I know some basic HTML, CSS. JS, and very little React – I’m learning it currently. One of the things I see mentioned online is freelancing as a way to earn income. Now, I’ve tried this before in the past on UpWork, and it was nearly impossible to get anything out of it, I rarely received a response and that required submitting a lot of proposals which in turn cost a lot of money.
When I go on UpWork, many of the jobs need WordPress developers or an array of skills I simply do not have and appear to require a lot of time to learn.
Furthermore, I’m in an odd place financially and career wise, where I can’t seem to get a job anywhere, not even at places that would’ve hired me before, and certainly not as a junior developer.
I suppose I’m asking for advice. If freelancing is an option to pursue, how do I go about it in the cheapest and most cost effect way possible? If freelancing is not the right option, then what can I do with what I do know? Lastly, is the job market in a weird state for every sector?
My experience actively freelancing is dated now but I might still have some insight you would want to hear.
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don’t expect to make good money right off, in fact expect too pickup a part time job to get by. it takes years to build a client base that is capable is supporting you unless you’re skills are highly sought after.
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when I had a similar skill set I found local job boards (Craigslist, Reddit/Lemmy, etc) much easier to get work. The clients tend to be easier to work with as well because they probably won’t have the same expectations on a large freelancing site.
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managing client expectations is the key to success, know you ability and spec jobs for longer than you think. It’s better to get passed on a job than stuck with something you can’t do.
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this might just be me but the business side of things is a drag and takes a lot of time. Marketing, specing, client relations, it was too much for me as a one man shop, don’t discount how much time it takes.
Good luck out there, freelancing was the hardest but also most rewarding work I’ve ever done. You’ll be forced to learn a lot in and out of tech at a breakneck pace. Some of the best lessons I learned have nothing to do with 1’s and 0’s.
- this might just be me but the business side of things is a drag and takes a lot of time. Marketing, specing, client relations, it was too much for me as a one man shop, don’t discount how much time it takes.
It is! It’s not just you. Running a business is a full time job on its own. When I finally accepted a corporate job, I was shocked to see that there were 15-20 person teams to do what I was doing all by myself.
The best option is to team up with someone else whose skills and passions are in marketing and client acquisition. Create a bidding template for them, like a rate card, and then unleash them. Split the cost of the projects with them. Don’t forget to charge enough to make splitting worth it. Ideally this is an actual company, but another freelancer could work in this role too, if they’re actually serious about building a business.
OP, making these contacts and setting this stuff up takes a lot of time. You can either make that your primary goal before starting, or you can just start trying to get jobs off job boards and hope you meet someone along the way. Eventually you’ll get a marketing client and if you’re good, they’ll want to team up.
It’s rough out there without a brand. There are a billion overseas “programmers” who will gladly work for $25 a day. They’re going to be bidding on all the same jobs that you are. You really have to stress the value you bring in ease of communication. That is worth a ton. Companies and people value time and money. They will waste a lot of both working with a cheapo programmer.
You’ll probably have to take some crappy, low paying jobs to start your portfolio. Don’t rush those. Build them perfectly, and then proudly display them and the client testimonials in your portfolio. You’ll eventually be able to charge more.
The guy above me already stated it, but it can’t be overstated. A. Job. Will. Take. Longer. Than. You. Think. My strategy when I was freelancing was to break the project down into pieces, estimate everything using a chart I had for how long those steps took under ideal circumstances, add an hour for the time spent estimating, add 30% fluff, and then double it. That was usually pretty close to the actual time spent. You need to remember that all the time spent chasing the client down for images and answers, talking about what you’ve built, doing demos, and all that sort of stuff is time you need to be paid for. If you don’t account for that then you’ll hit the end of a year and realize that you just worked 52 weeks, 7 days a week, 15 hours a day, and made $17,500.
Best of luck! There are easier ways to make money with these skills, much easier, but few are as rewarding.
This makes a lot of sense. I’ll have to see how I can apply this locally, but at least it’s more information that I had before on how to approach this. I appreciate it, thank you.
I just elaborated some of his points and shared a system that I used when I was freelancing as a reply to his comment. Idk how to tag you on Lemmy, so I figured I’d reply to you here in case you want some more advice from someone who freelanced for about 8 years as my sole income.
Thank you! Your reply provides a lot of missing context. It will be my bible, or at least part of the guidelines I need to get something started.
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Find a head hunter or consulting agency to do the work for you (Accenture, Slalom, etc.). Some will train you further on their dollar. Most will pay shit. Once you get some experience under you, move on. There’s plenty of gigs paying $75+/hr to freelance Sr. devs.
If you don’t have enough skills for those jobs…keep at it until you do.
I’ll look into this and see if I can fill in the gaps. Thank you!
What’s your background generally. Do you have a degree in something CS related?
I learned more in my first 6 months of hands on work than I did in all of my schooling. So if you have a cs degree and can learn enough of the basics and interview questions you’d probably be fine applying to jr dev positions whether your concentration is programming or other.
Really hard question to answer with that info though.
I have a degree in philosophy, which, as far as I can tell, is more of a “support” degree that says I like thinking and learning a lot. I’ve thought about going back and seeing what I can do, but I’m honestly so broke that it’s not a viable option.
Related, but how much time per day did you put into learning practical skills? I put in a few hours each week, maybe somewhere between 5-10 hours, but it feels like I’m really low-balling the amount of time I should be coding and applying what I know.
Support degree
I have a master’s in comparative literature and I’ve been working as a front end/full stack developer for almost a decade. (I started as freelance but I didn’t love it, personally - but more on that below.)
Obviously philosophy & literature degrees aren’t going to directly help you - but they can help you shape your career, if you want. If your goal is to work as a developer in a gigantic multinational corporation, I have no advice - but if you want to stay around philosophy and philosophers, you can do what I did: work for institutions, rather than corporations.
I’ve been a developer for 10 years and probably 7 of them were at libraries. I’ve gotten to know colleagues at colleges and universities and it’s a great crowd. I’m currently at an academic library and I love it: I get to work in the academic environment, be around the vibrant college vibe, but I don’t actually have to interact with students, professors, or really anyone other than developers and bosses.
If you go that route, you should be aware that some jobs will just randomly pay super badly - make sure you’re aware of that in advance and don’t waste your time. Those institutions that can’t meet industry salaries should be outsourcing - which brings me to my final tip on that topic:
There are LOTS of academic and “academic-adjacent” institutions that can’t afford developers and so they outsource. The people they outsource to - that’s who you want to find. Go to the websites for events and “initiatives” (ie smaller websites, not their huge ILS or DAMS software or whatever), scroll to the bottom, and find “website by FooBarBaz” - and find those people. They’re usually small, and, importantly, local development firms and usually specialize in that kind of work - and they pay the kinds of salaries one would expect. So that’s another route.
Those “companies” - it’s weird to even call them that, because it’s usually just one or two people who were freelance and just banded together and called it a company; they hired a few yous and mes and they stick with that their entire careers. They’ll often have you freelance for them for a little bit until you prove your value, and then offer you a real job - or just keep you afloat until you find a “real” job.
(Getting back to my “more on that in a bit” from the first paragraph: that’s the freelancing I recommend: freelance for freelancers. This goes for inside and outside the academic/GLAM world: a good freelancer will have more offers of work than they can handle - so they outsource to you, take a cut, and give you experience. It’s not ideal, but it can turn into a solid, long term relationship, and having a developer as a “boss” also means they’ll understand the challenges you’ll be facing as a new developer.)
Good luck.
One other tip specific to library/academic/GLAM work: there’s a thing called Code4Lib that’s basically a community of academic/library developers. They’re awesome and they have great conferences. They have a job board, but, in my experience, it’s a lot of jobs from those places that don’t pay enough - and they post to C4L as though people who work at libraries don’t know how to find out what salaries developers expect. Don’t bother with Code4Lib jobs - but definitely go to their conferences and local meetups.
This is really good advice. I had no idea I about that area of work. It makes sense in hindsight, but having it written out so clearly really gives me some ideas on where to focus. Thank you.
That was the short version because I had no idea if you actually cared. Even the best dev jobs in the academic/GLAM area don’t pay Jane Street money. But, honestly, who does, other than Jane Street.
Anyway, if you want to talk about it now, let me know.
Of course. I am a bit curious about what GLAM is and any other important terms I can search that can help me find this type of work. Generally, I’m mainly curious about the whole starting process, what to look out for, and how to best approach this area.
I have a degree in philosophy (and no other diploma) and I make $200k/year as a senior developer. The degree does not really matter.
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