Ask HN: How do you find roles as a solo developer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you find roles as a solo developer?

34 points_ndcd18 comments

In my last gig I spent a lot of time working as a solo developer - essentially as a one man programming, testing and project management army - and it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. I loved the variety, responsibility and self-reliance.

Now I'm looking for another role, but am having trouble finding similarly individualistic work. Every org seems to be recruiting devs who can just happily slot into their "cross functional agile teams" - and this isn't me at all.

For context, I am a full stack JavaScript / TS developer with experience in web graphics and VR, a little C++ and Java too. I live and work in London.

Can anyone who works this way currently advise on how they obtained their position?

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Lone gunmen are probably best served by going off on their own. Think "consultant" not "developer."

You’ve got to make yourself available - case in point: your hacker news profile is blank.

How am I supposed to contact you? Many people will: Read this, Think: I’ll contact him Look at your profile - no info, Abort

You’re losing opportunities by not having profile, fill it out!

This is a metaphor for other things too - fill in your linked in, your Twitter, and think: anywhere else? Are you giving business cards out at the Meetup events?

I’m a sole dev in London too, and the above has worked for me

Target small to medium companies? I've also had a similar job to yourself and found it greatly rewarding during my time there. You can also look for places with an emphasis on hardware engineering/IoT/manufacturing, but who are looking to expand out to do inhouse software development. The place I was at involved mainly Windows development (C#/WPF) as well as some embedded C on microcontrollers.

I worked this way at a startup accelerator—for the accelerator itself before I had technically graduated from MIT (4-year bachelors degree that I did in 5 years). How I got into it was by responding to a recruiter email by asking if they knew anyone looking for contractors. They connected me with the organization and I had a single in-person interview. They wanted to bring me on board and I made up an hourly rate of $30/hour and they said great. I set about understanding their needs and writing the spaghetti code that 1.5 years later made me look for a role at a place where I could have guidence and code reviews.

Have you considered going independent and getting a few clients on retainer? That’s what I do and most of my clients stick around for 5+ years and often have bigger projects to work on from time to time. I work around 20 hours most weeks and make enough to live a comfortable life. There is a lot of work out there If you can sell your skills.

He said he wants to be independent. He is asking how to get clients.

I didn't read it that way at all. It sounds to me like he's asking how to find a particular role/job, not how to find multiple clients.

Exactly - I read it as the OP was looking for ways to find another full-time job for one company where he gets to be a 'one-man show'.

I've read it the same.

Could you expand on how you found clients? There are indeed lots of clients, the hard part is how to find them and convince them to work with you.

Sure, I'll put something together and post either a response or a link here when I can.

Also curious about this, and in particular what the alternatives to shortish-term consulting could look like.

A model I've been wondering about is offering longish-term contracts to build/support/maintain some capability. Perhaps could be thought of as a kind of one-customer SAAS. Anyone tried a model like this?

Join a startup. I’ve worked at 3 now and each time I’ve been the sole mobile developer.

I found a company that had a big need for software but no experience on staff. I took a huge salary hit over year 1 to prove myself. Can’t really say I recommend it, but it’s perhaps one option.

What country are you based in?

The United Kingdom. I live in London.

As others said you can bill yourself as a consultant and work as an outsider to a company. Doesn't sound like that's what you're looking for though. You're looking for a full-time job in a company acting more or less as a one-man show in your area?

While you loved the variety, etc., can you say you were actually doing good work? Beyond things getting done, did you leave behind working documentation, reproducible data and tests? I've lost track of the projects I've come in to where the previous person was a one-man show and almost always, it was a mess. I can even say I've left some of those messes - in some cases because I was inexperienced, and in other cases, there were corners intentionally cut to fit budgets.

Inherited a project where a small company had a guy working for a year, and we basically had to scrap the code and start over, as nothing worked. Literally we had a server running that everyone was afraid to stop because no one could get it running again, even with the scant docs that were left behind (a combination of a bunch of undocumented go/clojure, with few comments in a smattering of git commits). Months in, we've hit some of the same problems the previous person hit, but had he actually documented the problems and decisions, we may have saved a lot of time (but... it also seems he went down a lot of weird corners, and the decision to scrap/rebuild wasn't really wrong after all).

> Whilst you loved the variety, etc., can you say you were actually doing good work?

Yes. I'm proud of what I built, and think I would be happy to inherit it as a first timer. And I would be willing to trade on that as my reputation.

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