[mcv]

My experience is somewhat the opposite. I work as a freelancer, and I've gotten practically all my projects through recruiters. I've heard of a few other freelancers doing their own networking directly with hiring managers, and if that works, that's absolutely great, because you cut out the middleman who takes a piece out of your rate.

Maybe I'm really bad at networking. I've spoken to plenty of colleagues, go to conferences and meetups, etc, but none of that has ever resulted in an interesting position for me.

Even so, I'm not unhappy with my compensation at all. As a freelancer, at least. Employed programmers seem to be severely underpaid. A year ago, during Covid, a freelance contract ended, and couldn't be extended because of rules, but I didn't want to leave that project yet, so I joined the client as an employee. I had to accept a serious pay cut for that, though, and no matter how much I argued that I had proven I was worth a lot more than that, I couldn't get them to budge at all. I'm currently back to freelancing again. At a very interesting project, at a higher rate than before, again through an intermediary recruiter. I can't seem to get rid of them.