• (nodebb)

    Um. Lots of people do freelance something, therefore freelance programming is hot? Does not compute. See, I doubt very much that there are 55 million people in America doing programming, much less freelance programming. (And no, I am not talking about secretaries recording Excel macros. I mean the activity we think of when we say "programming", that is, nerds in dungeons(1).)

    (1) Before you start: I count myself in this category.

  • Sole Purpose Of Visit (unregistered)

    "As much as $1000 per hour..." Or in other words, the equivalent of those BuzzFeed click-baits. "You too can earn a bazillion an hour, just like ..."

    But more likely, $50 an hour tops. Working 6 months of the year. For an "agile" company that whips you like a red-headed step-child whilst you churn out reams of low-quality untested insta-legacy crap.

    Just call me cynical.

  • Sole Purpose Of Visit (unregistered)

    Oh, and "Think of yourself as a brand?" One of those marketroid cretinisms that actually "rings a bell."

    In too many of my contract gigs, I have indeed "thought of myself as a brand." Specifically, the "Lazy Z" or "Half circle K" sort of brand, if you know what I mean. Buttocks for hire!

    And I think, appropriately, I speak for most of my cow-orkers on this one.

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    this made me think of a website i found called "clientsfromhell.net" where freelancers complain about crazy and stupid clients. the most common complaint is NOT BEING PAID...

  • Alan (unregistered)

    "What’s more, this number is expected to go up to 40% by 2020, due in part to the higher pay, higher job satisfaction, increased flexibility, and litany of opportunities contract work provides."

    Don't blow smoke up my ass. "Due in part." How about "Due primarily to the collapse of traditional employment, leaving increasing numbers of Americans desperately scrambling from 'job' to 'job,' trying to make ends meet."

    "According to Bloomberg, companies are paying as much as $1,000 an hour for talented freelance developers (with the right skill set)."

    According to reality, no one on this site makes $1,000 an hour, nor will they. Quoting the extreme top tier is deceptive.

    "One way to stash all this cash away while working a full-time job is to take on occasional ‘moonlight’ projects — aka projects you can tackle in the 5pm-9am hours (when your bandwidth/schedule allows)."

    Assuming of course one's employment contract doesn't expressly forbid doing so. In which case, I guess it sucks to be you?

    I've nothing against freelancing, but this sort of happy marketdroid BS is insulting to your readers.

  • Derp (unregistered)

    This sort of shit is why nobody in the civilised world takes America seriously.

  • Dave (unregistered)

    "I've nothing against freelancing, but this sort of happy marketdroid BS is insulting to your readers."

    I can't agree more. Way to sell out, Daily WTF.

  • Reader (unregistered)

    obligatory XKCD :

    https://xkcd.com/1827/

    And yeah. 1000 / h . The highest I've seen a highly paid consultant get paid is 3000 / Day (and that is really, really expensive)

  • freemason (unregistered)

    Lovely how the images are out of proportion with mobile browser.

  • Jim B (unregistered)

    This is a little to (ahem) optimistic.

    The reason I got into software development is so I didn't have to be a sales person. Nothing against sales. I've been there, done that. Actually made really good money. But I hated the actual sales job.

    So now I'm supposed to go independent? Always be selling my work. No thanks.

    $1,000/hr = $2,080,00/yr (assuming 40 hours a week times 52 weeks). Nice work if you can get it.

  • operagost (unregistered) in reply to Derp

    "This sort of shit is why nobody in the civilised world takes America seriously."

    Fantastic rubbish comments like this sort is why nobody in the civilized world takes internet trolls seriously.

  • operagost (unregistered) in reply to Jim B

    The key to understanding the $1,000/hr (and mind you, I do believe that is an extreme edge case) is not being some naive infant who believes you're going to get 40 hours of that work a week. You might get a $2,500 gig that takes you only 2.5 hours to complete, but that also might be all the work you get that week.

    $1,000 is a windfall, and you should expect something an order of magnitude lower for your projects. But please, stop with the childish whining. If you want a "safe, secure job", then freelancing isn't for you.

  • Sole Purpose of VIsit (unregistered) in reply to operagost

    OK. That is theoretically possible. And it is certainly more plausible than 2000 hours at $1000 per.

    But let's try again, shall we? This is not political lobbying. This is not Ivy League Lawyering. This is (in the most general sense) IT.

    Now, tell me. Who, on an individual basis (not an IBM or Accenture or whatever "consultant") is going to be able to bill at $1,000 per hour?

    Nobody, that's who. And I don't care what "specialist skills" they bring to the table. This is just bull. And particularly for your instance of "might be" 2.5 hours.

    But we all have personal stories to similar effect. I, for example, was paid $15,000 on retainer for what turned out to be about five hours work, three phone calls, on third-line support for a legacy system. Bit of a shame it wasn't ten minutes, really, because then I could have put "Hourly rate: $90,000, but will work on a 90% discount for deserving corporations" on my resume.

    Point is, Hired are simply blowing gas through their rear end. You can be sustainably, and insanely, rich in other professions (say, representing murderous celebrities in court), but not in IT.

    Which is one of the joys of the field. You might not be able to sell your soul for money. You might not be able to parlay "skills" (temporary) into a putative $1000 per hour gravy train. But what you do get, when all goes right, is the satisfaction of being paid a very good wage in exchange for using your experience and your geeky talents.

    If Hired can't see this part of the job, then they ain't working for us. They're just snake-oil salespeeps, precisely like every other recruitment consultant business.

    Bloomberg quotes, pah.

  • Sole Purpose of VIsit (unregistered)

    At this point, Remy, you may just be sensing a certain amount of what we anti-marketroids describe as "Push-Back."

    Now, I don't wish to discourage you. I have enjoyed TDWTF for ten years or more. I appreciate that you need to take sponsorship, and I recognise that you may not necessarily be able to recognise greasy, nasty, useless, dingbat sponsors without, say, a three month probation period.

    So, on behalf (I hope) of your loyal readers, who love Puppet and BuildMaster and that card game and so on ... May I just ask two simple questions?

    1. Did it occur to the TDWTF team that a recruitment agency with a five-letter dot-com address might not, in all honesty, be anything other than a multi-million dollar corporate monstrosity? I mean, I have actually managed to get a seven-letter dot-co-dot-uk domain name for one of my clients. But even that was a pain in the patootie.

    2. Where did the cornification go? Nothing says "I am being brutally honest here. I truly believe in our sponsors" like a liberal dose of pink unicorns and sparkly angels.

  • Unregistered (unregistered)

    Ok. As I am actually looking for a job I signed up with Hired...

    A) I have gotten 0 (zero) matches from them B) Since I signed up I have gotten an avalanche of spam on the e-mail I used to sign up.

    Conclusion: The site is a spam harvesting site..

    Do not sign up with them

  • Sole Purpose of VIsit (unregistered) in reply to Unregistered

    Wot no offers of $1000?

    I see your problem. You are not a fictional ex-employee of Google, are you?

    #BloombergClickbaitJobSpam

  • Wolf (unregistered)

    It's kind of like when you are stuck behind a semi truck on the way to work... And it has an advertisement of "our drivers make 50-60 cents a mile". And then you realize, you could be making more being a Truck Driver. ;)

  • (nodebb) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    I doubt very much that there are 55 million people in America doing programming, much less freelance programming.

    It doesn't say 55 million doing freelance programming; it says 55 million doing freelance work of any kind. This number apparently coming from the Freelancers' Union, which certainly sounds like it would be an unbiased source with no vested interest in inflating that number whatsoever. The number of those who are programmers is carefully not mentioned at all.

    The $1,000/hr figure comes from the Bloomberg article, where it is sourced to "a person who gets coders gigs", i.e. a recruiter. So you know instantly that that's false.

  • WonkoTheSane (unregistered) in reply to Sole Purpose Of Visit

    "But more likely, $50 an hour top"

    In the UK £50 an hour is about average for contract development work, With anything a little specialised you are easilly adding another £15-20 per hour to that.

    In $ terms Xe tells me thats an average of $64 and a high of $90

    Of course in the UK there are also some tax considerations - mainly that if we set up a limited company to contract through we can pay less tax than if we were just taking the money as a wage... so contracting/freelancing in the UK has become ridiculously popular... Which in itself is becoming a problem as supply can often outstrip demand - its hard to walk into a company and justify them paying you £10k plus VAT a month when they can get someone looking for their first contract that will take half of that (But their code will end up as a story on this site eventually!)

  • WonkoTheSane (unregistered) in reply to eric bloedow

    "this made me think of a website i found called "clientsfromhell.net" where freelancers complain about crazy and stupid clients. the most common complaint is NOT BEING PAID"

    Yeah, this depends - if you pick and choose your clients carefully and get contracts and Purchase orders up front then its not really an issue, Ive never had anything go unpaid for development work when Ive had contracts in place... work for friends is a different story - my brother in law owes me 3k from a few years ago (I know Ill never see this money now)

    There was a period where on a long term gig I didnt get paid for about 6 months due to an admin error - that was a bit of an interesting time... but all resolved and one massive payout at the end!

  • Brian (unregistered)

    "Jumpstart your career by joining Hired today!"

    Riiight. I posted an application on Hired months ago and have received zero communication from them since. Apparently I'm just not one of the cool kids. At least sites like Dice or CareerBuilder generate actual calls from headhunters, even if none of those calls has yet resulted in the kind of job that I'm looking for.

  • eric bloedow (unregistered) in reply to WonkoTheSane

    "never work for friends" is another common phrase on "clients from hell". heck, there's one story where his own MOTHER wanted him to blatantly copy her competitor's website..."just change the colors and nobody will notice".

  • Ross (unregistered)

    TL;DR. Boring. Not a WTF. Not interesting to me. Not why I read the site. Not even sure why I entered this comment on such a useless post.

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