Freelancing for idiots

[Anthony W]

Hello,

Due to a change in circumstances, I've been pondering that going for
freelance or contract work may be the way to go. However, I've come to
realise, I am really not sure how to go about this, or if there's
enough demand out there to make this a reality.

People have mentioned registering with an agency or a consultancy firm
is a good way to find work, however I am yet to find one that
specialises in managing web developers.

So, is there a solid market for freelance and consulting work out
there and what would people recommmend?

Thanks...

[fresh...@gmail.com]

Hi Andrew,

There's plenty of work out there, it's simply a matter of finding it.

Of course, where you are based is a factor - not all companies are progressive/flexible enough to permit off-site work.

I recommend that you give Steve Gilles a shout. He'd be quite happy to give you some free advice to help you get your foot in the door. He's a recruiter but he's one of the good guys, he's technical (a regular rails camp attendee) and understands the Ruby community.

He's @stevelikesyou on Twitter. I think he's overseas at the moment though, so he might not get back to you immediately.

Best Regards,

James.

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James

[Warren Seen]

Hey Anthony,

I contracted remotely for years from Launceston - if It can be done from here, it can certainly be done almost anywhere in Australia that you can get a decent broadband connection. Right now it seems like there are more rails jobs than there are devs to fill them, which certainly wasn't the case when I started looking for rails gigs, so I'm sure with a bit of persistence, you could make it work.

My main suggestion is: don't wait for a recruiter or someone else to drop leads in your lap, but just make a list of possible clients and start emailing and calling the people who hire rails devs.

Recruiters will often tell you that offsite isn't an option, but if you talk to the decision makers, you will often find that things are negotiable if you're good enough to warrant it. It may take you a few goes to get your pitch right, but stick with it, and don't be afraid to follow up every couple of months if you get knocked back at first.

Good luck!

Cheers,

Warren.

[Paul Annesley]

This SitePoint book by Miles Burke from Perth might be worth reading.

The Principles Of Successful Freelancing
http://www.sitepoint.com/books/freelancer1/

(I haven't read it, but it sounds relevant)

-- Paul

[Fred Wu]

A lot of times people go to meetups/conferences to find developers, so make sure you attend as many relevant events as you can. :)

[James Healy]

On 19 February 2012 22:53, Fred Wu <ifr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> A lot of times people go to meetups/conferences to find developers, so make
> sure you attend as many relevant events as you can. :)

This.

I've been doing freelance ruby for 4 years and every job (bar one) has
fallen into one of two categories:

* an approach from friends (or the companies they work for) I know
through rails camps and the Melbourne ruby group
* an approach from companies using my rubygem's and reading my code on github

Even if you don't live in a big city, making the effort to get to a
few railscamps and the occasional monthly ruby meeting will pay
dividends.

James

[Taryn East]

* Warren Seen <warre...@gmail.com> spake thus:
> It may take you a few goes to get your pitch right...

I'm curious - what's your pitch currently?
:)

Cheers,
Taryn

[Warren Seen]

I don't need one right now, I'm employed. :D

Really though, everyone is screaming out for experienced rails devs, it should be possible to pick up contract work pretty easily, especially if you can work onsite. Selling remote takes a little more work, but previously, I'd just point to the fact that I've been doing it successfully for years and refer them to people who've worked with me that can vouch for the fact. Then just talk through the issues that the client may have with someone remote and try to come up with ways for them to mitigate those perceived risks.

Cheers,

W.

[ben wiseley]

I've always found something just posting to all the rails/ruby lists (this one, Wellington, in the States: Seattle RB, the Boston one is great, NYC, the group in San Francisco is pretty active)... usually get a few job offers the same day.  Working with the west coast over here isn't too bad - fairly close on time... working with the East Coast is a lot harder.

-ben

[Matt]

Would be good we could create a team of at-home freelancers, where all
members search for contracts which are pushed to the team. Team
members can then choose which projects or Github issues to work on,
bill for time done and live the dream ;)

[Dave McPherson]

I've heard of such utopian visions done elsewhere.

I'd be well up for something along those lines.

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[ben wiseley]

+1 Would love it if this came to be.  Would be willing to help put this together.

[Craig Ambrose]

I think there are some benefits to that idea Matt, but it's perhaps a little more complex than it sounds.

If the team is just an anonymous pool of freelancers with no particular branding, they you'll all be treated as such by the clients. It'd be much like using odesk or some other service designed to connect programmer with client, with the assumption that the programmer is a mindless cog in the machine and can be replaced by any one of a million other such identical cogs if the client feels like it or if the programmer wants too much money.

So, to avoid that fate, one essentially needs to market a brand that says "we are a pool of rails contractors and we're all awesome". That's pretty similar to the brand of any rails contracting company. Running a company entails a bit of work, so I think that perhaps you're aiming for more of a service where the contractor bills the client directly, but the "pool" of developers provides some extra advantages for the client, such as the ability to bring more resources in, or also to get replacement resources if a developer is unavailable. Such a concept would be totally possible to market, but still the theme "we are a pool of rails contractors and we're all awesome" would need to have a strong presence.

In fact, it's probably not just the clients who would need to be convinced of that theme. The developers would too. If you're going to put effort into promoting the pool, instead of just yourself, then you're going to need to be sure that:

1. The pool does not have disproportionately more developers in it than the available work. Ie, if the pool is getting work, then you should be getting enough work individually as part of that.

2. The other developers in the pool are awesome enough that you don't mind your reputation being averaged with theirs to some degree, at least when clients consider the pool brand/identity.

The latter might be able to be mitigated slightly by ensuring that the pool also brands the individual developers a fair bit too, but the former really depends on having a closed membership policy, and only accepting new developers to the pool when it becomes clear there is sufficient work (of if they bring clients with them).

Another approach to thinking that all the developers are awesome is to divide the developers into 2 or 3 different levels of experience, and present that to the clients as slightly different levels of awesomeness and thus hourly rate. Thus, a senior developer doesn't feel that their reputation is reduced by having junior developers in the pool, because the junior developers are identified as such, and although paid slightly less, can presumably access mentoring and so forth through the pool.

Having said all that, the idea could be really interesting. I've dabbled in co-branding with others a few times. I worked loosely with Cogent Consulting for a while, (now Cogent Co), but much of their work is on-site and specific to Melbourne. Neither party got much branding benefit out of the relationship. When I started freelancing, there didn't seem to be a heap of rails freelancers around and I got significant benefit just from being one of those willing to take the risk. I know plenty of you have walked a similar road and have plenty of consulting under your belts. Some folks have gone off and formed successful consulting companies, but most of those have been geographically based. Those of us who steadfastly wish to continue working from wherever we happen to be are stuck either going it alone, or managing to build some rare shared brand which doesn't look like anonymous overseas outsourcing, and yet does involve working-from-home consultants. 

Craig

[Le Viet Hong]

I'm also willing to join & help :)

Q: Why is this email short?

A: Join the Single Sentence Email Project: http://bit.ly/1_sentense_email

[Warren Seen]

On 22/02/2012, at 2:00 PM, Craig Ambrose wrote:

So, to avoid that fate, one essentially needs to market a brand that says "we are a pool of rails contractors and we're all awesome". That's pretty similar to the brand of any rails contracting company. Running a company entails a bit of work, so I think that perhaps you're aiming for more of a service where the contractor bills the client directly, but the "pool" of developers provides some extra advantages for the client, such as the ability to bring more resources in, or also to get replacement resources if a developer is unavailable. Such a concept would be totally possible to market, but still the theme "we are a pool of rails contractors and we're all awesome" would need to have a strong presence.

You could maybe achieve this by pitching it as a co-op or collective? You would probably want to expand it to designers, UX professionals, etc if you want to be a compelling alternative to existing consultants or agencies. Obviously anyone who wanted to set up something like this would need to get legal and taxation advice :)

[Nicholas Faiz]

Craig is spot on. 

To add a couple more things. It's a great idea, something like the romantic vision of building a utopian community, but, alas, things just don't work that way. 

Consider it from the client's perspective:

* if it's a major project, which entity (amongst the pool of freelancers) will be there in a year for phase 2? If it's not the same collection of coders (the group might change constantly) why should the client pay for a new set of eyes to learn the codenbase? Who has corporate insurance (for decent budgets, this is normally mandatory)? 

* beyond that, there's the hard fact that finding good coders to work with is hard, and often takes repeated efforts. That's why people who choose to build company's together have a further reason to make sure it works on a coding basis - they want to see profit and success in the longterm for what they build together. If it's a short term collection of coders (perhaps some with rockstar attitudes), you might find the cooperation a little bit painful for the team and unproductive for the client.

I don't want to be overly negative about the thought. The thought has often occurred to me as I've freelanced (I've been remote working since 2006). I ended up forming my own private company in the end, for many of the reasons above. As soon as that happens, the work distribution becomes uneven between long-termers and short-termers.

Anyway, cheers,

Nicholas

[Matt Allen]

On 22/02/2012, at 10:36 AM, Matt wrote:

> Would be good we could create a team of at-home freelancers, where all
> members search for contracts which are pushed to the team. Team
> members can then choose which projects or Github issues to work on,
> bill for time done and live the dream ;)

I've actually had success with this, both as a dev receiving the work (Hey Ben@Plus2!) and as the lead on the project.

I think it comes down to knowing how fast you can get your team together and that the team can deliver.

Everyone runs their own show, works from home or whatever and essentially looks after themselves until one of us says "hey, it's go time" and allocates some work. I've done it on an ad-hoc basis (Hey Cam, Phil, etc) and a per-job basis (Hey John!) and both have achieved what they needed to do, that is, allow me (Dev Logic pty ltd) to take on work that was beyond me, both in skills and amount. Scheduling is hard sometimes as each one of these guys have their own clients and workload so springing work on them is a no no.

I really like this type of setup. It's good to know that I'm on the go-to list for some guys that I enjoy working with and also that when I put out the signal, I have a bunch of guys who'll come and work with me. I live outside of Sydney, so beyond a trip north every now and then (mostly for social reasons) it's all done remote.

Filling up the sales channel for yourself is hard enough, but knowing that there is guys who'll have your back (for a good daily rate) if "The Big One" drops makes life a bit easier.

Matta
0413 777 771

[Craig Ambrose]

Since I was writing about some of the challenges to this approach in my last post, I thought I'd write about some of the potential advantages that have been occurring to me over dinner. Here are some things that such an organisation *could* do (probably not all of them, this is just brainstorming):

1. Provide a shared experience to clients regarding workflow process, particularly with regard to project management, communication and issue logging tools. Ie, if all the developers in the group agree to use the same tools, it's easier for the client to understand how to integrate a second developer, switch developers, etc.
2. Provide a single point of entry to clients for workflow tools. Not only is the process between developers the same, but the client doesn't need to change accounts, etc. Adding issues against a given project automatically brings it to the attention of the right developer.
3. Provide some volume discounts to developers for using some development tools.
4. Provide a backup person for all client/developer relationships (I mentioned this already). Every developer would be another developer's backup. Your backup can call you at home in the middle of the night if you aren't responding to the client.
5. Possibly provide support contracts from the collective, not an individual developer.
6. Run an internal code review process, review each other's code via github.
7. Build a shared name in relation to commits to some key open source projects. A shared policy of spending time in certain projects (presumably related to business goals) could help the group get know for being experts in those projects (which the group would actually become of course).
8. Provide consistant and understandable rates (beware of price fixing laws).
9. Aggregated blogging

I'm sure there's more.

Craig

[Craig Ambrose]

Hi again,

I'm keen to keep poking this issue along a bit. There have been a lot
of folks keen to pipe up with their thoughts, but of those expressing
a personal interest and actual availability to freelance on this
thread so far seem to be:

- Matthew Platts: 1.5 years rails freelancing. (http://
www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=51167250)
- David McPherson: 12 years programming, 2.5 years rails (http://
www.linkedin.com/pub/dave-mcpherson/1/36b/1a8)
- Ben Wiseley: 8 years ruby/rails (http://workingwithrails.com/person/
5804-ben-wiseley)
- Le Viet Hong: Rails experience unclear. 2.5 years SEO & operations
consulting. (http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=35566313)
- Craig Ambrose: 13 years programming, 8 years freelancing, 6 years
rails. (www.craigambrose.com)

I'm not sure I've gotten all that correct. Just pipe up if I've gotten
your details wrong or if you aren't on the list and are interested in
talking about taking this idea further.

The main purpose of the above list is to illustrate that there is a
bit of disparity amongst experience levels. I'm not quite sure quite
what to do with that. It'd be a bit hard to brand such a group as a
rockstar team of top rails guns from down under. Maybe that isn't the
right brand though. I'd welcome further thoughts on the matter.

Craig

[ben wiseley]

Wow - thanks for the reminder to update workingwithrails profile - it was very out of date :)

Craig

[Dave McPherson]

Should probably update my profile. About 4 years Rails.

On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 10:15 AM, Craig Ambrose <craiga...@gmail.com> wrote:

Craig

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[Nicholas Jefferson]

> The main purpose of the above list is to illustrate that there is a
> bit of disparity amongst experience levels.

But experience is not productivity; for that, "number of years" is the
denominator.

Thanks,

Nicholas

[Craig Ambrose]

Hehe, it's fun google stalking everyone. :)

Anyway, my point wasn't to say "Person X" is more awesome than "Person Y". Experience is not the only thing that counts by any stretch, although I certainly don't agree with Nicholas J's point. If I was going to work with some other folks, or even just co-brand with them, one thing that I'd be concerned about is that they had some experience dealing with clients, working from home, and acting as a contractor or freelancer with some professionalism. I've certainly known great programmers who really didn't function very well outside of a salaried and structured office environment. That doesn't make them *worse*, but it does make them unsuitable.

As for whether programming experience matters, well I think probably what matters is overall programming experience, not ruby experience specifically. There is an idea amongst younger programmers (I know, because I used to share it when that was me), that beardy old programmers are conservative pains in the ass who just don't appreciate your mad skillz. The counter argument to this on goes like this:

"Ok, so you've finished Uni, and you've been coding professionally for a year or two. I bet you're pretty hot shit, right? Of course you are. I also bet you learned heaps since getting out of uni and getting on the job. Of course you did, you're a great guy and a very fast learner right. So, you're learning is finished now I take it? From this day on you wont learn a single new thing, except perhaps a new library or tool, and your programming will never improve. Yes I know you're a great guy and a fast learner, but that's all over now, you're totally finished learning after your first two years of work and you can just sit back and code for a living."

The point is somewhat facetious of course in that our hypothetical junior programmer doesn't really expect that their learning is abruptly about to stop, so given that, it's a given that the annoying beardy old programmer in the corner has kept on learning for the extra decade or two of experience that they have over our junior. It's sometimes hard to see how that learning could be relavant, because it may be have been in some language or environment that doesn't seem trendy anymore. But, of course our junior is adaptive as well and will no doubt be working in a new language and environment in 20 years time and yet they still expect to learn.

So, with 12 years or so of commercial experience, I feel like I sit in the middle here somewhere. I see the person who's just starting out, and I think that's totally fine, as long as he doesn't think he's a god who know everything I know, and is happy to ask for advice to avoid making mistakes I've already made. Likewise, I see the programmer in the corner who has been doing this professionally since the 80's, presumably working in Assembly and COBOL and punching cards and goodness knows what else, and it seems hard to imagine that his experience from back in the stone age has any relevance to me, because after all I'm experienced now and I've got mad skillz right? But obviously it follows from the above that he must has something to teach me too, and I have no more right to be an arrogant git than our junior coder does.

So, my ideal work environment, if I was to work more with others than I do know, would include folks smarter and more experienced than me, providing they were happy to share their skills. And it would also include folks less experienced than me, providing they were humble enough to realise that they don't know everything yet.

cheers,

Craig

[Mikel Lindsaar]

This is an interesting idea, and I am saying that while heading up http://reInteractive.net/ which you could think is encouraging competition.

From my point of view, I get projects coming in the door all the time, which are under our minimum budget cut off. Some want a brochure site, others want a dev person who can do ongoing work for them. There are a lot of these people out there. Just yesterday we turned down a job for a client that was in the $20-30k range. This would be pretty good for a full time freelancer to do. Would have taken them 2-3 months to get done depending on how good they were and probably has some ongoing work for them.

But for us as a development shop, it was not worth taking the job. Because we would not be able to deliver everything we do and sets us apart from a freelancer for that price.

Having someone or some site I could refer these clients to and I has a fairly high confidence that they would get looked after would be good. It would also provide a way for me to tell clients I can't help them, but they can get help from this team.

But I think trying to formalise the structure would be hard. If you have it as a non-profit business, then people have to be on staff to handle sales enquiries, match developers with clients, public liability insurance, professional indemnity insurance, etc, etc, etc, and that ends up looking like a development shop :)

Anyway, that is my two cents worth.

Mikel

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[Dave McPherson]

I agree with Mikel here.

The ability to pass off possible work to a group of individuals, that have a range of skills and abilities, that are trustworthy is great. There are lots of ex-clients, and friends of ex-clients that constantly pass me work, that I have to pass up.

It's something I think non-tech folk would get. A co-op, of sorts. Like where you get fish. Only a web site. Kinda. Ha.

But, on the negative side. Like all committees it's could get thrown into the "tomorrow I'll do that" basket. Time is a difficult thing, when you're already juggling multiple jobs, a wife and kid (like me).

Cheers

--Dave

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[Daryl Manning]

I love the idea of a co-op/collective. Kinda of curious as to how it would work in practice. The big problem I think would be who "fronts" for the non-dev/design aspects of projects and kinda herds the cats, handles capacity.

But def interested in being included in investigating whether it's viable. Sounds kinda cool (also, I get to work from thailand, right?... =] ).

ciao !
Daryl.

[Jonathan Chang]

As someone running a development studio, I can empathize the comments in this post. There is an opportunity for a matching service which could remove the friction involved in marrying developers and clients. When I'm chatting to people they mention that they want someone reputable who they can trust. That's really important as I would only consider an introduction if that person is going to benefit the network they're being introduced to. 

I'd be interested to see how this takes shape outside of posting up gigs on the mailing list or self organizing at the meet ups. 

Jonathan

Silverpond Pty Ltd

email: jonatha...@silverpond.com.au
mobile: +61 411 727 819
phone: +61 3 9008 5929
fax: +61 3 8621 8996
address:
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    Australia

[Daryl Manning]

Anybody in Sydney available for a meetup next week to chat about this in person (or online... ). Kinda interested to see how this could flesh out. (I'm more interested in interesting projects outside of my day job... since some of my outside consulting gigs could benefit from having extra people involved).

D

[Dave McPherson]

I'd love to, but am moving house next week, and have already been blasted out by my wife for over committing to stuff...

:-(

Perhaps in a fortnight? Is there a jelly on somewhere at some point?

[Daryl Manning]

Anyone else interested in weighing in on this in two weeks' time? Set up a separate mailing list to keep this off the main roro list? (I can set one up off my domain if no one else is keen to throw time at it...).

A friend has a design collective that does similar stuff which I've always thought is interesting... 

D

[Matt Allen]

On 24/02/2012, at 2:28 PM, Daryl Manning wrote:

> Anybody in Sydney available for a meetup next week to chat about this in person (or online... ). Kinda interested to see how this could flesh out. (I'm more interested in interesting projects outside of my day job... since some of my outside consulting gigs could benefit from having extra people involved).
>
> D
>

I'm up in Sydney on Wednesday and Thursday next week and would be happy to contribute.

Matta

[ben wiseley]

I'm around for a meetup.

Someone at a RORO I missed also mentioned getting a shared work space in Syd going.  Seems like this and that would be a good fit.

-ben

[Jonathan Chang]

I'd be happy to chat if you want to speak with someone from Melbourne.

[Tim McEwan]

It may worth asking Enspiral (NZ-based) what they do.  Also, is Inspire 9 "just" a co-working space?

Cheers,

Tim

[Pat Allan]

There's Inspire9 the co-working space, and Inspire9 the web development business. Most people in the former are not involved in the latter - there's several businesses that base themselves in the co-working space.

--
Pat

[Nathan S]

Yeh, Enspiral do something like what you're describing.  They basically pool jobs and virtual teams across their jobs.  They have the benefits of being treated as one entity, yet there are a bunch of floating devs and designers working in their space and around the place (some in Aus, I believe) that get the project work done.

At Inspire9 we're a Ruby dev shop as well as a coworking space which doesn't seem that strange when you really think about it.  The ruby culture is pretty progressive, especially when it comes to community, so it just fit the mold.  If you're keen to come work with us flip an email to hello@inspire9,com.

Like Mikel, we get a lot of work enquiries that aren't appropriate for us as a dev shop, but would suit a freelancer.  We normally shoot them out onto our Yammer but that wouldn't really scale up to what you're talking about.

So, as for formalising that sort of arrangement, I'm not sure what that looks like. But we'd be up for supporting that sort of thing at Inspire9 - we've got a lot of dev freelancers as residents.

[adz]

hi guys -- I'd be interested in something like this.

To save you some stalking...
  http://www.linkedin.com/pub/adam-davies/3/ba2/26a
  http://workingwithrails.com/person/5967-adam-davies

I also like the idea of some kind of co-op/cooperative setup...

[Craig Ambrose]

Hi folks,

Lots more interest in this idea in the last 24 hours. Lets go with Daryl's suggestion and move the discussion to another list. I've created a list at:

http://groups.google.com/group/roro-collective

I've invited a bunch of you who expressed interest, but others can feel free to join if you haven't piped up yet, or if I missed sending you an invite.

The list name in no way reflects the name of any possible group formed, this is just a temporary place to discuss it.

Joining the list does not represent a commitment to join any group formed, just a commitment to discuss what that group would like like at this stage.

I'm not trying to take charge of anything here, just creating a list.

Craig

[Michael Cindric]

If anyone in sydney is interested to have a chat let me know we (Sentia) have work we turn back as not our kind of thing that l am sure would suit others or we just don't have the time.

Kind Regards,
……………………………………..

Michael Cindrić | Sentia
Software Developer


e: michael...@sentia.com.au  |  t: +61 2 8003 5216  |  m: 0403 526 226 |  f: +61 2 9223 4151

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