Ask HN: What to do if you hate working for someone else and arent an entrepreneur?

I managed to save about $20,000 and freelanced the same way the next year or so, but charging $50/hr. Money steadily dropped, but it was mostly due to taking fixed-bid contracts, not tracking my time well, estimating done dates and then failing to bill after the deadline. So try not to give time estimates (which are often by by a factor of 3-10 or more), and if you do, be sure to bill if you go over. They are paying for the time it takes you to solve a problem, not your ability to guess at unknowns that can't be known until you've done them.

After that, I got a great gig at a local agency. If I find myself being a contractor again, I would charge 1.5-2x my desired hourly pay. In internet tech now, that's probably $75-150k/yr, $35-75/hr, even in rural areas, so a $75/hr freelance rate is probably a good minimum.

In other words, there's not an easy way that I could see to survive long as a contractor by taking a pay cut from your current salary. It's better to think in terms of charging twice as much as you're paid now, but finding work half as often. Which is generally worth it because it gives you time to work on your skills, do side projects, etc. I would not take other advice to moonlight, because a programming job by itself generally tends towards burnout.

The company specializes in a couple of frameworks so yes they sell expertise in that sense, and they've done a lot of work developing the brand.

But yes, there are more jobs than people to fill them, which is pretty much any software development job that isn't gaming related or movie related. My company always has open software dev positions and they can't fill them fast enough despite being very well known in the industry.

What domain is your consultancy in?

W.r.t. the co-op, at the moment my ideas (or fantasies) are more about organizational stuff than the content (what we would work on). I am just gathering ideas, learning and keeping my eyes open waiting for all this to crystalize...

My motivation is to be able to work with other people in a democratic and (internally) non-capitalistic way. You are still playing in the market so there are lots of contradictions that you would have to assume, but I think there is a lot of progress one can make nontheless. For me Igalia, as I mentioned, is a source of inspiration because they have been going for quite a while and they are about ~50 people now and have a good business. They are also very democratic and flat (e.g. everyone has equal pay, something shocking but with very good rationale). They also do excellent technical work---for example, they have been the ones implementing a lot of ES6 features inside V8 and SpiderMonkey. If you want to read about them, Andy Wingo (the person I know from there) has 3-post series on the topic here: http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/05/no-master

On a more political side, recently I read the Telekommunisten manifesto which also touches on cooperative models as a way to do social change for real: http://telekommunisten.net/the-telekommunist-manifesto/

In my student times I was very much into activism, but since I started working I stopped "having time" for it. I was also burned out from the energy and emotional sink that activism can be. I've realized with time that the workplace though has not managed to make me more conservative, if anything, it has made me more concerned about the issues of exploitation and alienation---even in "well-off" industries where workers often feel privileged just because of the (relatively) high salaries. My current thinking is that separating work and politics is one of the things that leads to activism and work burn-out and that, if anything, I should use the privilege of being an engineer to try build a democratic workspace for myself and hopefully others too. In the best scenario it could be an example and do some little good for the world, in the worst case I would have tried and learnt something about how the world works.

W.r.t. finding clients at conferences, I am really no expert, I have actually been freelancing less time than you :-) I don't consider myself an extrovert. What has worked for me so far is doing talks about open-source projects. Last summer, for example, I worked with a client that just watched the video of one of my talks and contacted me. Last week I talked with a new potential client that just some comment on Hackernews where I talked about some of that work. Doing open-source work and talking about it is very time-consuming, so it is not a silver-bullet for sure, but something worth trying if that scratches some itch of yours.

I still feel that I have lots to learn and am making lots of mistakes, but I guess this takes time... :-)

In fact Americans are inexplicably voting for the absolute worst proponents of capitalist corruption.