181–190 of 262 posts
There is always a price for growth. Always. Sometimes it’s worth paying. Sometimes it’s not.
It’s ok to have a lifestyle business. Not every company needs to make millions a year or be worthy of investment.
It all depends on what you want.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you’re ridiculously well paid I think you’re considerably underestimating what many independent contractors end up earning. I can only speak about my anecdotal network but everyone that I know who went the independent contractor road is making around a million or more a year. They didn’t start out like that, and I’m not sure how easy the road would be in the current economy, but the people who started out 10-1…
What industry is this where all of the ICs you know are making a million or more?
I guess the latter isn't really an IC anymore, but I know he didn't plan for things to happen this way. It started with him just being an IC and then eventually when he had too much work he had one of his friends join him, and so on.
Question: a friend is a great designer and has coding chops. He just got a project with a large company fixing their e-commerce site. The deeper he digs the more farcical the whole thing has become. Nothing works, no one seems able to do anything and the past “agency” appears to be someone who hires developers in a developing market but has no real idea what they are doing. My friend has fixed huge amounts of broken…
As a solo dev contractor who got my business to $500k/year during the pandemic - I echo a lot of the sentiment in this post. An extension to the post I want to touch on is that VC funded startups are not the only way to break free from the dreadful corporate games. Working for yourself at your own pace is. As an industry we're surprisingly very behind in normalizing this.
Question: a friend is a great designer and has coding chops. He just got a project with a large company fixing their e-commerce site. The deeper he digs the more farcical the whole thing has become. Nothing works, no one seems able to do anything and the past “agency” appears to be someone who hires developers in a developing market but has no real idea what they are doing. My friend has fixed huge amounts of broken…
Customers do not hire agencies with the expectation they will build great software. They turn to agencies because they don't have the time or skills to do it themselves, and agencies are cheaper than hiring people and they are more dependable than freelancers. By that I don't mean that freelancers are collectively unreliable, but with an agency you have a dozen or more developers and if one falls sick, they can just replace them with another developer. If your product depends on that one freelancer, you are screwed.
So "10x developers" aren't really suited for agencies, where every hour is billable and accounted for, and the output does not have to be great, it just needs to be more or less reliable and more or less on time and under budget (or at least cost overruns are accounted for).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Working for yourself at your own pace is. > As an industry we're surprisingly very behind in normalizing this. This is great for people whose own pace is reasonable and matched to their compensation. If you’re paying someone 50th percentile compensation and demanding a 90th percentile work pace and output from them, you’re just going to have endless turnover as you burn people out. Conversely, if you’re paying 90th…
How do you know that people are lazy by nature and not because their job sucks? Of course they have zero incentive to get anything done, they get paid regardless of how well the project gets done. Maybe if they had the guts to leave a paycheck for browsing Reddit and started their own business they would have success too. When I work on my projects I have way more stamina than when I'm doing client work. I kind of ha…
Not having to work was my goal for a long time, but lately I realised that it's not a very achievable one, without some major luck at least. Working on my own terms is the next best thing, and quite enjoyable so far. If that's the goal, why scale the business?