12 years into running a tiny digital consultancy with my wife. We've used an "associate" model for all that time - a posh way of saying "a network of trusted freelancers".
We've deliberately chosen not to take on staff. We could have grown at many points along the way but haven't wanted to. Instead we've stayed small, focused and profitable.
The benefits to growing would have been being able to take on bigger gigs, but we have always aimed for family first. The business has always been a means to a sustainable, balanced and loving family - and not an end.
I have friends who have taken the growth route. Some are doing ok. Others are desperately stressed. One has split from his wife in part because of the financial burden of maintaining a 5-10 person team.
We've never regretted taking the route we have. We have been here for our kids and we've been able to be flexible with our time in large part because we're able to scale our own work up and down in response to changing times without having to worry about paying salaries.
Whatever the choice, it has to be deliberate. So many are people pleasers in disguise. They grow not because they actively choose, but because they can't say no. It causes that desperately stressed life when you're not active about these choices and boundaries. They're always in survival mode, chasing more more more, without ever being deliberate and reflective about their actions.
It winds up being the end of a lot of businesses, whether or not they actually did grow. They took on a contract that was just too big for them, despite their intuition telling them not to. Or they hired too many people despite not wanting to but was talked into it by a friend.
So good on you for knowing what you want and being deliberate about it! You and your wife have avoided a lifetime of stress by doing so!
No disrespect to the previous comment, which is well put, but just to say you shouldn't be hard on yourself there at all - everyone and every company has different boundaries to figure out, and it's great you've found yours.
The biggest advantage to owning your business is that you can optimize it solely for what's best for you. If growth is all you care about, go nuts, but if you've got it humming along making decent money with just the right amount of work, there's zero pressure to change it.
I think a lot of people forget that and think that they need to push to be more "successful" - kudos to you for doing in the right way for you.
> The biggest advantage to owning your business is that you can optimize it solely for what's best for you.
Another great advantage is being able to fire bad clients.
It's not something I've done more than once or twice but the freedom not to be brought down or stressed by someone else's insane demands is worth gold.
Related is the ability to pick and choose your clients in the sales process. e.g. plenty of small consultancies have formal or informal policies not to bid for government work because of the effort and frustration involved in responding to public sector RFPs.
> Another great advantage is being able to fire bad clients.
That's not an advantage to owning your business, that's an advantage to owning a successful business. When you're struggling to get off the ground or to keep the lights on, you can easily get stuck with bad clients because you can't afford to fire them just yet. In the worst cases this results in a death spiral where the financial hit from firing them would be too much of a risk but the cost of maintaining them slowly starves your business and/or burns you out.
As the old wisdom goes, most businesses die and most businesses that die do so in the first couple of years. If you have to start by bootstrapping your business you already start from a disadvantage. If your financial situation means failure is not an option, bad clients can turn into hostage scenarios.
I mean, this is true for a lot of technologists, but there are a great many professions that allow for the kind of approach mentioned by the GP.
My grandfather runs a quite successful one-man architecture consultancy built on decades of experience and networking in the industry. He gets to pick and choose his engagements, and if he lives long enough I’m sure he can sustain his business for many decades to come.
Together we make enough in 10 hours a week to pay for our tiny apartment, 16 year old car, insurance, and healthy veggie diet. The rest of the week?
Well, this year we're ultra-marathon training, volunteer firefighting, backpacked the first half of the Appalachian trail, crew on a racing sailboat, and running a charity teaching apprentices how to be software engineers (got two into the industry in 2023). I just got asked to come be a helper at our fire academy starting next week which I'm very excited about.
Wise advice indeed. There's a fine line between "working to to live" and living carelessly. I would hope anyone attempting the same thing ensure they have a solid plan for the eventuality of old age and/or broken wrists, blindness, etc.
I had 15 people, including myself, at one point. I wasn’t terribly good at marketing, and all of our business was word of mouth in a cyclical industry. It was always stressful to not know where future business was coming from, and the overhead meant I often kept less, rarely more, than I would have by just remaining a solo entrepreneur.
This is always a temptation for agencies which almost never works out. They underestimate the effort to build a product. They also typically don't have the skill or experience to build a high quality product that can compete with the whole world.
I work with an Iranian guy and he used to be CEO of a ~30 people company. He told me it was too stressful for him as well. He also did’t make much money, as he was concerned about the income of his staff.
During COVID, work dried up and company (more or less) ceased to exist (but website is still up).
He told me he is much happier again as a “normal” developer.
As for me, I also wouldn’t want to manage many people. The stress of dealing with bad employees, sickness, all government related stuff, etcetera, it’s not for me.
Actually I’d prefer to develop full time on my own projects, if I had the financial means. But I don’t, so since May I am an employee at a Thailand based company.
We're in this spot after 9 years, most of which was spent trying to be an "agency".
The pandemic cost us most of our employees and the final one left for personal reasons later that year. Trying to be as non-exploitative as possible (within the constraints of the system) left us without sufficient resources to weather a nearly year-long struggle and the fixed nature of wages meant we ended up sinking money into people effectively just sitting on their hands (to no fault of their own).
We talked about possibly moving to an "associate" or "collective" model before the pandemic hit and it was very clear that people who look for employment aren't necessarily also people willing to run a company or give up the labor protections for a stake in their place of work, especially when they were already with a "good employer" which we tried to be.
Depending on how you actually do it and the part of the world you live in, this model could be illegal. For instance the case of freelancers almost exclusively working for one employer is in some countries interpreted as avoiding to pay all the taxes, healthcare and pension contributions for employees. The penalties might be severe, e.g. requiring to pay all of those things retroactively, which if you do it with enough people ends up being a lot of money.
Where did I say he did? The first word of my post is "depending" and the first part of the first sentence is "Depending on how you actually do it", so it was pretty hard to miss that it depends.
Had a similar experience for 6 years. But the downside of not being big is that your business can die in big crisis , as happened to mine when covid started.
Respectable move. My primary complaint with solo-turned-agency people is how grifty they get.
As a solo, the job is to add value and make the customer happy so you build your reputation. There are definitely solo contractor grifters out there but they usually struggle with the reputation issue.
Agencies develop a grifty dynamic where they realize that their job is to sell themselves and as many headcount and hours as they can squeeze into a contract. Now instead of hiring that solo dev, they’re forcing you to pay 20 hours/week to the project manager and to have two devs minimum on it, one or more of whom are complete juniors who will spend incredible amounts of hours solving simple problems, but that’s okay because that’s what they want.
Agencies rely on their status and size to impress clients, which short circuits the reputation issue and opens the door to these shenanigans. They also target bigger companies where wasting time and moving slowly might be the norm, or at least something they can gloss over by sending the sales people out to schmooze the execs over dinner again.
I knew some excellent devs and infosec people who turned into agency operators who just tried to milk companies for contracts and run a revolving door of junior hires who they can squeeze hours from until they quit. It’s sad to see.
To be fair, I know a few good agencies as well. They tend to be in such high demand from reputation that they’re always booked without even trying. It takes a long, long time to get there though.
I’ve unfortunately done studio/agency work my entire career and they’ve all been pretty small (around four devs) until my last employer, which was closer to 70 people and exactly what you described. It’s like you were describing them specifically. I left that job because it ran the capable people ragged and also generally felt dishonest to our clients despite financial transparency being one of the biggest public selling points
Telco I worked at spent 6 months choosing an agency, end up spending 3 million for what turned out to be a new Color scheme on the public website. Mind blowing, but completely normal for them
This is not a very charitable read of the agency or consultancy business model.
What you call grift is actually sales. Most business in the world are incentivised to grow and scale, so that's a given if it's done ethically.
As a buyer, I would rather work with an agency or a consultancy, given enough budget. The advantages are:
- I don't have to source, manage and pay individual contractors.
- If a team member isn't right then the agency will switch them out quickly.
- There is one throat to choke.
- There should be at least some institutional knowledge in the agency.
- The agency will provide oversight, be it from leadership or a billable PM resource.
I have built a few products for startups and my own projects over the last few years, and even with a budget as small as $50-$100k I would rather work with an "agency" with a thin layer of management even though I am very technical. It is much easier to manage and less risky than betting on 1-n individuals.
> This is not a very charitable read of the agency or consultancy business model.
Judging by all of the comments from people saying this matched their experience working either inside or with agencies, I don’t think it’s inaccurate.
> What you call grift is actually sales. Most business in the world are incentivised to grow and scale, so that's a given if it's done ethically.
I think you’re talking about something else. I’m not talking about a sales process being done ethically.
If I was talking about ethical sales with aligned incentives, I wouldn’t have used the word “grift”. That was, literally, my whole point in using that word. :)
I’m specifically talking about the huge incentive that exists to unnecessarily balloon the hours as much as possible.
It’s simple, really: As a solo dev with a mostly full pipeline (assuming this for simplicity) your incentive is to finish work efficiently so you can impress the customer, build trust, and build a reputation to overcome the challenges of being solo. If you sandbag your efforts and deliver inefficiently, they have nobody to blame but you. You also burn your chance of a good referral. It’s bad all around.
As an agency, the situation changes. You now can scale up to as many people as you can convince to work with your agency, but now you need to force them into as many projects as possible. You’re no longer limited by the number of hours you have in a week because you’re selling other people’s hours. Hiring inefficient people will actually get you more profit.
When the client catches on, you can remove the inefficient people and apologize for the “bad apples”. You temporarily assign some superstars to the team to impress the client until they’re not looking again and then you slowly go back to the inefficient people when they’re not paying attention again.
Like I said in my post, not every agency does this. However, as someone who has done a lot of hiring of contractors and agencies I can say it’s almost like most of them are operating out of a hidden playbook. The headcount always gets inflated over time (including their assigned project managers who they require to work alongside our internal project managers) and the revolving door where the good devs get pulled off to other projects and then they try to substitute lesser devs.
It’s gotten bad enough that we have a framework for bullet points to negotiate away from agency contract proposals. We reserve the right to aggressively dismiss anyone they assign who isn’t doing work up to par. Agencies hate it, but it’s a necessity these days (at least until an agency has proven themselves)
This was my experience as well- I started my career with an agency, and it grew from 80 to about 500 people in the course of 7 years. My last two there made it abundantly clear it was turning to the grifty side- every year, we were less profitable, and every year, they kept pushing for ways to get more hours (document more! Test more! Add more value!) despite the fact that the quality we delivered varied greatly from one team to the next.
It was really hard to watch what had been a committed group turn into a grubby machine.
If a client doesn’t care, that means it also internally operates on principles different from just getting the job done. Sometimes it doesn’t even know what the job is. There’s a budget and a general direction, burn the money and hope the wheels are at the right angle. The fact that they spent millions on a simple result only helps upselling it further.
> 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 percentile compensation and you have an employee moving at half the speed of their peers, eventually you’ll get fed up and replace them with someone better matched to the position.
But this all breaks down when you get into the weirder ends of the market. Self-pacing works great for you because you can put in the work to deliver $500K/year of value and companies appreciate it. It doesn’t work for many people whose idea of a workday is to put in 1-2 hours of focus and then browse the internet all day, which is a larger portion of the developer population than I would have guessed before becoming a manager. Other people can’t help but wander through tasks, get distracted by rewrites or new frameworks, needlessly refactor working code, or otherwise do a lot of activity without producing a lot of work. Both of these fault modes benefit greatly from the pacing and structure of management.
There’s no one size fits all approach. I think solo dev contracting is a great option for some people, but the type of person who can self-manage, sell themselves, network, and retain self-discipline isn’t all that common.
I think this is a great example of how different people thrive in different environments.
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 have to resist the urge to kill myself all the time instead of doing that boring job and I keep reminding me I'll be able to build a villa with the money.
I don't think it's laziness or lack of accountability,
I think it's the 20 years of indoctrination in the school system - which are just factories churning out employees afraid of stepping out of line.
> How do you know that people are lazy by nature and not because their job sucks?
The two aren't mutually exclusive. I personally wouldn't say humans are lazy, but simply: people avoid doing things they find unenjoyable, but if they must do something unenjoyable they'll find ways to minimize their time spent doing it.
> Of course they have zero incentive to get anything done, they get paid regardless of how well the project gets done.
This makes it sound like freelancers get more work done, not because it's more enjoyable, but because they must to get paid.
> Maybe if they had the guts to leave a paycheck for browsing Reddit and started their own business they would have success too.
For some people, getting paid to browse reddit is one definition of success.
> When I work on my projects I have way more stamina than when I'm doing client work. I kind of have to resist the urge to kill myself all the time instead of doing that boring job and I keep reminding me I'll be able to build a villa with the money.
Huh... After reading this I need to rethink what you are even arguing. I assumed it was that freelancers put in more hours because the nature of their work is more fulfilling. But you're really just saying, yeah humans are lazy to the point of wanting death over client work, but at least with freelance I can frontload the actual number of miserable hours worked, instead of spreading them over 30 years.
As someone who takes pride in their work and who tries to always work the hours I'm paid for (and often regrettably more, but trying to cut back on that ...) It can be surprising to find out that a lot of people, really are, very lazy.
If you've been lucky enough not to encounter them in your day to day, then that's really good, because when you have to work with one of them, boy does it suck.
That being said, I've only encountered this a few times in over 10 years working as a software developer. Most people really do want to do a good job. Even if some of them get distracted easily and need more structure.
I like to think I am pretty engaged and self-propelled, but it doesn't surprise me that most people aren't interested in working. It would be a miracle if all work required for society just so happened to line up with all the passions of the workers.
That's why we get paid after all. I really enjoy my job and I'm effective, but if I didn't need money, it's not so fun that I wouldn't drop it to do other stuff I find more rewarding.
We aren't built for this either, especially not thought work. Society compells it, which is what it is, but we are not evolved for an 8 hour day of thinking at a desk.
Some people are good at it, but we are asking far more than some people to do it, and you have to do -something- to survive, and the outcome is obvious from thay lens in my opinion.
The last two sections is mostly what I want to address. I feel the same way of more stamina doing my projects then what I do at work, but I feel like the blame, at least for me, can't be attributed to school. Here is the reality, at least for me. I got into software engineering because I like to build really cool shit. The problem is, when people hire me, it usually isn't for really cool shit. Its a business application, often with insane requirements because the client has no clue what they want or even why they really need it. When it does get figured out, its often just some boring business application with nothing really challenging to it or interesting. I'll code it out, but there is nothing interesting about. But when I go home, I just do whatever I want. Want to build my own internet protocol built at a lower layer than TCP? Sure, sounds fun! But no one wants to pay me to do that, or the jobs that would pay me to do that are so far and few between.
If anything, school set me up with higher expectations. Here I am in college, doing interesting math problems and programming projects and such. I get out to the real world and boss man is just like, "client just needs an application/feature to do X," and the solution is just fetching the data, putting it in a list, and doing a for loop over it. If anything, College had me expecting to do a lot cooler shit.
There is simple fact. You will never be a master of your time a truly free in matter of choice what to do if you have a boss above you. Either you let grow others by money that you able to make for them or you let grow yourself by beeing boss to self.
> It doesn’t work for many people whose idea of a workday is to put in 1-2 hours of focus and then browse the internet all day, which is a larger portion of the developer population than I would have guessed before becoming a manager
Yeah, but not necessarily for any malicious reason. It may not matter to you. My impression is that these people are burnt out from high school and college. But they fit a superficially, stereotypically identical profile to like, the one person you know putting in 80 hour weeks, so they keep getting hired. This is not a fringe idea, it's common enough to be made fun of in movies.
My point is that there are a dozen commenters litigating all sorts of irrelevant issues, when the explanation for how people who want to work 1-2h weeks keep getting $200k/yr+ jobs seems obvious to many non-industry laypeople.
> Other people can’t help but wander through tasks, get distracted by rewrites or new frameworks, needlessly refactor working code, or otherwise do a lot of activity without producing a lot of work. Both of these fault modes benefit greatly from the pacing and structure of management.
These are all problems that stem from management, not employees.
> 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.
I feel this! I have run my own one man contracting shop for about half of my career, in two different stints.
I loved:
* the flexibility
* getting paid for every hour I worked (I billed by the hour)
* the freedom to choose clients
* having more than one made me feel more stable
* how close it kept me to the business problem space
* the ability to take time off
* the distance: I could roll my eyes and say "at least I'm getting paid for this BS" when there was political BS
However, after time I joined a team because:
* PTO is quite nice
* Insurance (in America) is better in general for employees
* it was great to be part of a team
* the ability to specialize in a way that is difficult as a contractor (I can be further away from direct revenue generation or product creation)
Highly recommend everyone tries this out as you'll have a much greater appreciation for all the components of a business when you are doing them yourself (or are responsible for them).
Billing by the day is not the best for everyone: billing by the hour can give you the flexibility to work incomplete days or switch between clients during the day.
It would suck if I was called in on a weekend (without having agreed to be on call). It would suck even more if I was called in for a whole day just because I'd demanded that to be my minimum. Instead, weekend hours could be priced 16 times higher. There could be a quantity discount so that a full day would be somewhat less expensive.
>It would suck even more if I was called in for a whole day just because I'd demanded that to be my minimum
This isn't really how it works though. If you find "getting called in" (what does this mean?) to be terrible, you should be charging more for that service. You should be in control.
The whole point is to generate enough surplus value that your client signs the cheque, no questions asked, and is happy to do it. You shouldn't squabbling over hours.
I don’t think it means you work a full day, but that you bill a minimum of a full day for any weekend work.
A while back I worked at a consultancy that typically billed using a 15-minute granularity during standard office hours, reasonably rounded up/down. Unless otherwise contracted, outside of office hours the granularity increased to 1 hour rounded up. A 5 minute fix would be billed as an hour, a 65 minute fix as 2 hours, etc. It was also only undertaken for emergencies; general work requests would be done the next business day.
Generally all contracts were budgeted some number of hours per billing cycle per service. N full-time engineers would be converted to an equivalent amount of hours for the budget.
The result was that overtime was used judiciously and clients were rarely insisted on pushing big changes near the end of a day or on Fridays.
I never had the ability to bill by the day, but if I head back to contracting will try it. By the time I learned about it, I didn't have new clients coming in the door to experiment with. And existing clients and I were okay with billing by the hour.
I think that it is unabashedly a pro, because whenever you are adding value to the business and can defend it in an invoice, you're able to get value for it. Unlike when you are a salaried employee and the extra hours don't get you anything material (maybe noticed and provided with a raise. maybe).
> As an industry we're surprisingly very behind in normalizing this.
Given the fight we’ve seen over WFH, I’m very inclined to believe that this is intentional by the industry. By focusing on paying top dollar for FTEs and demanding incredible amounts of time and energy from them, companies maintain a level of control that they wouldn’t have by working with a fractional engineering team.
I find it humorous that anyone thinks they are capable of forcing talented people to do more than they want. Most of the people who feel pressure to make their corporate masters as happy as possible are either desperate or barely competent. All one must do is appear to be slightly better than all of the dead weight in the corporate world. No need to work hard.
* I wanted to add that I am referring to software developers. Creative types like the author of this article are always shit upon by corporate types unfortunately
Maybe I'm doing it wrong but I feel I work harder than most people on my team. I always go for stories in areas that are more complex than the rest or areas that are new to me. I'm always trying to learn more to keep ahead of the rest.
My performance reviews are always "exceeds expectations", but I haven't seen how this benefits anyone other than the company so far.
Maybe I should just take it more easy but I feel like I'd float under the radar for possible promotion then.
Not to be discouraging, but promotions rarely go to top performers in the sense of what you're doing. They go to movers and shakers, folks with heavy soft skills who routinely interact with skip levels and the like. Their work output is marginal to the influence they command.
Basically, you're most likely being taken advantage of and will never be properly rewarded for what you're doing, IME.
Yeah, if you aren't skipping levels you are sitting still. Takes balls and the ability to handle when it goes sideways. It is often a gamble at first. Most people don't want to bring on this type of stress/uncertainty--but when it works, it works.
I went from "lucky to get hired" application support engineer peon to being groomed for CTO by stepping out of my lane. My supervisor had a sign on his wall: "Stay in your lane." I did not (he ended up sacked by the CFO). I found that even pissing off some key executives (CEO/CFO) a few times just helped my profile. I got lucky but it was all deliberate.
One of the executives I inflamed (CFO) had to sign off on two record setting raises/promotions for me. All brought before the board of directors/investors by the then/current CTO.
To be fair, I was also super productive/knowledgeable and a high-performer. Everyone else was used to working at big companies, I had been sitting at home the previous ten years playing on my computer and gardening.
Truth. Been learning this the hard way, myself. But what do you do when you've never been one with heavy soft skills? When schmoozing has never been natural or enjoyable? Is there really nothing more than either choosing to suck it up and accept your fate or else force yourself to be what you're not?
I can tell you what worked for me, but I can't promise that it will work for others. Basically, I just stopped giving a shit about what other people thought, especially most other software engineers.
I stopped caring about getting promoted and doing things just for visibility. If I see something that needs to be done, I make sure it gets taken care of. I ask intelligent questions in meetings and have almost always put way more thought into anything we're working on than anyone else so I'm able to have good questions and concerns. I focus on delivering for the business and not impressing other software engineers.
The key, and this is the one piece of bullshit unfortunately, is to make sure your manager and ideally your manager's manager know about what you are doing. I mostly accomplish this during my one-on-one and by speaking up in various meetings we are in. I also work for a company where talking directly to senior management and even executives is truly accepted.
The thing is, most people are followers and need to be told what to do. Become the person that knows what needs to be done and makes sure things don't fall through the cracks. Unless you are looking to go into management, focus on the technical and driving projects to completion, but avoid trying to manage other people. Eventually if you build enough respect from the team you can get them to do what is needed and your can build enough trust with your manager that you can direct them to deal with problem employees.
The downside to all of this is that I'm pulled into absolutely everything because everyone wants my opinion and I'll actually make decisions for everyone instead of meeting about it 15 times. I end up doing very little actual development these days, but I'm paid extremely well and don't have to manage people. In the end this doesn't bother me that much because I see corporate software development as a different activity from the one I actually enjoy.
One option is to study and practice soft skills like any other skill. I found this unpleasant but useful, and I would recommend at least trying it.
Another is to find organizations that have individual contributor (IC) promotion tracks that are at least as lucrative as the management track. (Of the highest-paid, most respected people at my company, most of them are not in management and are simply really good at what they do.)
Change your mind to make it enjoyable. Emotional intelligence, be helpful to all. Play the game using intuition and any opportunity. The team/company situation also must be condusive to it.
Look for other job. I spent almost decade shipping things, that just work. The managers didn’t heard my name often (because my deliverables always worked). At the end I was not visible enough for promotion despite working hard. Job change, few percent pay raise. Probably I will work now less hard.
How much real progress have you made towards that promotion? And do you even want the position you'd have if you got promoted?
Honestly it does sound like you're doing it wrong. If you want to get paid more there are more effective ways of doing that. If you enjoy tough tasks that's fine, but be honest with yourself and make sure you're doing it because you want to.
I think my employer is a bit unique. They don't have a lot of the problems that other companies have with long hours and asshole managers. I've gotten great reviews and bonuses for years and I've been promoted a number of times. Most of my value is in just making decisions for a bunch of indecisive people and having a deeper understanding of most things. They have pretty high turnover because no one cares about what the company does (lending), they aren't the highest paying employer for average employees, and the work isn't exciting. They put a lot more effort into retaining a small number of us.
> Maybe I should just take it more easy but I feel like I'd float under the radar for possible promotion then.
Few companies have sane compensation policies. by all means put in extra work when you have an opportunity to learn some new skill from it. but once you get to a pint where your skills are valuable, either jump ship to a another company that pays commisserate to your new skill level or start or join a startup where you get enough equity to eat at the adult's table when the ipo or acquisition happens
How many employees does your company have? Less than 50, ok maybe push the limit but honestly if it’s more than 25 people across the company your ability to get recognized is hamstrung by bureaucracy. Anything more than 25 people should honestly be met by “just good enough to be better than the other guys” and the realization that tenure and political pull, not talent, is rewarded.
If you want to stand out then you need to go somewhere that you can.
> * I wanted to add that I am referring to software developers. Creative types like the author of this article are always shit upon by corporate types unfortunately
Ish. It's complicated.
IME, most folks have a low standard for "good" and don't differentiate well above a certain minimum. Someone with an MFA and 150k in debt may expect to get paid more than someone with no degree and no school debt, but that doesn't mean the buyer will rate the MFA higher -- which means they won't pay them more money.
The MFA may also expect to spend X hours on a project without _explaining that_ to the buyer.
That's not corporate types being stingy or such, it's a mismatch of expectations. At the end of the day, buyers value the work much lower than the sellers, so the sellers are going to be disappointed far more often.
> Given the fight we’ve seen over WFH, I’m very inclined to believe that this is intentional by the industry
Doesn't this require a level of coordination between hirers that almost certainly doesn't exist?
I see these takes all the time about how "the industry" cabal coordinates to screw over workers. Never have I seen any meeting notes or interviews from former CEOs on how this coordination might happen, just disgruntled employees feeling they deserve more.
Personally I don’t believe theirs a conspiracy regarding this but just to play devils advocate.
Clearly, the heads of HR and other people who define corporate compensation talk to one another, “hey what are you guys doing to manage pay cuts, reductions in staff, etc in this economy at company x/y/z”.
It’s a pretty obvious benefit of having a strong professional network. I.e you have people you can ask for mentorship and advise. Every startup board was asking companies to belt tighten and reduce costs because of the economy earlier this year and last year.
A relatively small number of companies and startups in tech define top of market for compensation. Clearly the people at those companies know one another and talk about what they are doing.
> VC funded startups are not the only way to break free from the dreadful corporate games.
Do people really think this ? VC funded startups are as corporate as it gets, probably worse, just a different kind of corporate.
The second you take funding you have a new boss[1]and have all sorts of constraints which become more and more rigid with more rounds .
There are only few well understood models of scaling and governance that VCs know to work, if you deviate too much they are going to fire and replace you.[2]
It would be rare to have the kind of corporate control Zuckerberg enjoys today for a founder and neither are valuations and preferences terms generous to founders larger you raise .
Whether small business or a giant startup the power dynamics is the same . how much money you need to make payroll(including yours in a solo op) and who is funding it , if you don’t need any money at all then you are the king , if you cannot afford even a small short fall everyone else who can bring that money is your boss
[1] until you raise funding, there are many bosses you cannot afford to piss off : early users/customers , employees, vendors and so on you don’t have the money to attract the talent you desire or runway to say no to capricious user demands
[2] I am not even including the class of funds like a16z who early on will bring in dozens of experts who are on staff and have done scaling many times , imagine part of management, the -1 team reports to your boss also
I have a dedicated outbound sales person who pings their network for referrals every few weeks. Their job is to weed out noise + educate + convert hourly to project based billing
Went into a lot of detail on Reddit a couple years back here
I can see how that helps in increasing revenue, but it also makes the work less agile, requires longer negotiations and adds risks. So it's probably not for everyone.
Some others have found a way to bill similar amounts but on short projects billed by the day/week. That sounds preferable to me, but you need to have a skill that produces value in such short projects.
>but you need to have a skill that produces value in such short projects.
I assume you're a software developer? There's your skill.
I think you're overthinking this. How is it less agile? You have a project, a price and a timeline. Everything between then and the end is on your schedule.
The only "unintuitive" skill you need to hone is assessing value and pricing based on that. But there is endless analysis and analogies out there to help.
Based on what I've seen other people do, it's basically someone who does the lead prospecting and qualification for you. They can be paid commission or flat, but are usually paid both.
No idea on the specifics, but the theory goes like this : clients have been burned many times over cheap solutions. Cheaper is usually more expensive on the long run. For this to break the circle you need reputation of reliability.
If you're in the US, restricting yourself to jobs where they are limiting to the US results lessens that problem (doesn't eliminate it - I suspect there's a ton of fronting accounts)
I've tried it on the buyer side and anything less than $50/hour can't speak proper English. It's definitively cheaper but not significantly; and if you add the struggle of going through all the profiles, then the price will match reality.
Upwork can work for very niche things as a extra channel. I've seen it work for people selling packages of "I'll fork bitcoin for you for 2k".
For normal contracts it's terrible.
I started on freelancer websites when I was 15 and it was nice to bag 20$ per hour plus extra if I happened to be faster.
But the more experienced you get the more you can charge and use your network instead of cheap jobs on Upwork.
> Working for yourself at your own pace is.
> As an industry we're surprisingly very behind in normalizing this.
We are trying this but have you seen the constant media siege bombarding us with “studies” show remote work is bad for you? In the uk there are now articles saying that even hybrid is bad. We want to be more independent but we are not always allowed to. Tech is meant to be the easiest path to independence yet somehow its not. Wondering why.
Going remote shouldn’t change the pace of worn. For some people, going remote causes their productivity to collapse (distractions, loneliness, feeling disconnected, less oversight) but those people should be managed individually.
But being remote or in office shouldn’t determine your pace of work.
I haven’t seen the studies you mention, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if in a few years some of these studies are revealed to have had some bias due to being funded by commercial landlords.
I've worked as a freelance solo dev (sadly for far less than $500k/year) and the difference between my revenue and profit was close to zero. Expenses included accountancy costs and the occasional new laptop or whatever bit of hardware I could justifiably call a business expense, but it was a tiny fraction of my revenue.
It means you are not "expensing" or deducting everything possible. Technically, yes, your only expenses are a laptop. But a good account will find way more: home office, legible meals or travels, investments, etc.. This should reduce your tax bill. You should never pay over 10% total, otherwise you are not maxing the system.
But if you assume as I do that your time is the most valuable thing you have, then there’s no way to generate profits when all you sell is your time.
You can generate cash, sure. But profits as in selling something for more than it cost you, never. You can never get that time back, and it’s worth more than anything.
I would guess many will disagree with this perspective.
If you're a solo freelancer, there's no difference between paying yourself for your time and paying yourself out of the profits. The money goes to you either way.
Back when I was a 3d artist I was making good money as a freelancer. I would also work with a archviz studio as an "employee". Time went by and I leaned towards the "secure" job with the studio (instead of opening my own), cause from time to time I would have a hard time with my clients as a freelancer (sometimes they did not pay, sometimes they would ask for changes that would be a entire new work...). Making a long story short: the studio went bankrupt and let me go without any compensation whatsoever. Maybe I've should kept a few clients and not rely entirely on the studio.
Don't know if my experience adds to the discussion, but I thought about sharing it.
I think any kind of career move, be it freelance, corporate or anything in between, has risks. You shouldn’t regret the decision you made if when you made them you used the best information available to you - no one can predict the future.
For years I’ve felt “weird” and “wrong” for working this way.
I still feel guilty when telling people that I am only open for meetings from 11 am to 5 pm. The only exceptions are people in distant time zones.
It can also feel wrong if your SO is on a regular 9 to 5 and you are getting up without an alarm clock, going shopping and making appointments in the middle of the day, and generally setting your own work habits according to your own preferences. Last night I was working at 1 am because I couldn't sleep and there was something I wanted to get done.
OTOH, she never has to go food shopping and I have always been there for the kids in ways that are not possible for her - helped my adult child load and unload a moving truck last Wednesday afternoon, and over the years took both kids to school activities, driving lessons, and other events that my spouse couldn't attend.
“Tiny unicorn” is what I call this kind of business. I’ve been working like that for 30+ years. Avoid failure to the left of you, greed to the right. It’s a strait, narrow, rocky and easy-to-lose path. A constant onslaught of people and chaos trying to push, pull, trick, trip, invest and otherwise knock you off it. Stay on target and you get to be… yourself.
Agencies charge like a very good contractor but use midrange to lousy contractors/employees to do most of the work, and bring the good ones in only in need.
One guy I worked with spent a lot of effort evaluating Ukrainian and south American talent who had fluent or at least business level English.
It took him awhile but the devs he fed work to were solid engineers, almost FAANG tier but he paid them s*t or good for their locations. I've kept their names handy because poaching them would be dirt easy.
Knowing this as well as what you said, I avoid agencies now and simply assemble teams of individuals for this reason alone. They're easier to evaluate and you can let them go easily as opposed to a full service agency.
However, what annoys me the most about Upwork are agencies larping as solo guys. Anytime I evaluate a guy who has a solo freelancer account and then mentions he has guys he works with that bill through him, I cut them lose. This is easy to spot. I wish uowork would ban these guys.
I'm a solo freelancer and I happened to get contracts that needed more than one person to work on. Sometimes the customer paid everybody separately, sometimes they paid me and I paid the others.
> However, what annoys me the most about Upwork are agencies larping as solo guys. Anytime I evaluate a guy who has a solo freelancer account and then mentions he has guys he works with that bill through him, I cut them lose.
In the UK, you need to collect evidence that you are a contractor and not an employee of a company. One of the ways you can do this is by hiring people to do some or all of the contracted work on your behalf. It might be unlikely given it is Upwork, but if those freelancers are repeatedly doing big or long jobs for the same client(s) then this may be a legitimate tactic to avoid falling foul of the taxman.
It’s the same in Denmark. It’s really annoying because companies will not commit to top tier salary, but are happy to pay for a freelancer. I guess it’s hard for middle managers to hire engineers that should paid a lot more than them. The result is that all the FTEs are mediocre, and freelancers are where the talent are.
Not in Denmark (or even UK), but if we hire perm HR get involved, while contractors are just procurement, and can be directly attached to a project which will be funded differently to BAU - when I hire a perm attached to a project I need to attest to what will happen to the employee when the project ends.
There are a lot of agencies out there with diverse business models attached.
We charge like a low-to-mid-range US developer but only employ high-range Latin American devs. We invest heavily in those devs and their training. They get paid handsomely, our clients get top-notch work at a bargain, and we handle all the bullshit of international management and payments.
> When I’m only focused on work and don’t dedicate enough time to personal projects, I become unwell. Creative self-expression is not “just a hobby” for me, it’s a necessity.
As someone with the creative urge, I always found the word hobby itself was quite patronizing, as though your identity were just what you get paid for. But with some thought, I would say our identity becomes what we are appreciated for. Whether that's as a parent, a musician, an artist, a writer, a hacker, a promoter, performer, or another thing we do long and well enough that it's what people come to appreiciate about us.
If you don't do the things you are appreciated for, you will absolutely become unwell, and if you want debilitating mental health problems, do a job where you aren't appreciated. It's like a recipe.
"I would say our identity becomes what we are appreciated for."
I think there's a lot of truth in this, and it's not something I've ever seen stated before.
I guess it's a bit of a feedback loop. We want to feel good about our self, so our self becomes increasingly about the things people appreciate and respond positively to. There are a lot of aspects to my life, but the ones that are core to me aren't necessarily the ones I do most or get paid best for, but are things for which others are most complimentary.
This is why I like to ask "what keeps you busy?" instead of "what do you do for work?" Someone might work in a fish cannery but their real passion is the classic auto they are restoring; I'd rather hear about that.
Today I herd an interviewer ask "what does your joy look like?" I like that one too, as a question we should ask ourselves.
This is very refreshing to see. Not everything needs to grow grow grow fast fast fast. I think she has a very sustainable way of operating and living and it makes me very happy and I find it inspiring.
I hope more people follow suit,I kinda am saying that to myself :)
Regarding this topic, I know many people (myself included at the moment) that do not want the burden of freelance, starting their own business, etc. For these people, there are other alternatives.
For me, I have been working 4 days work weeks for multiple years now, and love it. The experiment went so good that the rest of the engineers in the time have Friday's afternoon off now.
You can do this, even if your company never had this type of working schedule or even if your team still works 5 days a week. You will not be left out nor called lazy. In my case I actually deliver more, and higher quality, since I started because previously I was developing physical pain in my hands/arms (because of work and sedentary life). I have started the process of working 4 days a week in 2 companies, a big (unicorn) one that is part of NYSE, and a small one of less than 20 employees. This works on all scales (not guaranteed it works with all companies).
Shameless plug: If you want help on this, I actually have in my bucket list to write a medium/short guide or handbook on how to do this. With examples, email templates and how to approach your employer.
> have started the process of working 4 days a week in 2 companies, a big (unicorn) one that is part of NYSE, and a small one of less than 20 employees. This works on all scales (not guaranteed it works with all companies).
Don't take it as whataboutism, but many companies love adding clauses to engineers contracts that forbid them from working for other companies or starting their own business. In some cases they will also claim intellectual rights on all your creative output "while you are working for them". In my case even contributing to some Github repo could get me in trouble if my employer thinks a competitor is benefiting from it.
On the other hand, as someone who suffers from similar physical pain, a 4 day week would boost my quality of life significantly. So it's something I am looking forward to at my next job.
I realize that this comes off as a very American way of thinking, and apologize if you are not, but things are starting to move towards employee rights in regards to striking down non-compete agreements or anything where your livelihood would be affected by signing an agreement. Of course the biggest changes are starting in more "progressive" states, such as New York and California, but the movement is spreading. You might see trouble if you are so specialized that whatever you work on, it would touch your day to day tasks, but moving towards another path of development could provide you with more creative output in a manner that your business couldn't touch. Your business may decide to fire you, but you should be free from legal obligations if you aren't directly releasing the same type of code that you write for the business.
> Don't take it as whataboutism, but many companies love adding clauses to engineers contracts that forbid them from working for other companies or starting their own business.
That is true, and I actually have a friend that renegotiated that with their employer and removed that clause from his contract because he wanted to do consulting work outside his working hours. Sometimes it is as easy as asking, sometimes it is not possible.
> On the other hand, as someone who suffers from similar physical pain, a 4 day week would boost my quality of life significantly. So it's something I am looking forward to at my next job.
It is a major change in terms of life quality, even more if you use the extra free time to explore hobbies that add physical activity to your life. I tried climbing/bouldering and loved. Now I also go to the gym for lifting.
Also you don't need to wait for moving to a next job to negotiate 4 days work week. Just a reminder :)
> My non-commercial creative self-expression is equally important to me as my career.
I recently read a Tweet says that, some people dreamed of owning a storefront of the trade that they love, but not just for the money. They also wanting to use it as a place to allow them to express their interests, tastes and qualities in an externalized way (while making money doing it).
I think this is what the author was trying to say there. And in the context of design, I'd totally agreed :)
This lady seems more successful than me, but I managed to build a respectable one man consulting business, and I have zero intention to grow that. My job already feels like 50% sales, I'm not looking to make that 100% and add the anxiety of having to pay people to the anxiety of having to earn enough for myself, or limit the freedoms I got out of this move.
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?
freelance is not scalable, not good to have any passive income, and, you stop working your income stops, there is not even any PTO to take a break. I have been doing freelance on and off over the years, and I believe using all the free time before next project to build some sellable products is the only way to become more financial independent.
I just mentioned this elsewhere. But everyone in freelancing and agency feels the same way. If only they could get that sweet passive income they could relax and have a stable buisness. Here are some things to consider:
- have you ever built and maintained a large codebase/project over several years?
- have you ever sold or marketed a product rather than a service?
- are you ready to compete with the whole world, as opposed to locally?
In my experience they are completely different skills, that agencies and freelancers do not have.
One approach is to develop internal "products" that make you more efficient. The bar drops from being something a customer can buy and enjoy right off the shelf, to being a productivity multiplier.
I persnally actually accepted the opposite. If everyone is obsessed with passive income and not doing work, to the extent that they are accepting tiny margins with artificially low discount rates, I want to maximize the value of the time I do concrete work.
It just requires different framing. Maybe taking a week off means making $10k less so your vacation feels really expensive. But in reality you've accepted a job paying $10k less per year with one more week of vacation.
I think it's a perfectly valid choice but I don't think it's quite as binary as the author puts it.
I've been in agencies, in bloated product companies and they were all terrible experiences.
I did some freelancing and enjoyed it, but I could make significantly more money with less effort contracting.
I liked my solo contracting days albeit they quickly resembled little employments.
But when I run my own company or when I worked in some startups with enlightened leadership, it was great.
I think you can absolutely create an agency (or a product company) where a work pattern like yours is acceptable and where people can work flexibly and be happy about it. I used to work in one of the few remote first company before COVID and everyone loved working there because of it. Async as much as possible is crucial.
If you're worried about people not putting their 100% because they're employed and not making more money the more value gets created, you can setup a structure with low base pay + amazing bonus on success and you can get the same incentive (and risk) you have in your solo work - but with friends and scaling up your business into something that can make more money.
It's easier to have large margin as an agency than as a solo grifter.
> If you're worried about people not putting their 100% because they're employed and not making more money the more value gets created, you can setup a structure with low base pay + amazing bonus on success and you can get the same incentive (and risk) you have in your solo work -
I think more jobs should be structured this way
BUT
it also needs strong checks to catch and _fire_ folks who upsell/ oversell/ overcharge against the customers' interests.
This is a risk with any quota (minimum) system but there are a relative handful of folks who will abuse a reward structure to the maximum potential, raking in tons of money for the company (and themselves) while slowly damaging the reputation of the company.
So, we need good incentives and rewards coupled with harsh penalties for dishonesty and abuse. IME, companies are often much better at the former than the latter.
I have a similar vision. I want to hire one person and pay them well. Culture will definitely be very easy to maintain. I only want to net like $20k/month.
Good. Business fetishism is a cancer on society. If you're doing something that pays your bills and makes you happy there's no reason to ruin it for the sake of extra money.
Can someone explain what the appeal of solo freelancing is in the age of bountiful remote work?
My typical day as a remote worker is not that different from the one described: a couple hours of work per day and mostly leisure the rest of the time. And I probably still make more money than a freelancer. Consistently too. Is chasing down new clients all the time and working on multiple projects really that desirable to people? I think this article is just cope.
> Can someone explain what the appeal of solo freelancing is in the age of bountiful remote work?
Income multipliers, flexibility and being treated like an adult are a few reasons that come to mind.
For example, with salaried work your income is mostly fixed (minus a pre-defined'ish bonus or options, etc.). With contract work you might land a $30,000 contract that takes 2 weeks to do because the focus is on providing value that allows your client to 5x that in a few months so it's a no brainer. This is different than salaried work where you're expected to be available for 40-45 hours a week.
You may decide to spend a year traveling the world while maintaining existing work and working whenever you feel like it. As a salaried worker I don't think you'll be able to work a few hours a week for 6-12 months in a row and still be employed unless you had an exceptional situation.
With a number of salaried positions, especially with companies that receive funding or are growing a bit past early startup stages you often lose all freedom to make decisions that you're qualified to make. Such as having to ask permission from multiple people to store $0.01 / month worth of files in an S3 bucket where the discussion to get this approval literally costs 10,000x to 20,000x more in engineering time.
How often are you getting $30k contracts that can be done in two weeks? Remote workers can still travel the world and work remotely if they can tolerate the timezone differences. I just got done with a rental in Costa Rica where I lived by the beach for 40 days this summer while working remote.
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. By the time there is work for me to do, I’ve spent a lot of time idling. The actual work is done quickly, efficiently and I’m back to waiting for more work. The bottleneck is always other people, it’s not engineering taking too long.
I’m not going to push those people to hurry up either. They are under other pressures and it’s none of my business how long they take. As a remote worker, they are out of sight and out of mind until they have something useful for me.
Sometimes when we finish a big project, there’s a period of 2 or 3 months afterwards where we basically do very little except maintenance of the new deployment. Conveniently this year, we planned for those months to coincide with the summer.
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.
> 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.
Biggest difference is that you get to 100% chose exactly what you want to work on, and all the profits generated by the work goes to you. You're not beholden to anyone but yourself.
> Is chasing down new clients all the time and working on multiple projects really that desirable to people?
Chasing down new clients is probably a thing mostly affecting new freelancers without much experience. When I've done freelancing in the past, I've never had to look for any clients besides posting "I'm available to help out people on a freelance-basis" on various social media, and then I get more work available to me than I could realistically do.
I think most established freelancers "suffer" from the same. Once you're available for work, it fills up quickly.
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 10-15 years ago have it made for them. They did work a lot more than us who went into the corporate mill, but they are frankly going to “win” anyway considering some of them are basically set for retirement at age 40-45.
They started consulting and eventually build products that they sell to the organizations they consulted for. One did consulting for public sector authorization management and eventually build a ReBAC API to put on top of the myrirad of API's that the public sector in Denmark operates, so that IDM became much, much easier. Another started as a RPA (robot process automation) trainer who worked together with the business side of the whole concept and was their go-to for technical training whenever they sold a "package" to organizations. Now owns a 50+ person company that is full of consultants that did what he once did.
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.
Likely niche consulting and implementation on unique or domain-specialized knowledge. While I've made a few hundred k off React and Node work, the people I know who make the big bucks are experts in a particular field.
This is similar to the FAANG salary phenomenon: for every individual contractor pulling $1MM in annual revenue, there are thousands who might barely be making minimum wage when expenses are factored in. Very few independent contractors end up earning enough to equal full-time employment doing similar work.
For me it is mostly freedom. Employment contracts usually go into "all your code belongs to us", "we own every piece of thought you ever had", "if you want to make PR to a project you like first write an email to your manager with approval, then you have to forward approval to owner of project".
If I want to make a side project I don't have to worry there will be any issue with copyright or god knows what. Because I am my own company and single customer cannot include in contract that I cannot do any other work.
> Can someone explain what the appeal of solo freelancing is in the age of bountiful remote work?
For start, remote work is not so bountiful.
At least it is pretty hard to find companies paying around UK/USA salary to people employed in Poland.
In my solo freelancing I charge a bit less than UK/USA salary, depending on who is hiring. So far all companies refused such salary and wanted to pay at most 200% of typical local salary.
Also
> I work for a couple of hours and then make lunch. Depending on my workload, I may go back to my office and keep working for another couple of hours in the afternoon, or take the afternoon off.
You're more easily replaceable as a remote worker, you're also dependent on the whims of your employer. It's easier and more beneficial to develop the skill of chasing down clients vs chasing down jobs in a remote work environment. You also don't have any options for residuals and your working largely to pad someone else's pocket and not your own.
It's worth mentioning that the next growth step doesn't have to be an agency. It could also be a co-operative or (an informal) collective. This avoids the overhead of having to manage employees while still allowing the distribution of work loads across multiple people and the outsourcing of non-core tasks to dedicated specialists (e.g. accounting, legal and invoicing).
I'm feeling something similar now. I'm doing freelance work about 20 hours a week making my previous income level. So far each project has ended because the company wants me to go full time with them. The challenge hasn't been finding work, it's been keeping it part-time free lance or quitting.
> Realizing that I don’t have to work 8 hours every day was pretty groundbreaking. I still get work done, and have lots of personal time. I do occasionally take on an ambitious project and work overtime for a few weeks, but then I try to balance it with more rest so I don’t burn out.
Wait, how do you get to not working 8 hours per day?
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 stuff and delivered on time and under budget stuff they just could not get done. But big boss will not give him the big project for coming year because “he is just one guy” . Any suggestions on how to address this? Big boss is looking for security more than performance. But my friend can’t afford to hire 10 people to be an “agency”. Any suggestions on how to crack this?
Agencies do not exist to build great software. I mean sure, it helps if their output is good enough to guarantee more work, but that's not why they exist. Their purpose as a business is to generate billable hours.
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).
Assuming it can be done by a solo dev, then pull on 10 guys out of body shops in India/Pakistan, seek the cheapest possible credentials that they can be called developers, call yourself project lead/architect.
Bill as a fixed price project with milestones — you want the work assignments to be ambiguous. Plan/budget by your own workload, consider using offshore resources as a bonus (keeping in mind you intentionally pulled them on as just bodies).
Has anyone here had any positive experiences of growing their freelance business to an agency with employees? I'm currently considering to do it myself but I'm getting a bit hesitant after reading this thread.
I've had success. Started as a freelancer. Moved to a me + contractor model. Now have 30 employees in 6 countries. On target to hit ~$2M in revenue this year.
I love it. I started my career as a super nerdy systems programmer. Now I get to jump between client work, sales & marketing, finance & strategy, and—my absolute favorite part—coaching and supporting the amazing technical professionals we have on our team, helping them become the best version of themselves as they can.
I'm thinking about going solo / freelance in my profession soon. Are there good places to read general tips on this? But short and to the point, like this thread.
I sympathize with the sentiment of working on your own way instead of following the growth, or others mantra.
But I think Nela should also understand that she is an outlier deciding to work ALONE: what happens when someone decides to have children? Do a single person has the skills to manage the complexities of a business? Be ready all the time? I don't underestimate Nela skills, just saying, again, she is an outlier and should balance her own mantra.
Why wouldn't they? While sometimes it takes more time than a normal job would, it also offers a larger amount of freedom than a 9-5. And if you have a great reputation and a constant stream of clients, it is even better since you can pick projects and decide when to do them and in what manner.
On another note, Nela is quite an outlier! I've been following her work for close to 20 years now I think, starting from her HTML&CSS tutorials long time ago. Her blog was basically CSS Zen Garden for my generation, teaching us how to achieve beautiful things with HTML&CSS back in the age of Dreamweaver, inspiring many future developers and designers. She gave so much to the community through the years with her knowledge sharing that it still inspires me and motivates me to this day to share more. Nela, if you're reading this, thanks for all the great work!
It's not a prerequisite tho - I've arranged with multiple clients to work either 3 days a week or just a set amount of hours whenever I choose. And most of others I know who get into freelancing do the same - if you have offer for another project, and they can't wait until you're free, you can always recommend them to a friend/colleague.
> she is an outlier and should balance her own mantra.
Maybe I missed something but she nowhere claimed that everyone should work in this way.
> what happens when someone decides to have children? Do a single person has the skills to manage the complexities of a business? Be ready all the time?
None of that would be solved by transitioning into agency.
How is a useful thing to write? All advice is circumstantial. There is no reason to apologize for nor temper one's opinion because it doesn't apply to everyone.
A starting point could be to target contractor positions posted by companies and/or recruitment agencies. Those are sometimes really close to permanent employment (except the job security and employee-specific perks) but will at least get you started in the game.
Be mindful of laws around disguised employment with those types of engagements. You need to make sure you are in the clear legally by paying the appropriate amount of tax for your given situation (in the UK the regulation is called "IR35" and tries to specify what falls under a legitimate B2B arrangement and what counts as "disguised employment" and incurs taxation equivalent to conventional employment).
For those who've done it, how did you go from solo contractor to an agency? Particularly how did you get and maintain clients, and what pricing model did you use? These and similar worries are preventing me for trying.
On the other side, I just want to work and get paid. I’m never the type who advertises well so I’d rather work for someone and don’t mind an agency taking a cut.
there is a middle ground now. There are multiple agency-as-a-service companies (like lifeandhalf.com, etc) which basically give you an agency infrastructure without running it yourself.
where infrastructure means - account managers, talented (but junior) design/copy staff, invoicing, etc
Its an interesting model - where really talented people & studio can still achieve scale up without the uninteresting parts of the scale up.
I suspect I have a different understanding of capitalism. To me it simply means free markets. Something the author is taking advantage of to build the life she wants. But she seems to dislike the hustle culture that has formed within our current economic system.
I'm trying to separate the ideas here. She uses the term "capitalist imperative of growth". I would say that is a culture that has formed withing our economic system not a required or desirable part of it. Free markets however are something different. They are simply the freedom to transact. That freedom is something good. An example of the beauty of that freedom is the Authors ability to live the life she wants while others get to live the lives they want working like crazy people.
Once you separate the ideas there is no implication of hypocrisy.
It’s basic reading comprehension, your original text clearly calls her out on hating capitalism yet depending on it according your own definition of capitalism.
I’m happy to be called a jerk by someone who is clearly dishonest and gaslights
Oh my... finally a topic I'm well acquainted with.
Source: Solo digital agency owner (6yrs here in Australia) who's been up, down, up, and recently made the decision to roll back to a single person consulting firm that's now WFH (gone from WFH - Office - WFH & 10 FTE to 0 )
I've found the last 3 years hugely difficult as an agency owner, when people are your business it cannot be underestimated how challenging (read: stressful) it can be. I got to the point where I was so anxious about opening my inbox in the morning.
However, there are ABSOULTELY some types of agencies that do work well and can scale effectively. Interestingly, these seem to be mostly accounting firms. Who in recent times have been able to easily add capacity through off-shore labour, who's client expectations are comparatively low and who's business is largely unaffected by the macro - You still need to do your bookkeeping at the end of the day! This makes for half decent retention rates and your customers don't expect a bookkeeper to solve every problem in their business.
The WORST type of agency to build is the mid-tier marketing agency or even bespoke dev firm - You get clients who are highly demanding and staff who are relatively expensive (agency owners will be nodding their heads here)... And it leads to a stuck-in-the-middle feeling where its hard to get out of the 5-10 person range and build any scale, and you'd honestly be more profitable and less stressed as a single person consultancy.
We used to work with large enterprise, and this is probably when we were most profitable. However, these types of customers have differing challenges and remote-style firms are at a disadvantage unless their sales teams are located where the big fish are.
The idea that agencies are 'booked without trying' is laughable. You get this by doing great work consistently over a long period of time, exceeding customer expectations and staying in constant contact with prospects. And this comes from great people... But you first need the work to be able to hire great people, which comes from the grind of agency sales. It doesn't change, no matter if your WPP or a local agency. Your pipeline is your lifeblood and what enables you to choose the right type of work.
If I did it again, I'd be looking at segments of the market where you can build easier client expectations and have more cost effective/simpler delivery, as ultimately this is where the game is won. I'd also be doing it with another 1-2 founders so that we could better achieve more freedom for each founder (as ultimately, this is a large drawcard alongside financial rewards to start). Id then leverage the cashflow better in productising... But in all honestly, I do think a large portion of you needs to like the 'work'.
On exit (if you're lucky), you're also stuck with more lengthy exit conditions. Meaning even when you want out, you're going to be tied up with the business in order to support the transition of clients.
On the flipside, I have found it to be pretty lonely just working away on client work. For some this is OK and I guess it seems novel, or maybe fits your lifestyle? But for me it's difficult because I always found it rewarding to be building things together with a team. That feeling of alignment when everyone is building the same thing is cool.
In some ways, its never been easier to start a serviced-based firm. However, in others, it feels like it has never been harder.
I’m currently on the path to a principal-level role at my company. I really don’t know what I think about it. The jump from lead to principal is a big one in terms of workload and stress, and I’ve been told the pay difference isn’t huge.
Older I get, the less I care to ascend the ladder. Even at this point I’m doing it out of a sense of amassing status in case I need it, rather than being motivated by it. And I feel that lack of intrinsic motivation.
I’m mid-career, and mostly just tired of selling so much time and energy to someone else’s enterprise, especially because I watch myself trade away time that should be spent taking care of myself for a stupid title upgrade.
Having never worked at a FAANG company, I'm not sure exactly what the principal role commonly entails. That being said, I've recently been promoted from lead to principal, which is one of the highest titles for software engineers on our tech track. There are basically a few people who are higher in the entire company, which is a medium-sized public company.
The best thing about this company is the work life balance; I never put in a lot of hours. The worst thing is the skill level of most of our software engineers. The thing I hate about this new role is that I'm less connected to the day-to-day work and just getting shit done. I'm in even more meetings now and the expectation is that I'll somehow help to level up the semi-competent people we hire, and make sure projects go smoothly even though everything is built on a foundation of shit.
Fortunately I am paid extremely well. Pay is literally the only reason I accepted the promotion. Sadly, the company probably gets less value out of me now even though we all convince ourselves that this layer of principals and managers is making everyone below us more productive.
I wrestle with this frequently as I am on the cusp of Senior to Principal promotion. Principal means more money but diverting from my preferred sweet-spot of tactical and strategic technical leadership.
The optimal answer for me is to stay at Senior level and enjoy my work to an extent. But I am forgoing the related compensation increase and career progression.
Then my thoughts turn to working for myself or with other friends/associates I trust and potentially seeing more of a reward for the effort I put in every day.
You don't have to rise the ranks. I'm still debating if I should go for a 'senior' role. I've been programming for over 20 years. I was a "senior" in my last job but now I'm just a regular SWE. I get paid well enough and I get enough respect. Do I need more stress/responsibility? Probably not. Mostly I just don't want more pointless meetings.
That status can act like an anchor and prevent things in the future. Once you have that on your resume you outclass yourself for smaller title roles where you might be happier.
A principle helps other and finds ways to add value. You get to deal with the enterprise issues. If you like sticking your nose in everywhere, going to meetings and want to move away from programming this is the role.
It's a role with little power or accountability. Part of your role is justifying your value. The successful ones I have seen have been able to listen, take in everything and convey that message in language a vp understands.
By default I say don't take it you sound happy at your current level. You are better off going the management route or product manager path if you are looking at status, power and higher pay.
I have no interest at all in being some high ranking manager or director in any company. I want to clock in, do my work, and clock out so I can go do what I actually want to do.
Don't get me wrong, I love my job and find my work interesting. I'm incredibly lucky to be where I'm at. But I'm also completely fine just doing my thing and being done for the day.
In some countries it doesn't make sense to transition to higher positions because the taxation will eat up a large chunk of the salary increase, so you end up with significant increases in workload/responsibility but only a slight increase in net pay.
She might be a beginner and excited about proving herself to the world by writing and feeling serious about it. Who knows. Some people write, some people don't. She just discovered what 99% of the freelancers feel already but 99% didn't write about it. Just another blog post.
We've deliberately chosen not to take on staff. We could have grown at many points along the way but haven't wanted to. Instead we've stayed small, focused and profitable.
The benefits to growing would have been being able to take on bigger gigs, but we have always aimed for family first. The business has always been a means to a sustainable, balanced and loving family - and not an end.
I have friends who have taken the growth route. Some are doing ok. Others are desperately stressed. One has split from his wife in part because of the financial burden of maintaining a 5-10 person team.
We've never regretted taking the route we have. We have been here for our kids and we've been able to be flexible with our time in large part because we're able to scale our own work up and down in response to changing times without having to worry about paying salaries.