest of the world. In most of Europe, a senior dev makes less than that. Freelancers are a bit more likely to make more.

Sure, but that's cost of living. $100k/yr is needed in Silicon Valley just to cover your portion of rent for the above-garage apartment you share with 8 other people.

That seems ludicrous to be honest (*though I do note the satire)

Re: Ask HN: 6-figure freelancers of HN, what do you do?

#84

Post by csomar »

richardknop wrote: post #44

Does contracting count as freelancing? Serious question. Or do you mean freelances as only in gigster/upwork sense? As a contractor I am technically working via my one man company but mostly work in a company office alongside other employees, so not sure if you count that as freelancing.

Are you in the US? I think you should be an employee instead.

Re: Ask HN: 6-figure freelancers of HN, what do you do?

#85

Post by metaloha »

TomMarius wrote: post #71
metaloha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Front-end JS? Need, mainly. Most of the UI/UX people I worked with have not maintained their skills, and I was getting tired of knowing more and doing better work than them in their own field. As it happens, there's a much better market for that work than for the back-end and architectural work I've been doing the past couple of decades. Oil-and-gas? Luck - I live in a city with a lot of head offices. Eventually almo…

Yeah, meant oil and gas. It seems pretty difficult to get in direct contact with such client to me.

Friend of a friend situation - a guy I worked with at another company had a friend who we game with once in a while (board games and miniatures games), and she works for this company. She let me know they had an opportunity and I made the cut :)

Re: Ask HN: 6-figure freelancers of HN, what do you do?

#86

Post by metaloha »

kk58 wrote: post #69
metaloha wrote: post #3

Front-end JS for the oil-and-gas industry. Custom, industry-specific customer-facing web applications. Interesting work, but the business logic required by some companies is freakin' terrifying :)

I work in oil. Curious to learn more about your experience. What do your apps do? Whats terrifying?

They're service applications for O&G companies to help with government regulation compliance, ISO auditing, and well performance, among other things. There are a lot of automated and manual processes that have to be dealt with by the various applications (including some old-fashioned straight-up data entry from graphs made by on-site equipment that get couriered to the office into spreadsheets that get imported).

Some of these are pretty large companies, and they want their tools (even 3rd-party ones) to work certain ways, so some of the workflow logic in the various applications we provide gets pretty hairy. It's impossible to avoid customizing things for some of these clients without losing them.

I was brought on to do a code-review of the newest (unreleased) version of their flagship product. The overseas developers didn't read the spec and management didn't bother enforcing it (hell, they barely bothered to plan it). 2 years of development wasted and it literally doesn't meet a single business need yet. My job then became to lead the rebuild of the front-end and work with the back-end team to make everything awesome again. I get to do proper planning, some nice enterprise architecture and deployment planning, some really cool front-end coding (Angular), and bring some modern (and even current) development practices and tools into a traditionally stodgy corporate development environment :) All with the full blessing and support of the technical lead :D

Re: Ask HN: 6-figure freelancers of HN, what do you do?

#87

Post by zimpenfish »

wikibob wrote: post #58
zimpenfish wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 100k+ as a freelancer is significantly more rare What are we meaning by "freelancer" here? I'm taking it (as a UKian) to mean "contractor" and every contractor I know is on £100k+ (which is currently ~$129k).

Can you share a story or two? I'm interested in the UK contracting market. The pay for salaried positions in the UK Is shockingly low.

I mostly do Perl stuff and get £400-500 day rate easily even though I'm far from a Perl expert (and, indeed, I loathe and despise the language nowadays.)

There's a few (senior) Go contracts starting to appear in London (at £500+/day) that I'm hoping signify the start of a trend.

Re: Ask HN: 6-figure freelancers of HN, what do you do?

#89

Post by zimpenfish »

flarg wrote: post #61
wikibob wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share a story or two? I'm interested in the UK contracting market. The pay for salaried positions in the UK Is shockingly low.

Depends who you work for. A solid LinkedIn plus the subscription option, with stints in the big 5 and some solution architect experience gets you some decent money.

Similarly, if you can pick up the (relatively) obscure FinTech stuff (kdb+, Vertica, M/Mumps/Caché, etc.), that's a definite ticket to decent money and job security.

Re: Ask HN: 6-figure freelancers of HN, what do you do?

#90

Post by jackgolding »

King-Aaron wrote: post #81
quickthrower2 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok well that you can rent in such a good location on a 70k income (assume USD?) means lifestyle in Perth IS much more attainable than on SFO which might require a 150k income. Rents seem to be 300/W AUD for an appartment there. Nice. Here in Sydney it's double that. 300 gets you a room in a decent location.

Oh no sorry, that's 70k AUD - in USD I think it's about 55? But yeah Perth is quite cheap to rent in. Living costs are kind of high though, but they are really comparable to other states.

Moved from Perth to Melbourne last year with a nice 30% bump but rent is significantly more expensive here and it takes a lot longer to commute to the city.
Post reply on HN