I've been thinking of a way to work around these traits, and what I have come up with is - work part time, on B2B, with invoices instead of employment contracts. I'm hoping that with B2B it will be easier to find work, fast. It should be more flexible to employers.
But where do I find people to do work for?
Edit: I'm a full stack developer, mainly focused on Go and React.
When you're freelancing you're essentially interviewing for your job every single minute you're in front of or have an active project with the client. Soft skills and doing work that has nothing to do with engineering is even more of a requirement.
Now soft skills are different and 2 of us are good at those and one of us is really bad; so we hire out based on the client, wishes and need for soft skills and a lot of communication overhead or not. And I agree that needs to be a match, however I cannot see how that requires 6-8 gruelling interviews spread over weeks instead of 15 minutes and a portfolio (which is how we get hired).
So yeah, I think OP would do better in a small collective of freelancers or even small consultancy company; I find it much easier to get into anywhere that way than the employee route.
BINGO.
I'm good at the job and good at normal interviews. I more-or-less enjoy both, even. I like talking to clients, and I'm good at it. I can sell myself. And I can do the work.
Specifically software developer interviews practically make me hyperventilate and break out in hives. Fuck that. A pop quiz over a huge potential space, probably over something I will never in my life actually use on the job, to be solved live while people watch and judge me? Oh my god, no. No. Why the shit that's considered acceptable in a world where we're so touchy-feely that projects are supposed to have Codes of Conduct is beyond me. It's straight-up abuse.
In my experience, it is now about knowing how to do these things but when to reach for them when solving a problem.
But rather that set of weird, contrived rituals (which pretend to measure soft and other skills, but basically don't really measure anything other than the candidate's ability to game up answers to questions they looked up on the internet) -- not to mention the frequently appalling lack of decency, common courtesy (and common sense) has come to stand to in for the interview process these days.
There is one significant difference. In this perpetual interview, you have access to the internet and can find factual answers from there.
The problem solving part is what makes someone a good engineer/scientist. Not knowing particular algorithms, or knowing formulas (in case of DL jobs).
Interviews focus on the wrong things.
I am okay with the perpetual interview as long as I don't have to rote memorize a bunch of stuff like some poor middle-schoolers in 1970s communist country.
I threw away many recruiters who even mentioned technical interviews. I am doing more than okay financially and career-wise, btw.
This might change in the future just as a step to do something I want to do. I will hate all the interview, HR initiation, onboarding, etc. forever.
In interviews for full-time employment, this has rarely been the case.
Yes, I would pay a recruiter to keep around so that I do not have to spend time sending resumes and searching job boards whenever a contract dries up.
Right now I am looking for work. If you're a recruiter (or another engineer for that matter) interested in such an arrangement, email is in my profile.
HOWEVER, and it's a big "however" -- I don't truly enjoy it. I don't mean that I don't like building a relationship with clients, putting thought into my communication, etc. In some way I do enjoy those facets of it a lot. But, I'm an introvert by nature and when managing clients, acquiring clients, etc... It feels like I'm putting on a persona that's not truly myself and it's very draining emotionally and intellectually which ends up actually impacting the quality of my work over time.
I would love to be able to find a "talent manager" who can do the job of "talking to the customer and bringing the specs to the engineers."/officespace I think to most people this sounds exactly like just "having a job." And people will ask what's the difference from simply having a manager?
I think this perspective is also why there's not a solid existing industry that fits the needs here.
As well, I don't know if this is necessarily true but having someone with at least some basic level of software knowledge I think is a huge plus to being a talent manager as you or I would think of them. That helps to ensure that the quality of working coming in meets at least some base level. The problem of course is that anyone with the right knowledge will either be a developer themselves or in some other role already. To make this work they might need to be able to manage multiple talents.. but then it runs the risk of turning into an agency of sorts, right?
And I don't off the top of my head know exactly what the qualitative differences are here between an agency managing multiple contractors and a "talent manager" but I think there are some and would love to hear thoughts on what those would be. I think it's all centered around how the relationship actually works. As you say you want to hire/pay a percentage and I would as well. That keeps the talent manager working for the engineer(s) versus the other way around.
I don't get why freelance software engineering can't be the same. I would pay a recruiter handsomely to do that exact service. I mean, we're not actors, but this is a rich sector, there's a ton of demand, it's a worldwide market, so where the heck are they?
I want to act^H^H^Hwrite code for a living, not getting real good at job hunting.
We were a lot less likely to be able to talk a company into doing that for a typical full stack dev.
That being said you will probably have to talk to a lot of recruiters to find someone who has the right relationships to do this. Like 2 out of the 80 recruiters at the company I worked for would have gotten you to me. The rest would have pressured you to interview for a full time role. That is just at one recruiting agency.
It’s a weird prerequisite, but without it there generally isn’t enough context to do meaningful work sans a lot of hand holding.
Do you perhaps publish (or could publish) some statistics on earnings and the like?
Also, how often the jobs are available for non-USA candidates?
Find companies for whom you are a total catch of a full time hire, and negotiate a part time contract.
I was on a 20h/wk max retainer for one co, and another I could flexibly bill anywhere from 15-40h max depending on load. They both asked me to come full time before and after working a few months. But I held the advantage. I also worked for slightly less pay than ideal, but the lifestyle was the point for me.
That's my big takeaway from freelancing. The power relationship is different. You want to be in a position where they really need you.
In my experience as a python/full stack freelancer, you're best off starting with a full time and then reducing your hours per week after getting familiar with the project. I've done this several times, either because the project went in to more of a maintenance phase, or at my request (normally to spend more time on a side project).
I think you have to have enough experience that you (and the employer) are comfortable skipping the interview gauntlet. After all, if you're contract if you're not doing good work they can just stop. One thing that is helpful is to suggest working on a small, limited project for like 2-4 weeks, and they can decide if they want to continue working with you or not. (of course, you have to do a good job on the project).
It's a little weird, there are times when I'm scrambling for work and it seems like there's nothing out there, and other times when I'm turning away work, but if you can deal with the unpredictability it can be good.
Because they were well-respected in the WP community, there wasn’t much interviewing needed other than discussing the specifics of the project.
I found them via the plugin GitHub.
Since I launched in November I’ve placed 10+ Rails developers with gigs. About half for full-time roles with salaries ranging from $100k to $200k.
For context, cold messages on LinkedIn have a 5-20% response rate. Usually on the lower end.
railsdevs is currently sitting at 50%+. If you’re hiring a Rails developer everyone is already half qualified - so matching is much more likely.
How well does it work for rail Devs?
I'm looking for a contractor at the moment: https://travelmap.net/jobs/fullstack-web-developer
This one accepts part time: https://www.zdigitalagency.com
We did eventually build up a stable of long-term clients, but we got those by doing lots of short-term work, each one of which was at least one interview-equivalent. You also have to learn how to judge when to pitch - you will get a lot of nibbles for jobs that don't make sense, are not serious, scams or beyond your capabilities. You need a well-tuned bullshit detector, and especially when you're hungry, correctly judging situations can be tricky. But writing proposals and estimates for everyone will bleed you dry, and you'll probably develop a rep as a sucker - a lot of companies solicit proposals they never intend to act on for various reasons.
In any case, good clients for consultants generally come from word of mouth. So you want to do good work for someone who knows lots of small business owners. Go look for those people. Small IT support shops are less plentiful now with the rise of cloudified commodity services, but that was my angle.
FWIW, I went back to full-time employment. We cold make it work, but we couldn't thrive, and it is hard to grow a shop on contract work (2x the workload generally means 2x the employees - there's very little leverage). I make significantly more as a wage slave than I did as "my own boss".
But you might well do way better. And there absolutely is a bright side - freedom is a big one. It was very hard to give up ownership of my time again. You also meet a lot of folks who can be very different from the sort you run in to in HugeCo technical silos.
Have you considered the consulting industry? Project rotation is high (2-3 projects/year) but you don't look jumpy in your resume (although to be honest, I have done the same before and only once a potential employer brought it up as a red flag)
I've worked for two consulting companies, enjoyed both but one company had me on 3 projects within 8 months while the other had me on the same project for a year and a half and only moved me when I told them I needed a change (to their credit they accommodated me, but I bring this up because every consulting company will be different).
A lot of the reasons why this variability exists has to do with the types of projects that the company takes on. In the second case, being on a project long-term, the client hired us because they wanted to outsource their software development in general and had created long term relationship with the agency. In other cases the client will just want a proof of concept developed, or a bit of additional help on a project that it is in the weeds etc.
We're always looking for experienced software developers who are personable and can go deep into a topic with learners, work through exercises, help them correct mistakes and so on. It's 1-2 hours of well-paid work per session:
https://apply.workable.com/skiller-whale/j/2D3E071FD5/
(Warning you do have to prepare each session quite well - it's much harder to teach something that you know as a working programmer than as a teacher, because you're probably not used to saying what you know out loud!)
But if you know the topic and like helping other software devs it might be exactly the kind of short-term you're looking for.
Happy to answer any questions here, and I'd probably be involved in an interview session too.
What other topics are you guys planning? I'm a part-time CS professor who is always looking to supplement his income..
I was the only person working on the codebase, deployment was broken, but the code was actually pretty good and had a test suite. The guy I was working with was easy going and let me take the reigns.
It was one of the best gigs I've had. Sadly the work stopped (their business was a casualty of the pandemic).
I'm not sure how you'd go about finding these types of jobs, but they do exist!
Best of luck.
You need to pay upwork continuously to be able to bid on jobs and you can pay even more to see other people's bids. It has become sort of pay to play scheme.
For example, they advertise and allow you to create a free agency account but you can't apply for jobs until you upgrade to agency plus.
There was also a recent case where upwork permanently suspended a freelancer's account without any recourse where the freelancer had $2000 in their account. I am sure that's not an isolated case knowing what Upwork has become.
My experience was that I got 100% scam and dangerously unhinged contacts. Not one single valid proposal ever came my way.
I have heard great things about Upwork, but always from people who wanted to hire, as opposed to be hired.
I don't think I'd ever put my information on their platform, and I'm also considering getting off linkedin for similar concerns.
I'd really like to avoid all the bureaucracy of banks, government etc for my side projects.
Ty
I don’t know any where you live, but it is a thing. They’ll connect you to clients and my experience is that nobody throws leetcode interviews at consultants.
If you are willing to work full time you can also join a consultancy and they’ll find you something to do.
(It certainly doesn't help that agents post jobs as part-time only to lure you to apply so they can start nagging you.)
The part-time roles that are available are usually either very simple, short-term tasks, Or companies with extremely limited budgets that will under-pay you, and try to squeeze the most out of you and give you trouble with payment and hours worked.
I suggest opening a company, adding some friends, and taking up multiple contracts simultaniously.
You can pick “part-time” availability and “small” or “medium” company size (whatever looks good) and you’ll only hear about part-time jobs at small companies.
Source: I launched my own software consulting business back in July 2022 and I work with a handful of customers "part-time" (e.g. project based work, 10 hours a week).
I like to do a lot of different things. I'm currently building basic web-apps for clients part-time and love it. Get to work on 2-3 different projects every month, since its usually coming down to basic CRUD apps.
I could build these apps in my sleep but finding the ppl that need them (or a good client) seems like a full time job.
But due to resource constraints those things just get pushed. Specially IT things like backups
I started on those platforms and I couldn't scale up my rate well enough as without those platforms.
At the same time I know a few crypto devs who built their reputation there and can get good rates.
For high paid normal web development, nothing beats a good network of wealthy companies who constantly need crap done.
Why not?
I heard good things about them but haven't got in myself because they require leetcode puzzles which I suck at atm.
"How would you get X?" "How would you get all X who are not retired?" etc
After 3 questions, the guy stopped and said "no one has ever gotten this far this quickly before - I don't have any other prepared questions right now. Let's try one more..."
That one took another 10 minutes - I sort of 'knew' it but... doing 'live' pairing being on display adds a bit of nerves, and... I just need to hammer through multiple trials. Felt awkward, but got there after a bit of time.
Then... person 2. "Leetcode" exercise... I reviewed it again a bit later, and one of the things that tripped me up is that the description and the expected 'sample in/out' answers were in conflict. At best, the description was ambiguous, but to my reading was in contradiction to one of the expected answers.
I struggled 20 minutes in front of them... and we were out of time. The question was (to my reading) relatively abstract and doesn't map to any of the sorts of problems I've tackled over the past 20 years in development.
They thanked me and closed the interview. I wrestled with the leetcode for another 30 min or so later that evening and 'got it', but... annoying.
I reply with this partially to say "you may never get better at the leetcode stuff" but don't let that get you too down. :)
Someday if I'm desperate for work I might work on it and apply again.
Still, it's still better than begging around on upwork or fiverr like some people are doing.
I learned this the hard way... a couple times...
But during the last technical call I couldn't finish one out of two puzzles in time because I initially went for a sub-optimal strategy, so I got told to practice leetcode and apply later.
With 16 years of professional experience, I shall do better with my time than getting good at solving timed Fizzbuzz-type puzzles.
To change your rates, you have to go to their support group and ask for the change. I'm not sure how hard it is to change I haven't needed to change it yet.
This is first to me. Why'd recruiters not like if you've worked on only one project for a long time? On the contrary, I think it's a plus - shows stability and 'long-term' mindset individual.
