there are a ton of developers looking for side income doing freelancing job because of the romanticisation of digital nomads and overemployment. you can go on facebook and there are groups catered for these needs.

So far i 've done 2 freelancing jobs and i would like to rant on here that freelancing jobs arent all sunshine and rainbows. in fact its even more stressful than working in a company full time in office.


reason
1) lowball from programmers from india/pakistan/bangladesh , easy ones are all snapped up by these programmers offering $5 for their services. And the ones they cant do, are usually very difficult and require specialised knowledge.
2) you are likely dealing with with very very messy code, likely caused by programmers from 1)
3) you need to full stack knowledge, literally everything.

my first freelancing job i took it up for a small local company, the boss himself knows how to code, but dont know how to code well. The project
> sql table no 1/2/3 NF, just a bunch of data chuck in there, no foreign key, worse than no SQL..
> password didnt hash, i feel for his customers..
> his variables naming is 3 alphabets plus 2 numbers behind.
> talks too much, the meeting with him last 1 hour 30 min ...and his excuse for using freelancer is "he has not enough time to code himself due to him running the business" (but have time for 1 hour + briefing, i also pengsan), i
suspect its because he become looking at his own code


My second freelancing job, the person ask me to build a booking site from the scratch up. Didnt tell me what is it for, didnt give me a lot of details. At the review period, only he told me, oh its for kedah's state government. Gave me the logo and ask me to put it on. Theres another problem , the entire site has to be re-translated into BM. I did it into late night, then, he ghosted me. cant contact him anymore..

I wont do any freelancing anymore

This post has been edited by 15cm: May 29 2023, 11:30 PM

U suppose to own the the link or smthg right. He ghosted u turn off the whole website la. U shud have at least own somethg to protek urself.

Bite it and move forward.

This post has been edited by Femsroot: May 30 2023, 12:43 AM

i hosted it on my own shared hosting, he never got anything

my guess is he asked several people to do , then pick the one he liked and block the others

i should have asked for deposit...but i was naive :x

1. Deposit is always a must, unless you're willing to do it for free,
or practice the technique even it is not able to sale.

2. full stack is preferred,
as you may faces cases that required certain skillset.

3. Able to understand those messy codes,
or at least knew what it is doing,
able to rewrite to human readable and workable code.

P/S : You may need to upgrade yours or others legacy dinosaur tech code to new tech.

Welcome to my life for the first 10 years of programming as profession.

Its still not too bad when you're doing it for side-income. Its really really hard when its your primary income.


This has gotten worse over the years as tools become more accessible.

You can only stick to your price and let your work speak for itself. I used to always get "This person can do for $x". Then I tell the prospect "Then go with them, if you want me, the price now is $y. If you come back to me later, the price may no longer be the same".


This is where you tell the prospect, either pay for the time to fix messy code, or pay for the price to build a new one from scratch. Most SME using freelancers are usually not in a position where the software is super critical to the business and can usually afford you to rebuild from scratch.


This is actually a perk, rather than a problem. You are exposed to more tech and hence learn more too. It gives you better insights into system design as a whole, which puts you at a higher level than most corporate workers that only focus on their little bubble.

If you do it full-time, you also have to learn the business side of things which helps you see the bigger picture. Then when discussing/negotiating with project managers, or higher you can make a better case than most technical managers.

............

This post has been edited by FlierMate: Jun 5 2023, 08:13 PM