[lelanthran]

I'm a one-man shop, and it's been pretty hard.

Best work coming my way is always from non-tech companies. Companies whose core skills include tech pay very poorly, ask for a lot and come with the downside that youll be working on their current stack, so you get no choice over what tech to use

[ciguy]

That's interesting to hear. I would have expected tech companies to come with more reasonable expectations/pay and better defined requirements. Best of luck to you and I hope things turn around soon.

[lelanthran]

The tech companies are more in tune with market rates on freelancing sites than non-tech companies, so they say "we need golang, postgres, Aws and some JavaScript" and they know what that costs.

The non-tech companies say "we have this problem we'd like solved". They aren't going to limit to market rates because your cost in their eyes is a percentage of the profit that results when you solve their problem.

When they look at your cost they look at it in terms of their business. When a tech company looks at your cost they compare it to the cheapest reliable person they can find on freelancing sites, typically between $30 and $50 per hour.

[marpstar]

On greenfield projects, even at the Fortune 500 level, there is almost always a greater concern about execution than stack. Especially for smaller projects. They care about results, not fine details behind the means of getting them.

[hn_20591249]

Should a one person developer shop be bringing their own stack to a client? Seems like a problem once you inevitably roll off the project.

[lelanthran]

This probably comes as a surprise to most people, but the clear majority of non-tech businesses don't have a stack because they don't have devs.

What they have is an immediate need for something, so it doesn't matter which stack is chosen.

In many cases they may say "can you fix this app the other contractor built", and then you will be using that stack only as far as that particular enhancement or fix.

They don't have git, or Jira, or ticketing systems, or code review or any of that.

[gnz11]

It can happen in "techy" companies too, especially if they are heavily siloed. I've witnessed plenty of times when a department goes off on their own and brings in a solo contractor/small shop to create some random thing. Eventually it lands in the lap of the engineering teams who have to deal with the mess.

[wak90]

I'd like to pick up some freelance side work, do you have any recommendations? Websites to use etc? The few I've found for gig work has abysmally paying jobs for what I do.

[lelanthran]

> I'd like to pick up some freelance side work, do you have any recommendations? Websites to use etc? The few I've found for gig work has abysmally paying jobs for what I do.

All the work I am doing is for either people I've worked for before, or friends of those people.

I've looked at a few of the gig sites, but I am not prepared to take on tiny 1day work at $30/hour, and that is unfortunately the majority of the things I saw on those sites.

The best work to get is from non-tech companies; tech companies want lines of code delivered, non-tech companies want business value delivered. Guess which one is prepared to pay more for the same number of lines of code ...

[marpstar]

At that point it's not his problem unless they're paying him for it to be.

I've had clients specifically ask for certain platforms (WordPress, Shopify, etc) but still assemble my own solutions regularly when it'll make me more productive up front.

[gnz11]

Yup, it will be a problem for the poor sap(s) that will eventually be tasked with unraveling the layers of plop added by contractor after contractor. I don't fault the contractors necessarily but the companies that provide zero guidance or oversight. Source: have been that sap many times in my career.

[lelanthran]

I've upvoted you because I agree, broadly, with what you say.

The thing is, for many small to medium companies, they don't have a dev team in house. It doesn't make financial sense.

What sort of guidance do you expect the CTO to provide when his main technical capabilities is ensuring that procurement gets the correct spec laptops for employees, that the correct permissions are set for new employees on the microsoft accounts, that Teams works for everybody, that the support staff go on appropriate training for the software they use, that there is a migration strategy for the next version of Windows ...

That sort of person is not, and is not expected to be, qualified to code-review your PRs.

Even if they know how to use git, they won't have a git repo set up, and even if they somehow managed to do that, they won't have a clue how to use Jira or similar correctly, and even if they do know, they still won't be able to code-review properly.

This is why they'll pay more than what a tech company would - you'll be bringing more value to them, and they'll be trusting you much more than the average FAANG trusts their senior engineers.

[moneywoes]

may I ask how you find these companies?