> How often are you getting $30k contracts that can be done in two weeks?
Often enough, but it's not always exactly 30k for 2 weeks. It's opportunities that lend itself well to making a client really happy while being able to maximize my skills in a way that makes sense for both parties. For example if I spend 20 years honing in on a surrounding skill set and can deliver something quickly then everyone wins. The client gets a high quality product delivered quickly and I get to work less "butt in chair" hours since I've built up the tools and skills to perform the work in less time.
The above is also guilt free because the deliverable is the outcome, not a working agreement that you'll be working 40-45 hours a week.
> Remote workers can still travel the world and work remotely if they can tolerate the timezone differences.
Oftentimes it's not up to you. Your role may require you to be in a specific timezone or overlap with X timezone for N hours. More importantly a business may disallow you from operating out of different countries for an extended period of time because they're not set up to file taxes in those countries. You may also end up getting a big pay cut from wanting to move a few states over. Even if you could move to a different country, if your company subscribes to adjusting your pay for cost of living you may end up getting 20-30% of your salary if you occupied a low cost country.
> I don’t particularly care if I have to ask permission to get stuff done in a company. This is actually one of the reasons I spend a lot of time doing nothing: I’m blocked by other people and am waiting for them to resolve something or get their specs straightened out
Fair enough. I'm the complete opposite in the sense that I really value having full autonomy or at least enough to make decisions without needing to ask for every detail. Being blocked for me is bad, especially if you're blocked on 6 different things and you're forced to break up your time as if you were a CPU getting sliced for execution time.
Everyone says multi-tasking produces poor results but so many businesses create environments where the only option is to multi-task because otherwise nothing would ever get done.
I want to work because the work itself is what motivates me. I really like learning new things, tinkering, seeing it all come together, shipping it to production and watching it positively impact the teams and customers I work with. Being paid to able to do that is a true gift of the world.
Not being able to do that efficiently because of non-changeable unreasonable policies made by someone who isn't doing the work is pretty much the only thing that causes me burnout.
> Everything I’ve heard about freelancing has told me it’s not going to be this easy. It’s going to be a pain in the ass talking with clients all the time and stressing about keeping money coming in.
It's all about trade offs. I don't find talking to clients a pain in the ass, it's one of my favorite parts of the job. Money is a stressor for full time positions too. You can be laid-off at any moment or fired and that's that. It's fully out of your control and your eggs are all in 1 basket. You may also be placed into a non-favorable position if your working agreement or environment changes but you can't do anything about it since if you quit then you have nothing. In my opinion that's not going to create a good working environment.