
"Accidentally" Freelance - endtwist
http://notes.unwieldy.net/post/57035586783/accidentally-freelance
======
rwhitman
So glad to hear someone articulate this. I'm pretty over people making this
assumption that because I'm a consultant I'm just ready to drop all my clients
and join their startup.

I have a business. I like my business. If you want to do business with me,
thats great. Otherwise, don't insinuate that the position you're offering me
is a better life for me. I chose my path, and the assertion that I "want more"
is insulting. I have good reasons not to pursue what you're offering. Move on.

------
stdbrouw
While I sympathize with the author and faced the same kind of attitude while I
was freelancing, it's a simple truth that it's easier for freelancers to
change what they're doing and join a startup than it is for most employees.
You're already used to weird hours, you like having decision-making power, can
wear many different hats, you can deal with a little financial uncertainty,
you're not leaving any colleagues hanging and so on. It's a good profile for a
startup engineer.

Yes, it's presumptuous to think that you can't possibly be a freelancer
because you want to be.

No, that doesn't mean you should get upset because someone thinks you'd be a
open to a recruitment pitch.

~~~
k__
If you're an employee, you quit your job and get going. If you're a
freelancer, you have to get rid of all of your customers, which is much more
troublesome than to just quitting a job.

~~~
random42
It is more than _just_ troublesome. Once you out of "freelancing game" your
leads start to dry up and if in future you want to go back to freelance
consulting, will have to do all the hard legwork you have already done long
back to re-establish yourself.

~~~
7Figures2Commas
I disagree completely. If you have been successful freelancing (or consulting)
in the past, chances are you are comfortable with running your own show and
selling yourself. As such, an experienced freelancer won't be intimidated by
the prospect of having to build a new client base. It will require work, but
it's not new territory.

The person who has always been an employee, on the other hand, is far more
likely to find the transition from employee to freelancer to be a challenge.
Beyond relationship building and sales, there are a number of skills and
traits that one needs to have to be successful as a freelancer and many people
who try their hand at it find that they don't have those skills or traits.

------
noelwelsh
That's a lot of extrapolation from a few awkward conversations to reach the
conclusion "There’s this stigma in the startup universe around being a
contractor, consultant, or freelancer."

I have a hard time believing there really is an industry wide stigma against
freelancers in NYC. It certainly isn't the case around here. Plenty of
startups come from people, like myself, who have run consultancies for a
while.

A major motivation for me to move out of consultancy is to make money while
I'm sleeping. The fact you're selling time is the limiting factor on
consultancy/freelancing, and one disadvantage the OP doesn't mention.

There's no shortage of socially awkward engineers, so perhaps the OP has just
run into a few who don't know what to do when the conversation goes off the
script they're expecting?

~~~
themodelplumber
>A major motivation for me to move out of consultancy is to make money while
I'm sleeping.

Actually quite a few consultants and freelancers do this. I've been making
money while sleeping, as a freelancer, for the last 5 years. It's actually my
favorite part of what I do, and I have an advisor who helps me figure it out
as I go along. Perhaps a startup is just another vehicle for pursuing this
dream that is better suited to you.

There really is that annoying "freelancer???" thing, but I think it's really
just a matter of the other party's experience & education.

~~~
noelwelsh
I should have said "move out of _pure_ consultancy". I imagine I'll be doing
consultancy for a while.

I think there are lots of great models between pure freelancing (paid for
time) and pure product. The simplest is probably retainer or support
agreements, which often net one money for no work. Info products are another
popular route. What's your model, if you don't mind me asking?

~~~
themodelplumber
> What's your model, if you don't mind me asking?

Retainers, support agreements, platform hosting, template sales, and some
simple SaaS stuff. And I just barely became an Amazon associate/affiliate now
that one of my apps is picking up traffic, but we'll see how that goes vs.
other types of advertising.

------
scottshea
I find it interesting that so many people have a hard time comprehending
Freelancing yet support entrepreneurs. An insurance or mortgage broker is
ultimately a Freelancer who can sell their output to a corporation and I doubt
any of them face the same strange stares.

~~~
tspike
Everyone in the tech startup scene belongs to the same social hierarchy, where
certain behaviors are rewarded and others punished, with success measured in
successful rounds raised and big exits.

Freelancers are inherently part of the ecosystem, but they don't fit neatly
into the hierarchy, much like senior engineers in large companies who have no
interest in management.

Insurance agents and mortgage brokers belong to a different social group, so
they're accorded "other" status and not measured by the same metrics.

------
themodelplumber
As a freelancer, I really appreciated this article. While I know what a
startup is, in my actual working experience, a "startup" is often some variant
of "the SaaS thing my best client's worst employee wanted us to switch to last
month." Otherwise we'd be using the proper name of the business without any
regard for whether they are a startup or a farming collective or a couple of
floating brains in a sealed chamber.

I have also had experiences where I say "I'm a freelancer" and watch peoples'
mouths drop open. They think I'm basically Peter Parker without the Spiderman,
living on the cheap without a single concern for the future. The truth is a
bit of an improvement on that. I pay for monthly consults with a former SV
tech executive & INTJ engineer, who helps my inner INTJ learn and grow into a
better salesman, marketer, team leader, and negotiator. While most of my stuff
is building web things for people, I get a variety of work from traditional
illustration to music to 3D modeling. I support a wife and three kids, and we
take vacations regularly. I'm not wealthy by any stretch, but people who visit
my rental say it's pretty big for NorCal and I get to work in a backyard
office with a nice skylight. And every one of my big clients has an IT guy who
actually trusts me with their web stuff. Having worked in IT in the past,
that's a big deal to me.

Someday maybe I'll do something different, but I've been freelancing full-time
for almost ten years now, and I've never had a bad year or even a hard year. I
don't miss free bagels & juice or XM radio and I definitely don't miss
anything that looks like it came from the food section of an office supply
store. I don't distrust startups, but I have absolutely no reason to be
interested in working for one.

~~~
wallflower
> I pay for monthly consults with a former SV tech executive & INTJ engineer

Intrigued. If you don't mind me asking, what does he teach you? That seems
like a business idea - successful Myers-Briggs teach others of their same type
how to handle their strength and weaknesses - which sounds like what this
executive is already doing.

~~~
themodelplumber
>Intrigued. If you don't mind me asking, what does he teach you?

The most important one has been "tolerating others and, optimally, succeeding
with them" since I can be pretty stubborn and defensive when I meet with, say,
a big-E social media consultant. I will typically tell my consultant, "hey, I
don't know what type of person this is but I need to figure out how to work
with them better." The consultant asks me some questions and nails it pretty
quick. The tough part is that he isn't easy on me--he is usually sympathetic
to the person in question and tells me how I can get my act together. :-)

The next most important has been "homing in on others' needs" as I used to
really put my tech blinders on and assume that everyone would want solution X.
So, more listening, more following up with surveys, etc.

After that, I often ask him, "I need somebody to help me with X" so he'll
point out that I'm looking for an ISTJ or whatever it may be. In fact we
recently went over this for some troubles I was having, and it turned out the
MBTI type I needed was my wife :-) So that problem disappeared pretty quickly.

Surprisingly I've told quite a few people about this guy's MBTI skillset, and
the fact that he's certified, and they are extremely skeptical to the point of
saying, "well I don't believe in that pseudo-scientific stuff, but thanks
anyway." I think it's mostly awkward because this guy's an engineer; his dad
was an expert on ceramic heat shields, and he's done a LOT of work & research
to arrive at something that works. But some people who should know better just
don't want to listen.

~~~
wallflower
Thanks!

> But some people who should know better just don't want to listen.

So true...

------
mikeho1999
I wonder if the bias towards or against freelancers is dependent upon your
geographic location...

Living in the SF Bay Area as someone who regularly bounces back and forth
between freelancing and working full-time as a co-founder or lead tech of a
startup, I didn't find any difference in attitude or reaction if I said "I'm
working at a startup" vs. "I'm a full time freelancer."

LOL, in fact, the reaction tended to be either "oh yeah? me too!" or "oh yeah?
so is my brother / sister / mother / daughter / father / son / dog / cat /
etc."

Looking at the OP's footer, looks like he's in NYC... so I wonder if the bias
there is a bit different?

~~~
rwhitman
It is. Been in both markets, and there is definitely a stigma around freelance
here in NYC that I never encountered on the west coast.

~~~
rdouble
If anything it's the opposite. NYC has way more freelancers because that is
typically how it's been done in agency work.

------
hudibras
It'll be interesting to find out the standard startup reaction once he takes
on an additional employee and changes "No thanks, I'm a freelancer" to "No
thanks, I have my own small business. But give me your card and I'll let you
know if something opens up..."

~~~
scarecrowbob
As a freelance worker, I find this interesting... it seems like a big gap
between "I only have to make enough off this to make my time work out for me"
and " I have to make enough off this to make a profit off someone else's
time". I don' think that the second works out very well for where I am in
life, but it seems to be where most of the people I work with find themselves.

IME, generally startups aren't looking for agencies, because they have at
least enough knowledge to hire individuals rather than agencies or turn-key
solutions.

------
esschul
At least in Norway, the pay is also about 30% higher without the need of a
administration. So there's that too. Instead of saying freelance, say
independent contractor.

------
tudorconstantin
I see you as being a startup person - while startups work hard to develop a
business, you _are_ the business. While startup businesses scale out, you
scale up.

Wish you best of luck in your pursuits, congrats.

------
girvo
There's a really easy fix for this. Say you're a Consultant instead

------
mcdougle
No offense to any startup founders/workers here, but freelancing just sounds
more appealing to me -- I'd rather be the boss than the employee, and starting
a freelancing business just seems less binary (as in it's either major success
or outright failure). I have huge dreams for growing a small freelancing
business into a huge international software company, but if it never gets to
that point, I should still be very successful with my small freelancing
business.

And, as the author noted, freelancing allows you to grow your skills and learn
new ones just like any business -- because even though it's not a "startup,"
it is a business!

------
orrjacob00
I am one of these accidental freelancers. I take on work that seems
interesting as it comes to me. I make enough money that it isn't high priority
to "have something to work on" at any point in time, and I have a dozen or so
of my own side projects, a handful of which make money.

In this space, I guess, the point is that you can make a lot of money by being
productive -- we're not forced to work 9 to 5 and there's so much opportunity
in terms of "stuff left to do" anyone with some business sense can find
profitable projects to work on on our own. Work becomes more of an option.

It's a really fortunate place to be.

------
csbartus
I'm just moving from a startup to freelancing.

I founded a local e-commerce company almost 7 years ago which now has its own
life with employees and investors.

I quit my day job to dedicate myself to bigger challenges like designing
beautiful websites which deliver the message.

Why? I found more interesting and creative solving new problems. And when I'll
have enough international contacts I'll launch another new company.

Which is by the way already in research phase.
[http://newsledge.com](http://newsledge.com)

~~~
teh_klev
Imagine my disappointment when I opened that link to discover there were no
sledges.

~~~
csbartus
oh ... newssledges is already taken ;)

------
medell
Well said. I echo the thoughts in the article about working on a variety of
projects with different types of businesses. I love meeting with clients,
understanding their problems, and then getting to see how my work directly
saves time or affects the bottom line. I'd probably be doing this even if I
didn't get paid.

------
Supermighty
I wonder if he stopped calling himself a freelancer and used a business name
that he "worked for" would he stop receiving these kinds of offers.

It's all about branding and perception.

------
lifeisstillgood
Totally agree - for me it seems that I can build capital in my business /
personal brand as a freelancer that I can't in a job.

------
lsc
yeah. it's actually a lot easier to get freelance gigs if you act like this is
just something you are doing to get your foot in the door (to a full-time job)
- If you actually want to freelance (and are willing to give the employer the
full benefits of hiring a freelancer... e.g. you don't need to feel bad/be
legally afraid when you fire me, I only show up and charge you when you
actually need work done, etc...) that is... actually a lot harder to get, from
what I've seen, even if you aren't charging a premium (though, the people who
do operate as 'real freelancers' do charge a premium.)

The whole system, in the mid range, at least, is setup such that freelancing
is a funnel to evaluate full-time folks. If you aren't interested in being
full-time (or pretending like you are full time) you are in a different (and,
from what I've seen, harder to get into) market.

It's funny; at the very bottom, you have the $15-$50/hr folks who work as
'real freelancers' \- often from mid-america or overseas. I hire out of that
pool, as do most small businesses.

Then in the mid range, in the $40-$100/hr range, you have the 'body shop' that
hires you and rents you to a fortune-1000 company - and, in that case, you
generally want to pretend that you are interested in a full-time job, and
willing to work as a 'pretend' full time person. (The interesting thing here
is that I've worked through that range, and I've been in situations where
managers who knew me called me back up, arranged things with me, /then/ had me
go through the body shop to be made into a pretend employee who shows up for 8
hours every day, which is a little silly, because I've got a corporation. It's
got non-consulting revenue that dwarfs what you are going to pay me.)

In my experience, it's super easy to get both those sorts of jobs.

Getting a job where you act as a 'real freelancer' in the $50-$100 range? in
my experience, is actually kinda difficult. I've gotten a few 'real
freelancer' gigs at the $200 mark, but those were pure serendipity. (and...
much to my shame and regret, I didn't treat that customer accordingly. I mean,
I did my job, but I didn't add that bit of "professionalism" with the follow
up and such, so we ended up drifting apart.) actually, I've billed as many
hours in the $200 range as a 'real freelancer' as I have at the $60 range, I
mean, not counting my time working through body shops. (I've billed...
probably almost a year of hours at the mid $70s mark, going through a body
shop, pretending to be a 'real employee' \- and the body shop, of course, took
a cut on top of that, so I think I'm worth money... it's just, they want 'fake
employee' and not 'freelancer')

Thinking back to those $200/hr gigs, it's possible also that I'm missing a
certain skillset. A certain follow up and 'you don't need to worry about it'
or something? Possible. My style is very much "here is all the information you
could possibly want" \- and that's probably not always the best style; many
times you hire an expert and want, instead a "here is the best course of
action for you" with minimal supporting information.

Hm. I wonder if I would be better at that now that I have a lot more
experience running a business, and hiring experts that are outside my field
(where I want the "This is what you should do" with minimal supporting
information.)

~~~
themodelplumber
The part you mention as difficult took me 5 years to get comfortable with--as
in, "ready to start thinking about buying a house as a full-time freelancer."

If you are a serious freelancer who wants to make a go of it as a lifestyle,
you are selling a result (e.g. beautiful website, better search rankings,
lovely illustrations). So when somebody calls you and says, "we are looking
for a freelancer," you start to realize that maybe they want some sort of
staff auxiliary rather than a result, and they won't respect your boundaries
like other clients, and you learn to ask them if they can pay $150/hr. just so
you can test the waters. You might even try to recommend that they dial up a
college student and see what they do. I did this last week with a furniture
company that was about to pay me $600/week for an hour-long meeting and maybe
1-2 hours of web design work. Sooner or later they'd realize they don't need
my skill set, and I don't really want direct furniture sales in my portfolio.
My job is just to help them out.

Lots of long-term freelancers will drop the hourly stuff ASAP too. In this way
you'll get freelancers who say, "my favorite client pays me $500/hr. for web
design," and they're really just saying they bill by the project. But go talk
to those clients--they're typically very happy and feel like they've got a
real solution on their hands.

~~~
lsc
>Lots of long-term freelancers will drop the hourly stuff ASAP too.

Hm. See, I've been thinking about this. I'm a sysadmin. A computer janitor.
The essence of my job is that when something breaks, I fix it. (I'm actually
way better at that part of the sysadmin role than at the architecture part,
though I can do that, too; there are many sysadmins who are better architects
than I am. However, there is this phenomena; the more senior a sysadmin is,
the harder it is to make him or her carry a pager. I carry a pager, and in
/that/ set, well, I look pretty good.)

So yeah, what I'm charging you for is something you probably won't need much
at all of (I mean, I'll help you apply patches and do backups and other simple
bullshit, but I'll probably make my PFY do that, or train up one of your
kids.) My real value is that when something breaks at 3am on a Sunday morning,
I'll wake up and deal with it. Really, unless you are twitter, I've got enough
spare hardware that your stuff could literally catch fire and as long as I've
got backups, we're good.

Problem is, how to charge? I've got a bunch of folks wanting to pay me
$50/month. Which I could do if I automated all the PFY work. (which, I could
do if I didn't give you root, and I only let you use my versions of the
programs I chose to support.) but it's one of those things where I'd need
thousands of customers to make it worth my time. At that point, we need to do
shifts, etc, etc... I mean, it's a realistic business, but a deep/hard one.

I mean, I'm going to want like two to four grand for the two or three days of
my time that a full "shit caught fire at 3am" cleanup is going to take (not
that you'd be down for two or three days; I'll get you back up the first day,
but I'm not going to be particularly useful for the next few days... which
presents something of a problem if these things happen in succession.)

But that's the thing, I can do a better job if I'm there all along, and I can
say "don't do that" when you are setting the thing up, and I can make sure you
have accessible backups and stuff.

I've sent out some feelers at the $500-$1000/month range, were I keep a spare
going (which means more ongoing work for me, keeping the spare up to date, but
it means much less pain when shit does break.) But, eh, I haven't gotten
interest, and frankly, I'm not sure if that's enough to make it worth the
brainspace. And that's the thing, if you get up to $4000-$5000, well, you can
get a midwesterner or an indian or a russian mostly kinda sorta full-time, and
yeah, at that rate, they aren't going to be as good as I am, but there is a
lot of value in having someone mostly full time (which I would not be, even at
that rate.) So maybe the right model for me is "wake me up, place a five grand
deposit; I keep the money if I fix your shit in the next X hours" or
something. I could be talked into that, if I had some reasonable assurance of
getting paid.

I think the root cause might be that most small companies use "the cloud" and
don't feel they need that kind of sysadmin experience (and spare pool... "the
cloud" vastly diminishes the market value of my giant spare pool, probably
even more than it does my SysAdmin experience.) and larger companies would
prefer to have someone on-staff full-time.

Also, well, I'm very good at marketing "value" \- e.g. most of my experience
is competing on price (yes, yes, I know I'm behind the curve. I am working on
it. You do not understand how much I am working on it.) and, well, this is not
an area where I want to compete on price. I'm pretty okay getting woken once a
week. If I get woken 3 times a week, for more than one week in a row? things
start to get bad. Wake me up every night? well, I've had times in my life when
all I did was sleep and respond to emergencies; I can do it, but I'd really
prefer not to go back there. So yeah; I have a very limited number of "wake me
up" slots I can sell. They need to be expensive.

~~~
caw
The pager is quite an interesting thing for sysadmins. Your value is because
you can fix what breaks when it breaks, or when you're so senior that people
only bring you in for solutions architecture and setup.

In the corporate world, you're not ever the only guy on call, so you only get
woken up for a week. If you're full freelance, you have flexible hours after
some late night work, and you have multiple pagers, so it's less of an issue
to add one. I haven't figured out how to rectify side work and being full time
corporate with the customer wanting an on-call break-fix guy, so ultimately
I've just said no to those requests.

~~~
lsc
>In the corporate world, you're not ever the only guy on call, so you only get
woken up for a week.

oh man. the /worst/ pager I've ever been on, by far, was at a fortune 1000 in
the mid to late 2000s.

Yeah, it was only one week out of four (seven days, not five,) and only 12
hours a day. When I heard that during the interview, my response was something
like "Twelve hours? I can do that standing on my head"

I mean, the thing you have to understand is that the pages that really hurt
are the ones that come when you are tired already, right before you are
planning on sleeping... you are most likely to mess things up then, and it
interferes with your sleep, which means you are more likely to screw things up
the next day. So limiting it to 12 hours is pretty goddamn nice. You have 12
hours that you can sleep, which sounds super easy.

So yeah, I've been on 24x7x365 pager for more of my life than I haven't... but
the worst pager I've ever been on was only 12 hours a day for 7 days a
month... why?

For most of my career? the pages that actually wake me up have a frequency
between once every month or two and twice a week. Sometimes it gets worse, but
then you look at what the root causes are, you fix them, and it gets better.

At this place, though? during that 12 hour shift, there was a serious (like
'fix this now or we lose tens of thousands of dollars an hour in revenue
serious) issue every 30 minutes. Most of it was not technically difficult, but
you had better be fast.

Essentially, you'd work one 84 hour week out of four. And actually work those
84 hours; like literally you had to find someone to cover for you when you had
to take a shit; (or you just bring your laptop) it was that bad. (On top of
that, then you had your usual architectural responsibilities... but
realistically, you didn't get any of that done during pager week, and you were
usually pretty useless for the next week or two. This is one of the reasons we
didn't have more of it automated.)

so yeah. In corporate land, yeah, you usually get shifts... but if someone
fucks it up in corporate land? (In this case, there was... cultural pushback
against automating the failures. We were supposed to diagnose hardware
problems as we went. Hahah. Yeah right.) things can get really nasty, really
fast.

------
Flakes000
Keeping my job while I do freelancing. I get more money.

~~~
div
If that's the case, it sounds like you're either not charging enough, or don't
have enough work lined up.

Striking out on your own means you take on more risk in exchange for a LOT
more potential upside.

------
svmegatron
"Actually, I run a small agency."

------
smm2000
Part of the reason is that most contractors in tech are less qualified than
full time employees and will never pass full interview loop.

~~~
Silhouette
I'm guessing you've been downvoted because you didn't back up your claim that
"most" contractors are like that. There is an element of truth to what you
say, though.

Typically with freelance/contract work, there's less of an interview stage.
Because the client can let a freelancer go immediately if things aren't
working out, there is less risk to taking them on initially, particularly in
places like Europe where there tend to be relatively strong protections for
employees.

Combine that with a level of workers whose effective charging rate is in the
same region as the equivalent salaried position, and a lot of people who
wouldn't do well in a closely supervised, salaried position can get by as
freelancers.

Naturally a client who doesn't understand the freelance/contracting market and
expects to hire good people at the same rate as they would quote an employee's
salary is taking a chance on the quality they get. They might luck out and get
someone good but naive from the contracting side, or they might just find
someone who isn't very good but gets by because of the lesser supervision.

One thing that is almost certain is that the good people will eventually
realise they are underpriced and adjust their rates accordingly, while the bad
ones won't. Moreover, rates for good people can scale up far more in
proportion to the value they actually offer when they're working semi-
independently than it would as an employee on salary.

In short, if you want to engage a freelancer, you probably will get what you
pay for much more directly than if you were hiring someone on salary. And that
means if you're offering well under market rates (and if you're hiring at a
direct translation of salary, you are) then there's a good chance you're going
to work with not-so-good people.

~~~
smm2000
I based my opinion on my personal experience in several large technology
companies. In these companies contractors were treated like second class
citizens - they got worst offices/desks, were not invited to offsites and were
assigned the most boring work that nobody else wanted to do. In one company
they were not allowed to take free drinks from the fridge (this one was
ridiculous). They could not work for the company for more than 12 month
without taking forced three month break so they were never assigned to work on
important parts of projects. Essentially - if you have choices why will you
agree to work as contractor in such situation? Most of them wanted to become
FTE but only a few were capable of passing interview loop.

Outside of tech or in smaller companies situation can be completely different.
I can easily believe that contractors can be more vastly more qualified than
average IT employee at random retail/fast food/etc company.

Another exception are people working in consulting arms of
Microsoft/Oracle/HP. I know that those guys know what they are doing and can
easily charge $300+/hour. I never worked with them.

