I would like to find more opportunities to continue doing what I love the most. At this stage contract work ranging from ~20 hours per week up to > 40 hours per week occasionally is probably the best value.
Yes, there is a question.
How should I go about finding such jobs?
(Also, I’m unclear about how to briefly fit my 45 years experience into a resume format)
Word of mouth and professional connections work best. With your long career you must know a lot of people who run companies, or still work in the field. And they know people. Word of mouth and referrals remain the best way to get leads.
Freelancers should focus on solving problems. Employees get hired to fill roles. Freelancers don't need a resume. They need demonstrated expertise that they can apply immediately to solving business problems. My approach comes down to getting the (potential) customer to list and describe their top five or ten pain points or needs, in priority order, then knocking those out for them. If you can deliver no one cares about your age or what you did before or where you went to school 50 years ago. Working remotely also helps, because you won't get the "not a good fit with our culture" excuse (i.e. "too old").
If you mean contracting like a temp employee that usually works more like an employee arrangement -- resume, interviews, etc.
You can work through an agency (disclaimer: 10X Management represents me). A good agency does the marketing, contracts, legal, invoicing, payment for you (for a cut). They can expose you to opportunities you would not otherwise know about.
Focus on your strongest skills, don't try to do everything. For example I concentrate on relational databases/SQL (core ideas and techniques almost unchanged since the 1980s), Linux system admin and cloud infrastructure (old hat to anyone who grew up with Unix), and web application development. I started freelancing by finding customers who had abandoned or broken projects (plenty of those, like 60% - 90% of all software projects) and offering to fix the problems. Debugging and maintenance pay just as well or more as green-fields development.
I have several articles about freelancing on my web site typicalprogrammer.com. No ads, sign-ups, pop-ups, or affiliate links. Good luck.
From most people I have heard is that they usually freelance as part time
I started freelancing part-time when my full-time employer started losing money and laying people off. I had a friend who ran a web design company, he would hear from his customers how they needed web programming, so he sent that work to me. He introduced me to another design firm that had even more clients who needed help. From there it kind of snowballed. By the time I quit my f/t job I had replaced my income with freelance work.
You don't have to freelance full-time, 40 hrs/week. You need to work enough at a good rate to get the income you want. If you were making $100k at a full-time job that's about $50/hr. If you can get $100/hr freelancing you can either work 40 hrs/week and make $200k, or work 20 hrs/week and make $100k.
My advice: Get some customers first. Concentrate on establishing long-term relationships. That will mean doing some not-so-fun work and maybe expanding your range, learning the business domain, doing a little extra for the customer. Try to keep non-billable time to a minimum. Don't spend a lot of time/money on stuff like incorporating, fancy web site, business cards, complicated banking, accounting, lawyers. The biggest non-billable time suck for a lot of freelancers is finding and bidding on jobs. The less churn you have with your customers the less of that gig-hunting you have to do. You want to build a good base of steady customers who will refer you to other customers. Ideally you get your customers on monthly retainers, which turns you into a predictable fixed monthly cost instead of an unpredictable account payable.
Remember that as a self-employed freelancer you have to pay all of your Social Security, Medicare, and health insurance, so factor that in when determining your rate.
In the freelancing articles on my web site (typicalprogrammer.com) I suggest charging for specific tasks and deliverables, not big vague fixed-fee projects, not hourly. That doesn't always work, it depends on the customer and the task. You should have a target rate in mind, of course. If you want to make $100/hr and your customer needs a task done you estimate how long you think it will take and multiply by your rate to get a fixed fee for that deliverable. Then stick to that. Estimating large software projects challenges even the most experienced programmers and managers, but with some experience you should be able to estimate well-defined tasks that take less than around 40 hours. That also keeps you from getting in the position of your customer owing you a lot of money, or you owing them a lot (because you took a 50% deposit up front on a $20k project and you can't deliver, or you client refuses to pay the remainder). I vary my exposure based on my experience and trust with the customer, but for a new customer I would not want to get more than $2,000 to $4,000 in the hole, so I will break their tasks down into small measurable deliverables I can bill for.
Although it's against the linkedin terms of service (and I do not currently use it), octopus crm is a good place to look for thr framework, octopus automates it, but you can just do what octopus does, follow the same playback, manually.
Every day like a few people's posts, write a glowing reference/reccomendation for someone you've worked with or for on their page, endorse a few people for skills, and send out 10 personal messages to people in your field. To find those people search . Like if your into semiconductor robotics just search for that with those keywords, then filter it by people in management, then further by anything else you want to filter by (location, etc) and then connect with those people (send a friend request) and in the note just say hi, I'm X, I do X, I noticed you do to, just wanted to connect.
Do that for a few weeks and someone will reply back asking for your help.
I hope this helps, if it doesn't ignore it and do something better.
[edit] That said, for a freelancer, LinkedIn has less value unless you are active in the same communities that your customers are.
(FYI, that’s a burner email— I’ll reply from a different one)
Lean on face to face networking? Programming Conventions? I got my last couple jobs based on who I know, not from applying in a big 'o cattle call.
> briefly fit my 45 years experience into a resume format
Chop it to just the last 10 years? That's what I did (as a green 45 yo with 20+ years experience). Then, during the interview I talked a bit more about my full experience.
Best of luck!
Have an online presence in some area. Open source something related to what you want to work on.
Help them find you.
As far compressing your resume, my suggestion would be to pick and choose the few past experiences / accomplishments that you are most proud of or are most relevant to the kind of opportunities you're seeking. In other words, what would you actually want an interviewer to ask you about. Don't include dates. This approach is better than trying to write a detailed accounting of your entire career, even condensing each role down to a single bullet point. I'm coming from the perspective of someone who has screened resumes of and interviewed more experienced candidates in the past. It is definitely a bit of a turnoff when you receive an 18 page resume containing an essay about every project the candidate has ever worked on.
Same for listing keywords / technologies you've worked with -- no need to list every language you've worked with since 1975 (unless you're looking for roles as a COBOL or PL/I maintenance programmer). Focus on relevance.
Let's look at the opposite end of the spectrum. People that have more requests for work than they have time. This is common, especially in your field (programming).
So - a hack I like to suggest. Befriend one of these people! They exist on reddit, twitter, etc. Find them, they love humble bragging "ah I turn down jobs all the time nbd".
These people are like magnets for jobs, and because of that, they are also extremely credible sources of referrals. Hey xyz! I heard you are turning down a lot of jobs because you're too busy. Do you mind sending those my way?
Hope that helps.
You don't. I have a way less experience and I still only show my last 10 years. As I said somewhere, if someone is interested in my experience in managing a (now) 15 years old specific software then I is not interested in them.
Also I'm in favour of 'CV should fit on a single page'. If someone looks for talent then this is more than enough to interest them and nobody looks at the second page anyway.
To avoid ageism, focus on online communities on Twitter and Discord. They don't even need to see your face. 99% of the time they are happy to do a text or voice chat.
If they won’t turn you on to work, there’s probably a reasonable reason.
Working with peeps who know you and your work doesn’t require a resume.
And the first step for finding work is always seeking rejection - because that’s the typical outcome of a phone call - on the phone not writing a resume.
A resume is only needed when someone asks for one.
Good luck.
The minority who are willing to look past your age (who will also be the better ones to work for) will pick up on your persistence and see it as a positive trait and hire signal.
As to the resume - there's lots of advice out there on resume advice for older workers. Truncating / condensing lists of older gigs is one of the standard techniques.
The rest of what you do is a variation of the same advice as applies to younger candidates - just that in your case it will have even more protective benefit,
For example - even though it may bore you a bit, be sure to both read (or carefully skim) as many modern books as you can that are relative to your field, as well as to stay up on the "shiny" stuff (cloud, containers, CI/CD) even though your gut instinct will (rightly) tell you they may be overhyped or less important than knowing the core principles.
That is - at least know what they are, what problems they attempt to solve and what they are basically made of. This will make is substantially less easy to dismiss you as a dinosaur (inflexible / crusty / less nimble than younger candidates).
Finally: wear your age with pride. You've lived through times, and have seen things these people can only read about (for those who even read these days). You have a rare perspective to offer, and the better folks out there will see that and dig that aspect of you. And will be proud to have you in their corner and on their team.
Anyone who learned C back in the '70s or '80s can pick up most newer languages quickly. Relational databases, the core of every non-trivial business application, date from the '80s.
My advice: don't worry about or focus on your age, don't make excuses, don't try to persuade people you haven't turned into a dinosaur. Focus on business needs and how you can solve problems and add value. Ageism in tech certainly exists but you mainly run into it when a team of younger people interview someone their dad's age and don't see a good fit with the team. And they're right about that -- I won't work 18 hrs/day for free pizza and beer anymore, and I don't play foosball or need a nap room.
