LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

In my country for example Upwork would fail for these reasons:

Substitution - I understand that you cannot subcontract the work without the client knowledge and approval. That means the service is most likely personal. Even if the client agrees etc. and the subcontractor is only allowed to be from the Upwork pool (e.g. the client could hire them directly) then that also doesn't count as substitution.

Control and direction - if the client is directing the worker from the outset and on an ongoing basis and if the worker needs to comply with any standards adopted by client's organisation e.g. the language, coding standards, APIs, then that counts as employment. Especially if the worker does not have final say about how the work is delivered.

Control and direction - if you ask the worker to attend meetings or work on a certain schedule e.g. to align with the organisation or even if they are allowed to have flexible hours - then that's no different from employment. Basically you can only get around this if the work is done to a certain deadline and you have no meetings after the work commenced.

Provision of equipment - things like a laptop and most software are excluded from consideration in my country. So if you need to buy a laptop for work, it doesn't count.

Financial Risk - basically it will only count as freelancing if you risk severe penalties for missing deadlines. Having to work on a project after hours fixing bugs or making amendments does not count as financial risk. The same as having to buy equipment or software just for that project unless the value is substantial.

Business on own account - this one is not so important - but basically you need to have a registered company, office, accountant, stationery, website, working with multiple clients (but employees can do multiple jobs too, so there is not much bearing)

Business on own account - if project takes majority of your time, so that you cannot work on other projects at the same time, then that also suggests employment.

Essentially for work to count as freelance it should look like this: you negotiate what needs to be done, rough specification is being made, you agree to milestones and possible penalties and then you only talk to client when a milestone is reached. The most granular way of payment is per milestone - e.g. hourly billing is employment most of the time.

There are exemptions, for example if you work for a private person or a small company.

Here is more comprehensive guidance with case studies. IR35 has been tightened so that from April pretty much any work will be considered as employment.

https://s3-eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/taxcofe-prod-storage-e5g3...

On the other side, if you ask a lot of good questions and give a quote that's within budget, the client is going to be suspicious of another quote where similar insightful questions weren't asked first.

If another quote is very cheap, the client will probably question if that's going to reflect the quality of the work.

There's also risk that the developer they take the requirements + design doesn't really understand what they're getting into and can't execute.

I don't think there's any easy answers, but generally you want to work on attracting clients that are more interested in high quality work over the cheapest price where shopping around like this isn't a good use of their time. Chatting about rough budgets first and making sure the client is going to profit from the work helps too.

It's great when you get to charge for the planning phase though because you're not feeling rushed into committing to a quote with too many unknowns that might not really solve their problem. If you explain why it's risky to quote with so little information, some clients will listen and aren't going to go with someone asking nothing and offering a cheap price.

I made the switch because I started coding and studying CS in my free time and realized that I loved it, and that taking a detour was not so risky since software engineering would be a good complement to the skills I already had (it essentially meant "closing the loop" of the dev cycle).

I've worked as a freelance PM once, right after finishing my SEng masters actually, and the experience wasn't great - the choice of tech and the team in that particular project were terrible, the customers were really clueless and it was a fight against the elements.

There are also not that many freelance PM jobs, at least where I live. There is a massive market for companies who want to build stuff - and in most cases they want everything handled end-to-end, so being able to do everything responds greatly to this demand.

The projects I've coded have turned out great thus far. In particular I have built an internal product for a global leader in its industry and it's really taking off.

> I feel most of the value I bring is not actually writing code but managing the whole process and consulting the client on what to do and how to do

I feel the same. In fact I may need to outsource the coding on a couple of my projects very soon... Still the SEng experience would be invaluable in this regard as I can act as both PM and engineering manager. And I will keep coding the projects I'm interested in - I'm not sure if I'd like to turn into an agency for the foreseeable future, but rather look forward to improving my coding skills for at least another 3 or 4 years.

Why not charge a fixed price though? Simple billing, no time spend on time tracking + predictable price to the client.

> I wonder if you (or anyone) ever managed to convince "boss" that the poor quality was due to these deficiencies, and that maybe cost was not the most important thing to optimize for.

In my experience, cheapskate employers are almost always pathologically cheap, so there is no amount of convincing or rationalization that will change their minds.