[zboox]

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.

[mcv]

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.

[ramblerman]

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.

[zboox]

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.

[zboox]

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