Yo ho, yo ho, a freelancer’s life for me

It has been quite a while since I posted anything. Lots of things going on and finding time to blog and the desire to blog has been hard.

After 2 years working for a company, I am back to Ruby on Rails freelancing. Why choose freelancing? Aren’t regular jobs more secure and stable? There are lots of remote job? Why???

Well, to answer the issue of stability, I have to say that there is not anything in life that is stable, least of which companies. Startups start and end. Intel just cut 12,000 jobs. Companies are down sized, resized, bought and sold, so no, no job is secure and stable.

My long time client is a remote gig but as a freelancer. I have worked remotely for a company before. There are lots of Rails (and other programming languages) jobs for remote workers. Probably due to what I was looking for I found that companies that I liked, did not want me and the ones that I wasn’t too excited about did.

I also looked at the available company jobs in the Phoenix area and honestly only saw a couple that seemed like a cool place to work and had something cool to work on.

So freelance it is. While I wish that there was a place that programmers could go to to find projects to work on, there is not. Now, I know that there are freelance developer sites out there. If you are ok with bidding low and earning low, go for it. The competition is crazy and you are competing with developers all over the world. This includes countries with a much much lower cost of living, hence they can afford to bid low.

How do you find work? Networking, networking and networking. Tell people that you know what you are doing. Go to developer meetups. Meet people and spread the word that you are a freelance developer! Of course there is a lot more to it than that but that is the basics, imho.

from Planet GS via John Jason Fallows on Inoreader http://ift.tt/26std8T
Bob Roberts