Hacker News Reader

Comment by ordinaryperson | Hacker News Reader

Get a lawyer, review contracts, hire an accountant, register as a company...is this really better than working a regular 9-5?

Sounds like the OP spends just as much time (if not more) doing paperwork, meetings, phone calls and other assorted meta-work as programmers in Big Tech Co, if not more.

Corporate America can be a drag, I get it. Annual reviews, backstabbing office politics, the wrong people get promoted, loud open offices full of clowns that prevent you from concentrating but from this write-up it doesn't sound like going solo is any hassle-free Shangrila, either.

For a certain class of people they like the "freedom" and hey, more power to you. By all means, enjoy the IC life. But I'd just as soon move to a different company if I'm unhappy at my job and not deal with this Kafkaesque amount of paperwork of being an independent consultant.

View on HN

I am the OP and I spend far less actually... a few hours at the beginning of a contract sure but the average contract is multiple months. All of the bills are auto paid, I just need to choose the right card/account when I pay for something. Invoices take about two minutes to generate using a free site called “invoice-generator.com.” The accountant I would have hired anyway to do my taxes. I don’t pay for the lawyer if I don’t use them.

I also get to skip doing phone screens, interviews, being oncall... I am spending a lot more of my time focusing on product problems than I was as a full time employee.

Also - this might be obvious but the goal is to make more than you made as a full time employee or get more vacation time for the same amount per year not merely tread water.

Is most of your work "on site" at the customer or at home?

Usually I commute to wherever the company is located 4 days a week. I have done all-remote projects before though.

I'm glad to hear I'm wrong. I'm certainly not rooting for anyone to fail.

But a couple of things.

One, the higher you rise in responsibility the more likely your work is to be meta-work. I saw your personal site and the services you're advertising, as time goes on you'll be offering more business-like services because inevitably that's what customers want.

Sadly most programmers have to choose between having the satisfaction of doing IC work and having their salary plateau or transitioning into management and/or biz dev consulting.

Second, it's hard to build equity as an independent. That is, if you work for Facebook or Amazon or whoever for 5 years, that's a hard skill you can trade in for a better job elsewhere, or at the very least your benefits start to accrue higher and higher (e.g. at my Big Tech Co: discount off public stock purchase).

How many 55 year old solo independent devs do you see out there in the wild? I'm sure they exist but unless the have some very specific skill set (e.g. COBOL programming for banks) it's hard to have a forever career as a generalist IC.

But again, more power to you if you can make it work. I'm not criticizing the lifestyle, only suggesting that it's not some peaceful freedom from BS that we'd all want to imagine it to be.

> How many 55 year old solo independent devs do you see out there in the wild?

I think this might be too young of a profession for that point to add up. I've been a solo independent Dev for 20 years and I'm only 40. I don't know if I'll be doing this for another 15 years, but I certainly don't expect to take a job anywhere.

I sincerely hope you can continue as you've been doing, but as you'll see from many testimonials here at HN ageism in tech is a real thing, people's reactions to you will start to change as soon as you "look" old.

Most of the ageism applies to FT work at Big Tech Co but IMO it sadly applies to solo, independent devs as well since 50% of it is how you market yourself, and "old" will equate to "out of touch" in too many people's eyes.

Have you ever done solo though? From reading your responses here I get the feeling no. Not that your views would be invalid if you haven't, but it does give a different weight to them vs someone who has been doing it a long time, especially who is now e.g. over 50

I have but not in many years. Maybe things have changed since then -- I don't know. But as I've said many times in this thread my point is not to say freelancing is terrible or not viable, just that articles like these seem to underrate some of the tradeoffs, which are significant. Glad it works out for the OP and you, I guess.

But when your wife is pregnant or your kids need to go to the ER life can get very expensive as a freelancer. Too easy to judge the career path as a single 20-something, IMHO.

I think ageism might be less prevalent for freelancers/consultants. Same with being remote, ime.

> Second, it's hard to build equity as an independent.

Your description of "equity" sounds more like "skills". You can always buy stocks of companies, just make sure to charge enough to cover those benefits.

However, I argue that freelancing tends to accumulate skills. If you work at FB, you're going to be doing the same stuff with the same platforms; at best you change languages/platforms every couple years as you get moved between projects. Every freelance contract I've had has been a different set of languages and skills. In fact, one of my contracts came because I am such a generalist. I feel like the clients I've interacted with want an "expert"--someone skilled in the exact areas they need (as opposed to companies, which are a little more willing for you to have related experience but not exact experience), so the more different things you can point to having done, the more contracts are available to you. It also helps you credibly claim "I'm not very familiar with X, but I've been able to get up to speed in a day on my other projects"

Not skills. I meant more institutional knowledge, connections, reputation and advancement within a company. With solo dev you restart at 0 with every new contract.

You can definitely acquire skills freelancing. The question is, what is the endgame? What do you do at 50? If there are a lot of 45-65 year old solo devs out there I would LOVE to hear from them, have them share their experiences.

But my sinking suspicion is ageism in tech spans outward to include independent, generalist contractors.

How many 55 year old solo independent devs do you see out there in the wild?

Lots.

Quick question? Would you prefer to be a 55 year old salaried senior dev, or a 55 year old specialist consultant? Same answer if you're one of those two, but currently between gigs and looking for work?

Being the "old guy" looking for a job is how you get discriminated against. "Why is this guy on the market now?" "How many years does he have left?" "Is he still any good?"

Being the "old guy" specialist consultant means you're going to be really good at the thing they need to bring you in to do. You're also really expensive, which just reinforces how good you must be. Nobody is going to hold your lack of inexperience against you when they have a problem their kids can't solve.

No need for the specialty to be Geriatric COBOL or FORTRAN either. A 55 year old Javascript guy today might have 24 years experience in it, and can certainly teach your front-end guys a few things about writing code that runs in browsers.

So yeah, when the time comes, make sure you're either consulting or running your own company.

Well there's no fact-based way to settle this debate, the evidence is all anecdotal, but I see discrimination against older consultants every single day.

Executives at Fortune 100 companies (in my experience) pick an agency speed, price and 'sexiness' -- I've never once heard them positively rate the age and experience level of a solo developer. And I have never, ever seen a F100 co bring in an old guy to tutor front-end devs. I can't even imagine.

I would absolutely rather be the old guy at a big tech co but I wouldn't be a solo developer, I'd be in management.

There's no question there's a path out there for solo devs in their 50s but is it really all roses and rainbows like you say? Seems like the harder path to me.

Do you only work with software companies where you hand over your work and they take over the maintenance and keeping the software running in production?

Pretty much, yes

Until recently I would've spoken as pro-independent, having been at it the last few years as an agency. I left Corporate America to increase "freedom" but regardless of whether you charge flat-rate, hourly, weekly, retainer, etc. you're also spending those "free" hours wondering / attempting to find + secure more work. And regardless of your pipeline, it is a dance with existing clients. Payment schedules getting out of wack, revisions delaying payment and so on.

What's the real net return? Living expenses covered? Compared to a 9-5, there is a significant risk. What I realized is that if I am going to play with such levels of risk, do so through equity plays and not services. Through end of 2018, I was services only. I am mid-process interviewing with larger companies and will happily dive into my skill set for _______ while doing side projects.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. You've been on both sides and can appreciate each. You should formulate your experiences into a longer Medium post (or blog post) and share with HN.

I appreciate it. Hadn't considered Medium as a way to create content, let alone share both sides or startup lessons learned (4x co-founder) !

When people talk about "freedom" in this context, they don't mean freedom from meetings, paperwork or other boring aspects of corporate life. And being self-employed is definitely not hassle-free.

What entices people is that - for both better and worse - you are your own boss. You dictate what projects you say yes or no to, what hours you work, when you go on vacation and lots more.

If W pays you X to do Y you are not “your own boss”. You just have different type of employment relations. I’ve done both and find them equally “free”.

It's true, and I've had enough horrible managers to understand and appreciate the appeal.

All I'm saying is when most programmers envision being a solo, independent dev they think of the freedom but it's really (IMHO) a series of tradeoffs that don't necessarily make it significantly better than working a 9-5 for most people.

Everyone's situation is different. For some it's a dream, I'm sure. But I read lawyer, accountant, contracts, billing and think I'd rather just go back to work.

You skipped the other “freedom” you get when you work for yourself: free time.

When you hang out your shingle and quadruple your bill rate for short bursts of client work, you get the option of not immediately booking another gig after you finish the last one. For me, I’d usually toss in a quick 9-12 months of travel before committing to another gig.

But you’re right. I did have to fill out the longer version of turbotax, so maybe it all balances out.

Ha not sure "9-12 months" is "quick". If I wanted to quit my job and travel, I can do that with a regular 9-5.

Maybe others can do this (and if so, more power to them) but if I was taking "free time" while a solo dev I would just feel like I was constantly losing money.

Yes, because once you figure those parts (which is not that hard as you listed), you will be able to make 5x - 10x more money than you used to make with the same skillset.

9-5 for a developer pays 100k. Freelance gets paid 250k+. This is real.

Most devs I know make a lot more than 100K but maybe that reflects my old age.

But let's dive into the numbers for a moment. I have no doubt you can book 250K in a year...but you only referred to the base salary of a developer, not all the other paid-for benefits.

Health care is a huge one. Take a big number out of that 250K.

Paid vacation is a second. Let's say you get 2-4 weeks off in total PTO, that's worth thousands of dollars.

None of the expenses the author mentioned -- lawyer, accountant, etc.

Free computer hardware. An office space to work in. Colleagues you can call on instantly for help.

You don't have to spend unpaid time looking for work.

I'd love to a see a spreadsheet comparison of each lifestyle and see if it's really raining money down as a consultant, because my (admittedly unscientific) gut says it's not.

Health care is a huge one.

Health care is a massive one. Burke doesn't mention if he's single or has a family, but any kind of decent plan (health + dental + vision) that covers a family will be extremely expensive. I just left a company and the COBRA quote for my old plan was $2,600/month.

If ACA had been modified to eliminate preexisting conditions, this would have been even worse. I shopped on the open market before ACA and it was a nightmare.

Exactly. And presumably the OP is young and healthy but as you get older you'll need a lot of doctor's visits for the entire family and if you want a GOOD plan, not just some garbage one that barely covers anything, it's extremely expensive.

But it gets to my overall point -- a lot of freelance devs like to bandy around big numbers like 250K without subtracting any of the costs or drawbacks.

For some people I'm sure the tradeoff is worth it but on balance a good job at Big Tech Co to me seems like a better long-term prospect than freelancing forever. But it's just my opinion.

You don't even need to get older. Once you add a spouse and the possibility of pregnancy and delivery comes into play...the rates skyrocket.

> Annual reviews

Oh man. This alone is reason enough for me to be a freelancer.

Ha, yes, that's fair. There are few worse features of corporate america than annual reviews -- not because of the process itself but more often because of how poorly they are run by untrained managers.

> Sounds like the OP spends just as much time (if not more) doing paperwork, meetings, phone calls and other assorted meta-work as programmers in Big Tech Co, if not more.

That's business ownership for you. The one thing you're almost certainly NOT getting (at least at the start) is more coding time.

Exactly.

And that's fine as long as you'r transparent about the tradeoff. But we tend not to frame solo dev as "mostly business-related work with a little bit of programming" instead we think of it as "Programming on your own! No boss! Wahoo!"

As a business owner, I wish there was a way to outsource all the boring stuff. Last year I've even tried hiring someone to do all the beaurocratic stuff for me, but that didn't work out -- finding good people who want to work just a few hours a week isn't easy.

I guess at a certain size, you can hire a full time assistant to take care of that stuff, but at a small business you are going to do all the overhead work yourself.

After the initial corporation, legal and accounting setup there’s actually little paperwork that really needs to be done and can actually be quicker than the 9-5 equivalent.

ie: if I need a new computer I just buy it and attach the receipt to the bank statement tracked by my accounting software and my accountant takes care of the rest, versus having togo through some procurement process involving making a business case for my purchase, filling in the expense report, getting that report signed by a manager, etc.

For me personally it was a huge drop in stress. I absolutely hated having bosses promise unrealistic deadlines and then crank up the pressure on the team when we flew passed promised deadlines.

Now the only person who makes promises is me.

you underestimate the burden of 9-5 though. time is more precious than money, and its not like you cant have both

I'd say it depends on the 9-5. I've worked enough terrible jobs to know they can definitely destroy your happiness but found a few good ones that make me happy to come into work every day.

For some people the tradeoff of going solo is worth it and good for them. But I read the OP's post and wait, I have to study contracts for XYZ? I'd rather just go to work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com