@thr2178008 Hey there. I'll give you a proven roadmap to six figure freelancing right now.
1) Pick a new up and coming language or framework. Something like elixir or pheonix or something else that is really hot and just starting out.
2) Learn it. As you learn, write a series of really awesome tutorials and articles on your blog about that stack.
3) Help people out on SO and other forums that talk about that tech. Point folks to your posts if it looks like it might help. Add your blog to your profile page.
4) Try to guest on some podcasts about this same technology, or maybe even create your own podcast.
5) Keep doing steps 1-4 with constancy and over time your luck surface area will grow and new opportunities will come your way.
When you start contracting in that tech you'll be able to charge much better rates than your old rate because you will be a thought leader in that space.
Also, you will be able to capitalize on sites like airpair.com
This also works for hot technologies, not just frameworks / languages.
WebRTC has seen phenomenal adoption in the past few years, as businesses can offload media bandwidth from their centralized servers. Making that cost savings case part of your pitch makes for a compelling offering. You can even leverage third-party solutions such as Twilio and even FB Live to build customer service live help desks.
Right now I'd say with AR / VR gaining momentum there is tremendous opportunity for skilled Unity3D / WebGL people. Definitely more involved than learning React, but can also be much more rewarding. I'd even go so far as to bet these skills will be a bigger draw than AI / ML / Data Sciences in the near term. Good Luck!
Startups might be willing to take this risk - if the new technology shortens the time to launch, then all the better. If it finds itself locked in 5 years down the line, who cares, it's 5 years later and they're a 100 million dollar company.
The same roadmap will work for even old but required technologies.
I am mostly into scraping and automation tools. Whatever I learnt; for instance Scrapy, Beautifulsoup etc I wrote about it on my blog as well as on medium based publications. It helped me to earn some good contracts and gigs. DO remember I did not follow 3-5 yet otherwise It was going to be more awesome for me.
To a certain extent I agree, only in some respects I'm the opposite regarding point 1. I still work exclusively on Ruby on Rails projects (on the backend, frontend is trending towards Vue.js usage now), and that's actually proven quite successful lately. Clients that aren't super tech-savvy don't really care what I'm using as long as it works and I can get it done in a speedy fashion (which I can because I know Rails like the back of my hand), and the tech-savvy clients that come to me do so because they have an existing Rails codebase that needs upgrades, enhancements, etc. I can't tell you how many times I've heard "man, I'm so glad I found you...it's hard to find any Ruby programmers!" Makes me wonder if the death of Ruby as a career path is greatly exaggerated...
Agreed and this is probably true for most "legacy" languages - for example there is still very much a market for COBOL, REXX, etc and it does pay well. However the flip side is that the size of the niche market gets smaller over time.
I don't think you're asking the right question, though. 100k+ USD/yr in some parts of the country is a lot different than 100k+ USD/yr in other parts. The really smart ones have found jobs in metro areas that pay lots, but work remotely from areas with low cost of living expenses, and put all the extra away into college funds for their kids and Roth 401k's invested in high risk, low-load index funds, with a significant amount invested.
And most of all, they ask for it. Once they get it, they don't piss people off, they do great work, and they get references.
I mostly do Perl stuff and get £400-500 day rate easily even though I'm far from a Perl expert (and, indeed, I loathe and despise the language nowadays.)
There's a few (senior) Go contracts starting to appear in London (at £500+/day) that I'm hoping signify the start of a trend.
Depends who you work for. A solid LinkedIn plus the subscription option, with stints in the big 5 and some solution architect experience gets you some decent money.
Similarly, if you can pick up the (relatively) obscure FinTech stuff (kdb+, Vertica, M/Mumps/Caché, etc.), that's a definite ticket to decent money and job security.
Silicon Valley is fairly unique, and not remotely comparable to the rest of the world. In most of Europe, a senior dev makes less than that. Freelancers are a bit more likely to make more.
Sure, but that's cost of living. $100k/yr is needed in Silicon Valley just to cover your portion of rent for the above-garage apartment you share with 8 other people.
Jeez. I'm a senior front end developer in Western Australia, on 70k. Build Fintech systems... It would be interesting to compare the costs of living etc to see how salaries over there compares to here.
I do integration between Brazillian mobile carriers and international Apps (content providers in general) who wants to get into Brazilian market, usually to bill users on their mobile plan instead of paypal or inApp Purchase. The funnil gap is much lower when you Bill users in mobile plan.
Brazilian carrier has a tough and slow integration process and, without a local IT support is almost impossible to connect with them.
As I have everything ready for all major carriers, it's easier/faster/cheaper to hire me instead of build the integration by itself.
First you need to get a job in some telco company and work on related projects. That knowledge is not available on github or books. Actually it is the same with other high-pay integration areas like finances, banking, logistics etc. Once you gain some expertise and see a niche you start freelancing.
Dealing with mobile carriers is really hard - their tech stacks are awful and outdated and they see everything as a threat and try to protect their turf by any means.
Source: I'm trying to launch an MVNO and struggling to find a host MNO/carrier.
This is hands down the best book I read about node. As long as you're already comfortable with JS, this should be more than enough to have you write your own Node apps. Best thing about it: it doesn't limit your to writing node servers like most other intro books. You start seeing node as JS removed away from the browser to a standalone language and not just a way to write javascript web servers.
When I went through it, it was all in es5. So, like I said, if you're comfortable with JS - this shouldn't be a turn-off
What exactly counts to count as 6-figure? My hourly rate is €80. Working 32 hours per week, 45 weeks per year, my yearly revenue would just be 6 figures. Of course after I deduct some costs and retirement savings, my taxable income is in the high 5 figures.
I'm not doing anything special, other than having 15 years of experience and not being terribly bad at my job. I do notice that to get more than this, I need to make a bit more of a name for myself. Just being a good programmer is probably not enough; it seems I need to bring something special and specific to the table to justify a higher rate.
Really nice schedule. I think the thread is about scores. Once debt free I would prefer to get more private time than trashing my life for 6 figures in somebody's sweat shop projects - the more than I can eat.
1. Experience: After a while doing what you're doing, you are an experienced developer/freelancer. You hit the ground running, you mentor, you contribute enough to justify your high day rate.
2. Go into Finance. Specifically banks. They hire contractors all the time. The work is terrible, the challenge is mostly dealing with the restrictions of the systems around you and the bureaucracy that envelopes everything there, but to counter that they pay well above market rates. In fact they pay silly rates. I did that for a little while and decided my soul is worth more.
The contract market is a funny one. Can be hard to find gigs one month, and have too many to choose from the next. But in general, going above 6 digits contracting is not that hard. Keep in mind that you have to manage your own taxes, so a good accountant is key.
Front-end JS for the oil-and-gas industry. Custom, industry-specific customer-facing web applications. Interesting work, but the business logic required by some companies is freakin' terrifying :)
Front-end JS? Need, mainly. Most of the UI/UX people I worked with have not maintained their skills, and I was getting tired of knowing more and doing better work than them in their own field. As it happens, there's a much better market for that work than for the back-end and architectural work I've been doing the past couple of decades.
Oil-and-gas? Luck - I live in a city with a lot of head offices. Eventually almost everyone works for one of them :) It was just my turn. But it looks like a long-term gig, which is great.
Friend of a friend situation - a guy I worked with at another company had a friend who we game with once in a while (board games and miniatures games), and she works for this company. She let me know they had an opportunity and I made the cut :)
They're service applications for O&G companies to help with government regulation compliance, ISO auditing, and well performance, among other things. There are a lot of automated and manual processes that have to be dealt with by the various applications (including some old-fashioned straight-up data entry from graphs made by on-site equipment that get couriered to the office into spreadsheets that get imported).
Some of these are pretty large companies, and they want their tools (even 3rd-party ones) to work certain ways, so some of the workflow logic in the various applications we provide gets pretty hairy. It's impossible to avoid customizing things for some of these clients without losing them.
I was brought on to do a code-review of the newest (unreleased) version of their flagship product. The overseas developers didn't read the spec and management didn't bother enforcing it (hell, they barely bothered to plan it). 2 years of development wasted and it literally doesn't meet a single business need yet. My job then became to lead the rebuild of the front-end and work with the back-end team to make everything awesome again. I get to do proper planning, some nice enterprise architecture and deployment planning, some really cool front-end coding (Angular), and bring some modern (and even current) development practices and tools into a traditionally stodgy corporate development environment :) All with the full blessing and support of the technical lead :D
The obvious answer is to specialise. The problem is how?
There seem to be two options:
1. Become an expert in a rare, rising tech stack (see elixir/phoenix)
2. Specialise in a market vertical
On hn and as a dev Option 1) is very appealing. And just a matter of time and keep doing it.
Many (smart) folks, however, tell you that 2) is the better bet long term and financially. Which makes sense because you shift from providing technical solutions to delivering business results. But it is much harder to get into (which long term turns into an advantage because you build barriers)
I would love to go route 2) but never actually went anywhere. But I didn't do 1) either because I'm stuck between those two. It's quite frustrating actually.
Congrats! I think you are the perfect person to give some feedback on a product I want to validate and build. If you have the time, please let me know what you think of this.
The product is a personalized Facebook app created for the ecommerce that aims to increase the number of emails collected for the ecommerce's newsletter and increase traffic from these newsletters by sending Facebook notifications to the users that signed up to the app.
Basically I create a Facebook App and provide the sign-up link to the ecommerce. The ecommerce adds the link next to the "Sign up to our newsletter" CTA they usually have on their website giving the user two options to provide their email: the regular input field and the link to do it via Facebook (this is not a Facebook Login btw).
If the client click the link, they are directed to Facebook's authorization page, one more click I have the access to their email and the ability to send them notification (only if the user is accessing Facebook on the web, as FB do not send app notifications to native mobile apps).
I then send the user's email to the ecommerce and send FB notifications everytime they send a newsletter (linking to the web version of the newsletter).
Does contracting count as freelancing? Serious question.
Or do you mean freelances as only in gigster/upwork sense?
As a contractor I am technically working via my one man company but mostly work in a company office alongside other employees, so not sure if you count that as freelancing.
I'm in UK. You should be an employee if you work in a single company for 2+ years. Contractors often only work in 6-12 month contracts so you are not definitely an employee if you only come to work on a project for 6 months and then go work somewhere else.
2. Work in corporate development for large, medium, and small companies, startups, etc. for 20 years.
3. Keep skills sharp, keep investing in new opportunities.
4. Learn project management.
5. Dress up (in a suit, etc.)
6. Find people who want work done.
7. Figure out what they want to be done, how long it will take to do it, and how much is reasonable to charge for that.
8. Ship it.
8. Send invoices.
9. Cash very large checks.
Technology lets people who are very good with tools, make amazing things all by ourselves in the same time or less than a team of people who are average with tools in a cube farm.
I guess a simpler version of this would be:
1. Get very good at tools.
2. Get people who believe you can deliver.
3. Deliver.
4. Invoice.
If you do it right, you'll be time- and price-competitive with much larger, slower, and more-expensive entities, and nobody will care because you're still delivering. It's a time of great opportunity.
110K at 21 yrs old in the UK contracting, hoping to reach 150k by this time next year - I help big companies figure out how to embrace new technologies
Six figures is a pretty useless distinction these days. It's like how every homeowner is technically a millionaire. The term sticks though.
In any case, freelancer is a vague term. Working on smaller, ad-hoc tasks it is probably harder to make a big payday, but working longer contracts (also called a contractor) can pay very well.
Yeah, a bit hyperbole. The point though, is that being a millionaire isn't as impressive as it used to be 50 years ago, but we still use the term to signify someone incredibly wealthy.
What sort of level would you say you were at with regards to your js knowledge, and how long have you been working with it?
I'm still pretty green and living up north, but looking to the future, I could see me having to move to get a decent salary, just wondering how feasible it may be.
I was hired as a senior contractor. I work with JS for about 5 years, 3 years as primary language. All of it professionally.
I think it's totally feasible. I moved here when I was 19 with the salary between 30-40k. 3 years later, I am doing something I always wanted for a great amount of money. I think without these two rules I wouldn't make it:
- Invest in knowledge
- Don't put your age on CV
Seems like everyone's interpreting 6-figures in whatever currency they use, so here are the exchange rates, using USD for conversion since that's easier:
That's also not too accurate as living expenses and taxation differ radically across those countries. Some of those countries you might pay 35-40% tax from your 100k salary, some of them 12% or less.
Yes and there are a lot of other factors like healthcare, education (if you have kids) etc. For a healthy young single person a country with very low taxes such as Singapore might be the best choice. For somebody older who is married with kids Germany would be better (taxes are high but you get a lot of value back for the money you to in like cheap/free education).
1) Pick a new up and coming language or framework. Something like elixir or pheonix or something else that is really hot and just starting out.
2) Learn it. As you learn, write a series of really awesome tutorials and articles on your blog about that stack.
3) Help people out on SO and other forums that talk about that tech. Point folks to your posts if it looks like it might help. Add your blog to your profile page.
4) Try to guest on some podcasts about this same technology, or maybe even create your own podcast.
5) Keep doing steps 1-4 with constancy and over time your luck surface area will grow and new opportunities will come your way.
When you start contracting in that tech you'll be able to charge much better rates than your old rate because you will be a thought leader in that space.
Also, you will be able to capitalize on sites like airpair.com
Hope this helps!