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

Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 116 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#71

Post by gregjor »

I went from f/t to contracting/freelancing almost 15 years ago. I wrote a long-ish article about getting started as a freelancer:

https://typicalprogrammer.com/how-to-start-freelancing-and-g...

(Free, no ads or affiliate links.)

I think the key is to identify a niche (or a few) that gets you out of the low-bid commodity Upwork/Fiverr wading pool — competition is always more dense at the low end.

A professional network and word of mouth referrals work best. Try to establish long-term relationships. An agent who can connect you with customers can also work really well.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#72

Post by gitfan86 »

10x-dev wrote: post #68
cushychicken wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is a nice reminder of how good my current clients are - especially regarding their comfort with asynchronous communications. Finally: Don’t underestimate how good a stable, big company job is right now. Freelancing isn’t really the easy money that some people make it out to be, especially if you’re not actually free during the day because you have a job. I am acutely aware of how much more money I could…

Aside from non-compete and generally unenforceable "ownership of work during your own time" clauses in my employment contract, I'd say I have quite a bit of control over my time. Nobody cares what I do throughout the day as long as I deliver my stuff on time.

As an employee I continued to run into people assuming I should be available from 9-5 and that I should take a similar number of vacation days as the rest of the team.

It seems like there was always some resentment toward the guy who leaves the office at 2:00 and take 30 days of vacation as an employee regardless of his salary or productivity.

But as a contractor they don't care.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#73

Post by dceddia »

ushakov wrote: post #58
dceddia wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

That sucks, sorry. People really have no shame. I've had it happen to me too, one guy cloned my whole site a while back :/

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#74

Post by granshaw »

granshaw wrote: post #50

One thing that I don’t see brought up enough is the different kinds of engagements a freelance developer could target: I suspect for many of us, the easiest to find would be what’s called “staff augmentation” - basically you get inserted into an existing team in some capacity, except you’re on a contract basis so not tied down, get to negotiate your terms, don’t get employee benefits etc etc Such engagements are ofte…

One other advantage of contracting even in a staff aug arrangement: you have some protection against overwork in that (as long as your terms are hourly) you simply charge more if you worked more that week

Often this also leads to clients being more careful about having sane workloads

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#75

Post by jollybean »

sokoloff wrote: post #51
jollybean wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

That's what I indicated: At 'a few hours or a day' there are many problems which need solving, for which rates may be substantial especially given highly specialized knowledge.

But 'leadership' over some project, over any period of time, is not one of them.

A 'consultant to solve our DB limitations', sure.

But in terms of leadership, part time, non-business hours, no 'on site' (aka the OP has a 'real job'.). I don't think so.

$300/hr is a $600K/year run rate - is the relative cost of having for someone for extended periods.

A contractor can log much more than 1K hours per year - or less - it entirely depends on the nature of their work.

Also, some 'hours billed' are de-facto to the firm, not the individual. If you're hiring 'a lawyer' - you're really hiring 'their team' not really the individual, as often you would when hiring a contractor.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#76

Post by jollybean »

cushychicken wrote: post #62
jollybean wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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…

>$300/hr is the same as $600K/year. ...at 100% utilization, yes. I've never personally met an independent contractor who books more than a thousand hours a year.

It's the equivalent from the 'buyers' perspective - that's the benchmark burn rate if they were to hire the person for a 'man year'.

Contractors come in all shapes and forms some may book more, some less, though yes, from the contractors perspective, $150/hour is more like $150K/year.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#77

Post by benjaminwootton »

Does any other country have the same concept and size of contracting market as we have in the UK?

Here you go to a website such as Jobserve, type in eg “React Contract” and apply to one of thousands of daily rate contracts. (Inventory is a bit low today due to start of the year, but will be 1000+ in a few weeks.)

After a short interview process, typically you will start a contract for 3-6 months, but can often stay for years. The processes by which contractors are hired, onboarded, paid etc are very mature.

In London in particular, many developers will go down this route in order to earn higher rates. There used to be tax advantages but these have been eroded over time.

“Disguised employment” is absolutely rife so the model is under constant attack by the government with our terrible IR35 law.

This is a very common model in the UK. I have only met a handful of “freelancers” here winning their own B2B business, but have met thousands upon thousands of contractors using the above model.

To answer the OPs question. In England you simply start applying for contracts posted publically online. The hardest part is typically that permanent employees need to give 1 month notice, whereas people want contractors to start in 1-2 weeks so you may need to give notice before having a contract in hand. Pull this off once though and you are away.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#78

Post by perrygeo »

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?

Start or contribute to an open source project, then offer consulting services to your users. If you can solve one of their problems indirectly through your published code and/or writing, they already trust your technical abilities to some extent.

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#79

Post by atlasunshrugged »

If you don't want to go the whole way where you have literally your own shop, are trying to hunt for your own clients, market yourself, etc. going to a platform is something to consider. I don't love Upwork but some people have good experiences there. Toptal is sort of midrange and then there are some more niche ones like tribe.ai (which I can vouch for as being great for talent having worked there for some time) and there's also braintrust which has an interesting story about the community having more ownership but I don't have insider details on how it's really run

Re: Ask HN: How do you start contracting?

#80

Post by awinter-py »

be very honest with yourself about your current hourly rate before you leave. as a full time person, you mostly do things you already know how to do, and you may or may not 'work' every day. as a freelancer, you only get paid when you do work that delivers value

freelancing is total BS unless you're good at negotiating and have a deep network in the thing you're trying to do

it can also be valuable if you're trying to create influxes of cash every few months to break even on finances while taking a year off to start something

but it can also be an awful distraction that kills more momentum than it adds runway

Post reply on HN