Comment by zboox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zboox | Hacker News Reader

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As stated before, I find freelancing to be a lonely experience. Not a lot of developers to talk shop to, and rarely do clients follow-up with additional work or referrals.

I finish work for clients as I get paid, and usually never hear from them again.

I've interviewed at larger companies trying to expand my career into being a senior among more developers but they seem to think I don't fit the bill, yet never tell me what I need to do to improve.

Lots of other small startups contacting me all the time trying to convince me to do a lateral move, but what's the point, I will just be the only in-house dev, stuck and stagnant again.

TBH I find freelance career maintenance to be laborious. It's just not right for me. I would rather move into a low maintenance software job rather than the high maintenance world of startups and freelance. It's so easy for me to lose my grip in freelance- I barely make enough money to stay above poverty level (I live in the US so I'm referring to US poverty).

At the very least I want to experience both full-time and freelance to an equal degree. Right now my experience is like 5% full-time and 95% freelance, so trying to shift my time spent on both closer to 50/50.

That depends entirely on how you freelance. I join teams. My current project, for a major Dutch bank, started with me developing the prototype, and later interviewing a bunch of people (internal and external) to join the team that I'm still part of.

At other projects, I was hired to add some external expertise to an existing team. But it's mostly long projects in teams.

But before I ended up in these sort of big projects, I went to a lot of local meetups to keep in touch with other freelancers. That can also be a great source of a network, although that never amounted to much for me.

> "Lots of other small startups contacting me all the time trying to convince me to do a lateral move, but what's the point, I will just be the only in-house dev, stuck and stagnant again."

It can be a great way to prove to the companies you actually want to get hired by, that you can work in a company as part of a team.

From the description it sounds more like you are contracting, not freelancing?

A contractor is typically on site, or sells his time (and presence), meaning he has one client at a time.

A freelancer to me works on projects, and will take on multiple clients at the same time.

A freelancer is usually an independent contractor, so they're a subset of contractors.

You get a certain kind of freedom with freelancing but it does get tiring to chase people down for your money.

Doesn't really have the "team" feel when the rest of your team is offshore. Large time zone differences make synchronous communication difficult.

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