This was my first freelancer project. Just dropped out of school, i think i was 17. No money, no proper hardware, i had a very old laptop & stolen wifi from our neighbor. I lived in a very small room at my mom’s flat, she wanted me out as soon as i turn 18. At the time my plan was to work on freelancer stuff and make my own games. “It will be fine, fuck school, who needs school? 😂“ I haven’t really finished anything back then, so i only had a few wip hobby projects to show ppl as my references. I saw a freelancer job posting. The task was to make a simple quiz game for mobile, it paid 350$. Back then that was a lot of money for me so i took it. I met the client, he said “2-3 week tops, i send you everything, you do the code” Cool. I finally had a “job”😃. The 2-3 weeks turned into a 8 month blur of all-nighting and just implement one more thing and its finished. I did not really have any experience on how to deal with clients and i really needed this project to finally have something on my porfolio. I motivated myself with “if i can finish this i can finish anything”. I think the story of my most definitive all-nighting was 3 months into the development. I finally got everything from the client so it was like just put it together and its done. The client wanted 300 levels, beeing a noob i was i started making all the 300 unity scenes by hand, aligning the pictures, the ui, testing each level, making adjustments to the code, etc.. after a really long night and a fuckton of caffeine i was done. I sent it to the client at around 9 am and gone to sleep. When i woke up i checked my emails to saw this: Cool! But can we do hints? (wich needed a fuckton of rework of my code) I think i had my first mental breakdown while working on the project. After that he wanted more modifications and because i made every level by hand i had to remake all of them like 10 times 😂
But in the end it turned out positive, he really helped me to start my carrier, we became sord of friends and the project gave me a lot of confidence and experience on how to deal with stuff when shit goes wrong because everything that can go wrong in a project gone wrong. It was the most valuable developer lesson. Plus it sounds so cool to say “i was born in development hell, b*tch!”🕶
I attached a pic of the laptop i worked on 😂
Thanks for reading 😃

Me : Here is your website. So, when can I expect my pay.😊
Client (wants to skip the pay ) : Site is not loading first fix this we can discuss later.
Me : Please conncet to internet and reload. 😒😎

Truestory 🍻

Freelance programmers

>22 year old college student
>Apply for a QA internship
>Interview goes well,they see I have plenty of experience and doubt it's real
>Hard questions are thrown
>Answer them and they admit the position is for manual testing

I honestly don't care I need the money, plus manual testing doesn't usually strain me.

>A week goes by
>A month goes by
>Call them
>...Sorry we were looking for someone with less technical and dev experience.

My fucking face when I don't have a title, still overqualified, fighting with WordPress devs on freelancer.

Non-dev friend : hey I've got a cool idea, we'll create a site where people can post jobs and people can bid for it. We'll name it freelance.com. We gon be rich!!!!..

Me: okay....

Friend: so you in?

Me: No.

Friend: It's really easy, just build it like you built that website you did the other day (talking a landing page he saw me do in a week). In 2 weeks, we'll be millionaires. You'll do all the programming stuff, so you get 30% of the money, I'm the idea guy so I get the other 70%. About that, you in now?

Me: have you heard of odesk, freelancer, jobberman.

Friend: no... Does a freelance site exist.

Me: boy, it's 2016.

Friend: I just thought of it few minutes ago and my other friends thought it was a great idea.

Me: 🙈🙈🙈🙈😶🔫🔫🔫

This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.

Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.

I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.

The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).

Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.

He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.

After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".

I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.

So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.

I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.

And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.

And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).

I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.

I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.

With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!

I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!

If you are a freelancer don't trust the client.

NEVER!

So far this basically describes my experience as a freelancer.

Problems of Freelancer

Freelancer: Hey your app is​ ready.
Client : Can you add this ?
Freelancer: Sure, When am I getting payment.
Client: As soon as this gets done.

Next Day...

Freelancer: Hey your app is​ ready.
Client : Thanks. This looks good if there is this feature. Can you help me with that?
Freelancer: Sure, When am I getting payment.
Client: As soon as this gets done

Next Day..
Client : Blah Blah Blah
Freelancer: Sure, When am I getting payment

Frustration at peaks!!!

*creates a freelancer account on some website.
*builds portfolio and gets things running.
*meets his first client.

Client: Hello. so your profile says you are an experienced full stack developer. You are just the kind of person i've been looking for.

Me: Yep.

Client: Okay I have a project for you. I am looking at developing a simple website that has a few functions and the budget is 100$.

Me: Okay smooth. Hit me with the descriptions.

Client: it's going to be a dating website. Once a user signs up; the website would automatically take control of the user's media devices in his/her home; automatically playing something romantic. You get me?

Me: Em... Idk about that it seems a bit...

Client: it can be done! Develop the algorithm.

Me: Em... Ok.

Client: Well, next the website uses some complex sorting algorithm and sorts existing members based on their past real life relationships. It puts the best people above the messy ones.

Me: o.0

*client goes on with his bullshit in like another 10 lines of messages.

Me: -_-

Client: so what do you think? How soon can you begin and how soon can we be done?

Me: Do you also want a "butt scratcher" feature? Like a hand pops out of the monitor and asks to scratch the user's anus?

*client leaves the chat.

Me: Oh. I guess he a thing against family guy.

I'm a freelancer, what about you

So, basically i am getting desperate, and i'm also angry... and want to cry, and i feel a failure.
My biggest error in this story is "believing"

First of all, I'm a starting entrepreneur as freelancer, started of 6 months ago, back then it all seemed bright, i had my first customer, they believed me, got a second assignment for that same customer, fulfilled the task in brilliance, and was ready to move on to a bigger customer base. Here's where shit goes wrong.

Working with another office that outsources people to various (goverment) contractors, Had a meeting with them, we would cooperate very soon. This was january.

PM: "We've got a gov Dept as a customer that wants to do project XYZ and starting in february, requirements are yadiyadiyadi, you up for it?
Me:"Sure, send me the specs, and timeframe and i'll apply with my offer)"
Project is about a bit backup system migration, lots of fancy shmancy tech used, 2 datacenters setup... a big project that can take up several months...
- sends offer- received an acceptance on the offer

PM " Great, we'll start end of february"
Me: "Ok, end of february is a go then, looking forward to cooperate"

FF to near end of february, receive msg from PM: "Project XYZ delayed until half if march"
Me: "Okay... what is the delay?"
PM:"Govt bureaucracy"
Me " Ok, let's keep in touch"

Near Half of March
PM " Project delayed again".
Me: " Okay... what's the reason?"
PM: "they have decided to take a different approach, and want 3 datacenters now"
Me: "That will change the offer i made for you, can you send me the specs?"
PM: "No, because they havent decided on the techs used, expect end of march"
Me: "Okay...but once you got the specs,s end them to me"

End of March
Pm: " Hy NeatNerdPrime, we still havent got any specs yet... they still forgot to make the shopping list"
Me: "(-_-) ... I thought they already had that covered"
PM:" No, new Govt budget cuts and lots of changes, basically, they still don't know what they really want. But we're just -delayed- , not -cancelled-"
Me: "Okay... i hope we get started soon"
PM: "expect launch beginning of april"
I was not really satisfied with this explanation.... but ok

Beginning of april, at april's folls day
PM "Project delayed again"
Me: " This is a joke right?"
PM: "Sadly, no, they delayed the project since they don't really know what they actually want, we are trying to give them the proposed solution... but they still need approval, and still need to set up shopping list"
Me:"when do we start then?"
PM: " I was told 17th of april'
Me:" I really hope it gets through, i had to decline some proposals for work for months due to this, this ain't funny"
PM: "I know, i'll make up for it"

15th of april...
PM " Project delayed again"
Me right now almost losing my shit
"why this time??? I thought you said 17th of april real launch!"
PM: "they fired their PM, need to hire a new one, delayed until May/June"
Me: "I've set aside some other assignments just because you said you were going to launch at those dates... This is really pushing my limits, can you give me SOME assurances?"
PM: "5th of june would be official go" Me: " Okay, i'm noting 5th of june in my agenda, let's get this through!"

And now i get a message...stating that the date of 5th of june , is for another project, at the same goct dept, but totally different project

WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT I'VE SPENT MONTHS WAITING FOR A PROJECT THAT WAS PRACTICALLY ALL SET AND GO AND EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED, EVERY FUCKING TIME I THINK "you know, i cannot accept these offers since that Govt project will start soon, i cannot do 2 assignments at once especially when they require me to work at govt office at the capital..." AND EVERY FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED!!!

I feel at a loss now..... i've done i think the most horrible thing you can do as a independent and that's not accepting another assignment just because there was a concrete promise for a govt contract...

Almost dried up, nothing much left, had to do some spending because of a move to another apartment... I'm feeling really down, and angry...and down, but mostly angry, for not accepting those offers in the meantime...

Freelancing be like

Agency: "Why don't you do more free work for us? When you do that we can give you better jobs for money?"

Me: "so if I do free work for you, I get to do paid work as a reward? ..you know that I am a freelancer, not your employee, don't you?"

*agencysulking*

An intern I was supposed to lead (as an intern) and work with. Which sounded kinda crazy to me, but also fun so I rolled with it. But when I met her I quickly found out she didn't even have a coding editor installed and when I advised one she was "scared of virusses". She had Microsoft Edge in her toolbar, and some picture of a cat as a background. We were given some project by our boss, and a freelance programmer helped us set it up on Trello. Great, lets start! Oke maybe first some R&D, she had to reaeach how to use the Twilio API. After catching her on WhatsApp a few times I realised this wasnt gonna go anywere. After a few weeks of coding and posting a initial project to git I asked her if she could show me the code of the API she made so far..

She told me she was using the quickstart guide (the last 3 FUCKING weeks) which contained some test project with specific use cases.

The one that I did 3 weeks ago that same fucking morning.

AND SHE WAS STILL NOT DONE...

A few days later I asked her about the progress (strangly, I wasn't allowed ti give her another task bcs the freelanc already did) and guess what... She got fking pissed at me

Her: "I will come to you when im done, ok?"
Me: "I just want to see how it is going so far and if you are running into any problems!"
Her: "I dont want to show you right now"

She then goes to my fucking boss to tell him I am bothering her.

And omg... Please dear god please kill me now...

Instead of him saying the she probably didn't do shit. He says to me that the girl thinks im looking down on her and she needs a stress free environment to work in. She will show me when its done. ITS A FUCKING QUICKSTART GUIDE YOU DUMB BITCH.

He then procceeded to whine to me about the email template (another project I do at the same time) which didn't look perfect in all of his clients.

Dont they understand that I am not a frontend developer? Can you stop please? I know nothing about email templates, I told you this!!!

Really... the whole fucking internship the only thing the girl did was ask people if they want more tea. Then she starts cleaning the windows, talk to people for an hour, or clean everyone's dask.

all this while I already made 50% of the fucking product and she just finished the quickstart tutorial 😭. Truly 2 months wasted, and the worse thing is I didn't get any apprication. They constantly blamed me and whined at me. Sometimes for being 3 minutes late, the other for smoking too much, or because I drink to much coffee, or that I dont eat healthy. They even forced me to play Ping Pong. While im just trying to do my job. One of the worst things they got mad at me for if when my laptop got hacked bcs it was infected with some virus. He had remote access and bought 5 iPhones 6's with my paypal while I was on break. I had to go home and quickly reset all my passwords and make sure the iPhones wouldnt get delivered. strange this was, this laptop I only used at the company. So it must have been software I had to download there. Probably phpstorm (torrent). Bcs nobody would give me a license. And the freelancer said I * have to *.

the monday after I still had to reinstall windows so I called them and said I would be late. when I came they were so disrepectfull and didn't understand anything. It went a little like this:

Boss: why u late?
Me: had to reinstall my laptop, sorry.
Boss: why didnt you do this in your own time?
Me: well, I didn't have any time.
Boss: cant you do this in the weekend or something? Because now we have to pay you several hours bcs you downloaded something at home.

Me: I am only using this laptop for work so thats not possible.

Boss: how can that even be possible? You are not doing anything at home with your laptop? Is that why you never do anything at home?

Me: uhm, I have desktop computer you know. Its much faster. And I also need to rest sometimes. Areeb (freelancer) told me to torrent the software. He gave me the link. 2 days later this happends

Boss: Ahh okeee I see.. Well dont let it happen again.

After that nobody at the compamy trusted me with anything computer related. Yes it was my own fault I downloaded a virus but it can happen to anyone. After that I never used Windows again btw, also no more auto login apps.

Ok, so, to every pieces of shit out there that got a "revolutionary idea that will change the way we look at things" and who asks you to code it :

Fuck you, you sons of a cunt

No, i won't make your app on 3 different platforms for free, i'll make you pay for every platform you wanker, i'm a freelancer, i need money.

No, making database is not something that a little business cunt like you can handle, you don't even know what sql means

And fuck no, I won't make that shit in 2 weeks just because your peabrain thinks that it'll make mad dosh and that "It MusT bE eAsy to Do!!111", "a dating app but with a twist" won't work you gobeshit

If you want me to work on this shit, you give me money, specs and shit, you handle the rest, if it doesn't make money, it'll be your problem. I'm not your employee you wanker

Fuck y'all

HOOBA PORKRIND!!! PEEPEEENESS!!! HIAAAA!!

Client: hey are you home yet.
Me: no. I won't be for another hour.
Client: so who's logged into your PlayStation account?
Me: ....

Whenever the clients try to lowball my price.

When working as a freelancer

I thought there was no worse freelancer site than fiverr.

*insert "Boy you were wrong" here*

freelancer.com

No. Just No.

- Limited to 8 bids as a free account
- You get 1 bid back every 90 FUCKING HOURS
- CLIENTS ARE EVEN MORE RETARDED THAN ON FIVERR
- HALF OF PEOPLE WANT YOU TO SELL YOUR UPWORK ACCOUNT TO THEM
- 5€ FOR 2000 WORDS OF TRANSLATION? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING? END YOURSELF PLEASE
- "Design a custom social network (video chat, chat, forum, shop and payment gateway) quick!!!" for 100€, within one day.

What the fuck.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

I was going out with this really nice girl, funny, independent, with a knack for entrepreneurship... and eventually she found out I was a developer and she needed a freelancer... and that's how she became a client instead of a date.

Here is the equivalent of every single mid sized "php" project listed on freelancer now:

I'd like a custom designed electric car.
Budget: $750.

And in 1999:

I need a literal pile of dog poop.
Budget: $10,000

When I opened my digital agency it was me and my wife as developers, I had no savings and I needed to get long contracts ASAP which luckily I did straight away.

Lovely client, had worked for them before as a consultant so i thought it would be a breeze. Let's just say the project should've been named "Naivete, Scope Creep and Anger: The revenge".

What happened is that when this project was poised to end I naively thought I would be able to close the job, so I started looking for a new full time consultancy gig and found one where I could work from home, and agreed a starting date.

Well, the previous job didn't end because of flaws in my contract the client exploited, leaving me locked in and working full time, for free, for basically as long as he wanted (I learned a lot the hard way at that time) and I had already started the new agreed job. This meant I was now working 2 full time shifts, 16 hours per day.

Then, two support contracts of 2 hours per day were activated, bringing my work load to 20 hours/day.

I did this for 4 months.

The first job was supposed to last one month, and I was locked into it, all others had no end in sight which is a good thing as a freelancer, but not when you are locked into a full time one already. I could've easily done one 8 hours shift and two 2 hours jobs per day, but adding another 8 hours on top of it was insanity.

So I was working 10 hours, and sleeping 2. I had no weekends, didn't know if it was day or night anymore, I was locked in my room, coding like a mad man, making the best out of a terrible situation, but I was mentally destroyed.

I was waking up at 10am, working until 8pm, sleeping 2 hours until 10pm, working until 8am, sleeping 2 hours until 10am, and so on. Kudos to my wife for dealing with account and project management and administration responsibilities while also helping me with small pieces of code along the way, couldn't have survived without the massive amount of understanding she offered.

In the end:

- I forcefully closed the messed up contract job and sent all the work done to another digital agency I met along the way, very competent people, as I still cared about the project.

- I missed a deadline on my other full time contract by 2 days, meaning they missed a presentation for Adobe, of all people, and I lost the job

- The other two support contracts were finished successfully, but as my replies were taking too long they decided not to work with us anymore.

So I lost 4 important clients in the span of 4 months. After that I took a break of one month, slept my troubles away, and looked for a single consultancy full time contract, finding it soon after, and decided I wouldn't have my own clients for a good while.

3 years since then, I still don't have the willpower or the resources to deal with clients of my own and I'm happily trudging along as a consultant, while still having middle of the night nightmare flashbacks to that time.

It would be fun to answer "myself", but I'm a terrible boss.

As a freelancer you're also helpdesk, finance and marketing of your own little company, and I'm horrible at those things.

My current boss lets me boss myself within the company, while I still get to enjoy the luxuries of company life — completely shielded from annoying questions, with a stable predictable income.

I do believe that's the optimal structure: Hire people who can manage themselves, and have a drive to improve the company with minimal oversight.

Don't have true "bosses" at all, just some people who are good at bridging communication gaps between the islands of self-reliant teams.

Hesitated for a while before posting this, as I don't like to whine in public but this should be therapeutical

Beware, it's a #longread

Years ago, I thought about how cool it'd be to have conversation-based interactive fiction on my phone. I remember showing early prototypes to my ex in 2012. It took me over 2 years to build up the courage to make it my priority and to take time off. FictionBurgers.com was born.

A few weeks in, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to Lifeline. I was devastated. I literally spent 2 days cursing my past self for not making a move sooner.

I soldiered on, worked 7 months straight on it. Now the tech is 90-95% finished, content is maybe 60% finished and I just... gave up. Every other week now, similar projects are popping up. I'm under-staffed and under-financed compared to them. Beyond the entertainment space, "conversation-based" is hot stuff in 2016, and I still can't seem to know what to do with what I have.

I feel like I had this fantastic opportunity and squandered it, which makes me miserable.

Anyway, just so you get some cheese with my whine, here are a few lessons I learned the hard way:

Lesson #1 : Don't go it alone. I thought I could hack it, and for over 7 months, I did. But sooner or later, shit gets to you, it's just human. That's when you need someone; just so that their highs compensate your lows and vice versa. Most of the actual writing was done by a freelancer (and he did AMAZING WORK, especially considering that I couldn't pay him much) but it's not the same as a partner, who's invested same as you.

Lesson #1.5 : Complementary skills. Just like my fiction project failed because I was missing a writer partner, my fallback plan of getting into conversational tech hit the skids for lack of a bizdev partner. It's great to stick among devs when ranting, but you need to mingle with a variety of people. Some of them are actually ok, y'know :)

Lesson #2 : Lean Startup, MVP. Google those terms if you're not familiar with them. My mistake here (after MVPing the shit out of the tech) was to let my content goal run amok : what made my app superior to the competition (or so I reasoned) was that it would allow for conversations with multiple characters! So I started plotting a story... with 9 characters. Not 2 or 3. NINE FREAKING CHARACTERS! Branching conversations with 9 characters is the stuff of nightmare -- and is the main reason I gave up.

Lesson #3 : Know your reasons. I wasted some much time early on, zig-zaging between objectives:
"I'm just indulging myself"
"No, I really want it to be a project that pays off"
"Nah, it's just a learning opportunity"
"Damn, why is it bothering me so much that someone else is doing the same thing ?"
"Doesn't matter, I just mine finished"
"What a waste of time !!"
etc etc
And it's still a problem now that I'm trying to figure out what to do!

So anyway, that's my story, thanks for readin'
Check out chatty.im/player/sugar-wars if you want to test the most advance version.

Also, I've also tagged this #startupfail, if any of you fine people want to share the lessons you've dearly paid to learn!

Client: Hi there, we worked together I few months ago and loved what you created for us! We have another job and would like to see if you are available?

Me (1h later): Sure! Let me know more details about this new project.

Client (15min later): Oh, sorry, since you took so long to respond, we've decided to choose another freelancer. Thank you anyways!!

Me: ...

My brother made a PC game for his game dev class.

You are a hamster with a hammer
- acorns drop and u crack them for points
- you have to avoid rolling logs and eagles that swoop down
- the game gets faster

Dad: I just played the game, I think it has potential like Angry Birds, can you convert it to Android?

Me: no and no
Dad: why and why?
Me: **facepalm and takes a deep breath**

Explains why very simply and that I'm not a game dev... And if he thinks it's that good, go pay for a freelancer...

Freelancer got some really interesting project these days

Client (not for the first time): Your work sucks. I had to have this email formatting re-done before I sent it out.

Me: *sees that the email sent matches the work I did exactly with no changes*

Client (months later): I need you to do maintenance on my website.

Me: *does quick maintenance for free but sends update on status of work done and amount left in retainer agreement*

Client: You're too expensive! You started working with me for $X/hr, then you went up to $Y/hr and now you're all the way up to $Z/hr! You're not worth that!

Me: *fires client by refunding the remainder of retainer and sends client a list of local, cheaper providers*

Client: But now I don't have anyone to maintain my website until I find a new provider! Why have you done this to me? Waaaahhhhh!

Me (in the most professional language I can muster): Because you're a biotch and I'm tired of your verbal abuse. Maybe try not to be such a dbag to that next provider, mmm'kay?

Upwork:
"Hey freelancer, sorry we can't let you join this website made for freelancers like you as there are too many freelancers like you on this site made for freelancers like you"

I worked as a freelancer, with no formal jobs, from 2009 through 2016. But my situation wasn't the best one, I had to accept some underpaid jobs and was on the verge of going crazy with some pretty nasty clients too. Also, PHP was tiring. :(

Then I found out about a headhunting website and decided to give it a try. Filled some forms, did some tests and built a profile and a small CV, then kept doing my jobs.

Of course, since I didn't have formal training (I've a BA in advertising, not coder at all :P) I wasn't expecting much. Also, I'm self taught, and I feel I'm kinda mediocre at coding.

Despite that, in less than 2 weeks, I receive an e-mail calling for an interview. I asked for the interview to be as soon as possible, which was the NEXT day.

They also told me that, if possible, I should fork a repo and do a test that involved consuming JSON and building an application using Node/Bower/Angular.

Up to this point I only used node a tiny bit, but I've NEVER EVER used Angular and Bower, and kinda almost freaked out. I spent the whole night reading tutorials, documentation and building the application, checking almost all details I could from the JSON file and building it as detailed as I could, then went for the interview.

Turns out both intervewers were pretty nice and cool, and checked my GitHub, some work I did and told me that my application passed the test (and I even did a but further than they asked me to). I was also told that I was the only intervewee that did NOT have formal training in computer science or something related to it, which kinda made me feel a bit worried.

I was asked to wait for some time until they decided on the results.

2 weeks later I was told that 2 people, among 30, were chosen and I was one of them! I was also told that they liked how my GitHub was well-documented and organized, and the range of projects that I had.

I worked there for only 4 months until a new CEO entered and change things a bit (cost cutting and all that yadda yadda), and I was laid off. Although a bit short, I was happy that I ended my work there on good terms with everyone on the team! Also, I'm still working with the people I met there on some freelance projects! ;D

I'm really honored to have met, worked and to still be working with the guys from there. They were all better than me in different things and it was an eye-opening experience, which most certainly made me a better dev today.

Also, working with them and learning from them renewed all the passion for coding I've lost from previous jobs, so I'm more than thankful for this. :D

P.s.: sorry for the long text and bad writing, I kinda didn't sleep because of some work-related issues :P

Register on freelancer.com

Sees a job offer with 0 bid.

Clicks to make a bid...

....

74 bids.

Client: I want you to build me a website.
Then makes an order on freelancing website.

Me: Okay, Sir. Can you send me your specifications, please?

No reply.

2 days later

Me: Hello, sir....are you still interested?

A week later
Me: Sir.

Me: Sir.....

No reply

2 Weeks later
Me: Sir......

No reply

Client: Oh, sorry.(Then gives some lame excuse) Okay I will send you the specifications.

Me: It's Okay. Waiting for it.

A week later
Me: Sir, you forgot to send me your specifications.

No response.

#Life of a freelancer.....No stability or security or decent clients.

Best current career choice:
Quit to become a Freelancer.

OH BOY did I sleep bad directly after that decision - no contracts, no sales running.

Oh BOY do I now 2 days later sleep like a dam relaxed, happy baby :) - My network for the win!

The days before handing in my resignation I really looked forward to just leaving, but the actual task again was scary. Why? Cause until then future for me was bound to income, job=stable income = happy me, happy wife, happy child.

Now? Just 4 days later, If all goes to plan I'm already overbooked twice. Truth told!: Couldn't have done it without the network that I built over the years where I was employed. Let's see how this works out :)

I stand up with a huge smile each morning: Just a great feeling!

Long Story time!

Tl;dr just because he's a teacher doesnt mean he's right

So a little bit of background on me, before I started walking the path of dev I worked freelance in another branche for 3 years, when I decided it was time to go back2skool

Halfway through the year we got a new teach, only 2 years older than me and man (I'm 23) and man was be full of himself. Let's call him Mr Bob. Mr Bob started his class with the classic "I'm not your run-of-the-mill teacher" (oh yeah we've never heard the before Mr original) "and for this class we're gonna simulate a real working environment where I'm the client and you're a freelancer". Alright. Sounds decent let's do this.

Mr Bob seemed to have actually done his part pretty well and gave us stylesheets, technical details, deadline, everything seemed pretty alright. It wasn't anything special some PHP database connections, some jQuery and a bit of CSS, it didn't have to be mobile ready either, just full screen desktop.

Fast forward a couple of classes. I'm done with the assignment and go to turn it in, where it turns out Mr Bob is quite a bit of a toothless knob gobbler..

I turned in the assignment webpage and he's reviewing it for feedback, some remarks of things I could improve later he says
"oke that looks alright, now I want the top navigation bar to scroll with the page, and I want it to be reactive and mobile ready"
Me: "Sorry sir but the scope only included a static bar on the top, and it said it just had to be desktop ready, without a need for mobile support"
Him: "well I'm the client so I expect you to do this now"
Me: "well sir that is outside of the agreed upon scope, you'll have to pay extra for that to widen the scope of the project, for which I need to plan in extra hours"
Him: "if you keep having such a bad attitude I'll fail you this class"
Me:"but sir it was your idea to pretend we're a real client and freelancer, those work with scopes and paid hours, you can't just demand free extras"
Him:"What do you know about work, I've had a company for 2 years and I spent hours in the night adding features for clients"
Me:"Well maybe you should've agreed on a set scope beforehand, and not accepted extra work for free"
Him:"with such a shitty attitude you'll never make it in the business world"
Me:"Well I've been a successful freelancer for 3 years before I wanted an extra education, and I never worked for free. So I think I'll be alright. Besides if you were so successful what's the name of the company and why are you a teacher now?"
Him:"I don't accept such disrespectful speech from students, you're expelled from class"

Seem to have hit quite the sensitive nerved when I asked about his company.
To his credit he did play his role as the douche bag client that wants everything free well.

There's more to the story that happened the following class I'll post later of you like.

Got to hop off the train now and find myself some new transport because some idiot called in a bomb on Rotterdam Central station..

Time to change my skills from PHP developer to AI researcher, Blockchain engineer and grab some thousand dollars deal on Freelancer

Some years ago when floppy disks were still common, I was a freelancer giving computer support to a small business that had only just switched from 5 standalone workstations to a network. Saw the office girl doing backups onto 3.5" disks and suddenly realised all the debtors' backups were void because she wasn't switching out the 2nd disk when that backup was finished and the crediitors' backup began, her reasoning being "it wasn't full yet".

I had to leave the room and cry.

As a freelancer, I outsource every bit of work to other countries with cheaper labor and charge the client like a rollercoaster

I reached a point where I'll be happily working as the kid who serves coffee and tea to random strangers and not work at a company, as a freelancer OR WITH FUCKING HUMANS!

I'm out !!

Had a freelancer come in earlier this week looking for work, and in his resume he stated "big supporter and enthusiast for open-source projects". But not a single link to a github or anything, nor mentions to any projects.

I overheard his application talk with the lead who asked him if he had any projects to show, or to what projects he did contributions, seeing he is such a big supporter and enthusiast of open source. His response?

"Oh no I don't have any public projects or contributions, I just really support people who do it though. Saves me alot of time and money, I think everyone should do it"

What the actual fuck.

I started this new freelance project where I am building some android libraries for the client. Anyways, during meeting I was about to present my results and suddenly backend seemed to be down. I looked into the round "are your servers down?"
Team Lead: "Yeah our cto, also our only backend dev, is developing a new feature."
Me: "Okay but why is production down?",
Team Lead: "Ah dont worry we always test on production. We have a pretty solid hardware, we will even upgrade it soon!"
Me:"... How about you just separate your stage environments and have a develop environment?"
Client: "see, this is where our strength is. We dont need a develop stage we have very strong hardware and our backend is fully in PHP"

Thanks God I'm a freelancer

The life of a freelancer:

Work is "just one more episode on Netflix" away...

"Could you quick make my website responsive?"

..sure, just let me press the responsive button on your website.

When your boss removed you from the team because he found a better developer that can deliver a task faster than you. Then after a week, he asked you for help and if you want to work for him again because the developer that he replaced to your position can't solve their problem.

#First

I joined a start up and worked after college hours as an intern over there. I would usually bunk my college and go to my internship. I had limited knowledge at that moment. I worked very hard over there because I wanted (still want) to gain practical knowledge.

Almost a month into it and I had to take a break from it because I had college work. Rejoined the same start up during my vacations. Worked quite a lot and learnt quite some stuff. I continued the internship after my one month vacation for another month once my college started. All this while I was not being paid, not even a little bit of allowance. But that didn't matter because I wanted to learn

Fast forward six months to November 2016. I have been placed in an MNC through my college placements. One day I get a call from this start up owner(we had become good acquaintances by then) if I was willing to work as a paid intern while I was working on the projects that the company landed (so I guess as a free-lancer) and as an unpaid intern while I was working on the company projects. I agreed. Jump to December. I have joined and started working on an Android project of this very big company.

At time point, I should inform you'll that I'm not very good at Android and that the company size is very small. Company owner plus the tech lead in one city (where I'm from) and another two full time employees in another city. Out of which one quit to start his own company apparently. The start up would primarily employ interns and provide exposure to them while getting their work done.

Back to the story. The tech lead vaguely assigns everyone their work. Everyone over here includes new interns and previous interns like me who will get paid some amount. 3-4 days into the project, the tech lead quits. The tech lead and the company owner call three of us and says that one of you will have to be a project manager for this project. And then both of them and 2 of my colleagues look at me. And I don't know what to say. I hesitate initially because it's too much responsibility but agree to it finally.

The next day I come to office and read about the project thoroughly and catch up with my colleagues about the progress. The entire day I'm panicking about what I'm going to do. In the evening, my boss tells me that we have to go for a meeting with the client for whom we are doing this project. At this moment, the shit out of me has been scared. Mostly because I don't know what the fuck am I going to do over there apart from being stupid and asking dumb questions. So we reach the client's office and wait for him. The entire time I'm thinking to myself that I'm going to drown this company by opening my mouth. Surprisingly, all the questions that I asked seemed legitimate and I asked a lot of questions. And so I didn't drown the company after all...phew!

It's been more than a week. And holy fuck! What a pain it is to manage people. Half of my time is spent on updating excel sheet about their progress, where are they stuck and what is needed. And the other half about thinking what the fuck am I doing or how am I gonna do it.

So to sum up, intern-turned-freelancer-turned-project manager who has no idea what the fuck is going on. Seems pretty crazy, don't you think.

1 - Please hack his/her facebook account for me.

2 - (at home) I used to block wifi access by mac filtering and if there's legit server down and wifi isn't working, everyone blames me.

(I am freelancer and mostly work from home)

3 - almost all of my relatives think I don't work.

4 - I am first choice for everyone's phone, PC and hardware repair.

This one is classic

GET A REAL JOB, you need to go out in the field for work.

My most ridiculous meeting was a meeting that I couldn't attend.

When I was working as a freelancer my companies CEO and me were invited by a client from another country (6 hours flight & hotel).
The meeting was scheduled for the day after our arrival.

After breakfast the CEO told me he would pick me up at the hotel lobby at 2pm. I waited for some hours, but he didn't come.
Later that day he told me that he met with the client already at 10am.

I am sure he told me the wrong time, because he was afraid that the client would try to headhunt me.

I work as a freelancer on *****.com also I have published a theme on theme***.com
Yesterday a indian client message
Client: wii you be able to help me to install a wp theme and customize it to my liking?
Me: sure why not, send me the link to that theme.
Client: here's the link (link to my theme)
Me: (oh i will make money from both side :D ) do yoy bought a license ?
Client: (shocked) who need license , download it from *****.com
Me: (crying in background)

So we are a development company, we have some remote coders.

This one is very good coding BUT

Sometimes he disappears and then comes back with an history, the other day he said his grandpa was about to die of cancer so he had to go to see him.

Three days ago, he had to finish a landing page manager, in React. just a form and unzip (nodejs server side) the files... It was not so difficult.

He said was going to finish later that day.

Then he disappeared, for 3 days!

And i got a message from him on facebook saying he got robbed and he was going to rent a laptop to continue working.

Then i asked if he had any progress on the code before that happened. and he started sending
me screenshots of the code , but in one screenshot i was able to see a part of the desktop background. Checked on the history of files @ Slack and that was his background lol.

Please guys , don't do these kind of things.
If he had told me that he needed to study or something i would have understood him

Now i feel i cant trust him anymore.

Moral: Lies/attitudes like these one can have a big negative effect on your life and you will miss some big opportunities!

I've seen several rants about dumb/useless teachers, college and the CS degree studies; today is a good day to vent out some "old" memories.

Around two semesters ago I enrolled in a Database seminar with this guy, a tall geek from the 80's with a squeaky voice, so squeaky mice could had an aneurysm if they listened to him.

Either way this guy was a mess, he said he was an awesome coder, that we were still "peasants" when it came to coding, that relational databases had nothing on him since he was an awesome freelancer and did databases every day, that we had to redo the programming course with him and with his shitty, pulled out of the ass own C++ style guide with over 64 different redacted rules.

He gave us sample code of "how it should be done" in Java...it ain't my favorite language but fuck me a fucking donkey could have written better code with his ass!! He even rewrote Java's standard input function and made it highly inefficient. He still wrote in a structural paradigm in OOP languages! And he dared to make this code reviews were he would proyect someone's code and mock it in front of the class as he took off points, sometimes going to the negative realm (3,2,1,0,-1...)

But you know what's shittier? That he actually didn't even attend, 90% of the time, it was literally this:
> Good morning class
> Checks attendance. . .
> I'll be back, I'm going to check in...
> 1 hour 45 minutes later (class was 2 hrs long) - comes back
> do you have any doubts?
> O.o no...? I'm ok.
> We're done

Not only that, he scheduled from 4 to 17 homeworks throughout the week, I did the math, that was around 354 files from everyone; of course he didn't check them, other students from higher semesters did and they gained each point taken from students making students from lower semesters get the short end of the stick.

How did I pass? He didn't understood my code or database schema and he knew he couldn't fail me as he had no ground to stand on.

Thanks for listening, if you got to the end of this long ass post and had a similar experience I'd love to read it.

I was getting a freelancer job to do some backend work for a company in India that is working for a huge company in Saudi Arabia.

The customer in india was my primary contact, I wasn't allowed to talk to the guys in Saudi Arabia. My contact, we'll call him Aman, asks if i can do frontend too. I decline. Now what follows were 4 weeks of backend work during which Aman called me 10-15 times per day via skype to ask me how I was progressing, and if "insert spec here" was already done. He even called me in the middle of the night, well aware of the different time zones.

But in the end all the work is done, Aman is happy. I request payment.

Aman: We can't pay you yet, you didn't do the frontend!
Me: I'm not doing frontend.
Aman: It's just a few simple changes and then we're done.
Me: Gnnn, fuck it, what do you need?
Aman: Our customer would like the frontend to look better.
Me: Ok, so what exactly should look better?
Aman: All of it.
Me: Do you have any specs?
Aman: No just make it look more modern.
Me: So you want me to rework the whole frontend? That's not just a few simple changes...
Aman: How long would you need?
Me: I actually don't do that kind of work.
Aman: We pay you double your hourly rate if you do this and finish it fast.

(This is were I should have just said no... but the greed...)

Me: Ok, but it will take me about 3 weeks to do that.
Aman: OK.
Me: Do you have any preferences as to how it should look?
Aman: No, just surprise us.

(After this sentence I really should have gotten the hell out of Dodge)

After working 3 weeks changing over 20.000 lines of CSS and most of the HTML I present Aman with the changes.

Aman: No our customer doesn't like the changes. Can you make a different version?
Me: What doesn't he like, any specifics, coloring, styling of lists or the buttons?
Aman: He doesn't like the whole thing. Please make us another version.
Me: Ok, you are the customer, but it would really help if you give me some pointers as to how it should look like.
Aman: Just do your best.
Me: ..., ok, that's helpful.

2 weeks later...

Aman: No our customer liked the version before better. But could you make it look more modern.
Me: *Bangs head against wall repeatedly*
Me: What do you mean by modern?
Aman: It should look more modern, as a whole.
Me: Ok, I get that, but could you give me an example?
Aman: Sends me a screenshot of the overview screen with all the elements encircled and modern written beside them.

1 week later...

Aman: The customer has decided, he likes the original version best. Can you undo all the changes?
Me: Sure but that'll take like 1 hour.
Aman: Oh by the way we were asked by accounting why the price for this project was so high?
Me: *hugh* *gnn* what?
Aman: Well at the beginning, you estimated the backend and frontend work to be done in 4 weeks.
Me: The frontend was never part of the original estimate.
Aman: Can you do anything concerning your hourly rate, so that we can get back to the original pricing.
Me: *make a mental note to never work with an intermediary company in india again and cancels the job requesting the due payment*

Luckily I got paid the full amount but not before having another 10 Skype call with Aman...

That would be the time when i got fired from my last job. Hosting company, it had lots of good stuff and bonusses, coworkers were great, i was doing really important stuff when suddenly, i got fired and replaced... 'You have a too strong personality, sometimes you're just too outspoken'... At hearing those words, i felt very sad. Took a few bottles of champagne from the fridge at work (they had those apparently a year already, nobody touched them)... I left the building, together with two coworkers who became friends, drank the two bottles of champagne... i was crying... Because i got smacked in the face due to my personality. Admitted i am an extravert, and i do dare to talk back when it's needed, always polite, but ensuring i was not agreeing. Still i did my job pretty well. I was practically the only one that was multi-lingual!

After that i became a freelancer. It was a good start, a lesser good intermission, but next month i am starting at a goverment department for long term, so future is looking good.

Work: there is little work for our freelancer we're getting rid of him at the end of the year
Me: are you sure, that will put a lot of work on my schedule.
Work: I'm sure you can handle it
*two weeks later*
Work: have you finished feature xyz yet
Me: nope had a server crash today so pushed it back
Work: why didn't you get "free lancers name here" to do it for you
Me: I could of if you didn't fire him, he could of also done the other features you want too
Work: ah ok

The freelancer...
We are looking for someone to design a logo with no less than 2 years Javascript, 10 years Intel IO low level engineering in assembly, 2 months pascal, 14 weeks of HTML5, 17.23567 years of ASCII C, and you must have a half pint of strawberry ice cream in your freezer. $20.00 firm.

Long rant, sorry.

I’m pretty upset, or let’s say: I want to kick asses and chew gum but I’m all out of gum(The duke TM).

Yesterday we had a discussion in the office about salary basically.

Context: The company has about 150 employees and earns a lot of money. I’m the lead dev for about 1.5 years since I joined.

So I talked to our CEO/HR about a raise since I was hired as a normal fullstack dev(title is lead dev now) but have to:
train my junior(PHP), frontend guy(react), our QA(Automation with cypress atm), our junior devop(gitlab, jenkins, docker) and even assist marketing with GTM and adword campaigns.

I’m a jack of all trades basically since I was a freelancer for big brands for a long time.
I’m fine with helping/training, I like it a lot but I still have to watch everything and be fast with my own stuff. If anything goes wrong, people call me.

That will change since I train them all(They will all be independent soon) but still, doing everything for the same pay feels wrong.

Bottom line: CEO told me it’s cool that they can use all my skills but I won’t get a raise.

The worst/strangest was: My coworkers heard about that(as always in an office) and were like: Everybody should get paid equally because we’re all a team. Uhm, ok?

I just contacted the head hunter which got me that job. I guess I’ll just see what the market has to offer.

It should never be about money but this was confusing. People telling me we should all be equal who are on their mobiles 3h a day and feel underpaid. Check yourself, really.

People who think their pure presence is enough.. Germany -.-

As seen at one hotel in Dublin: "Don't stay in your bed unless you know how to make money in your bed".
Looks like I'm OK to stay in my bed because I'm a freelancer.

One time I applied for a contract position for a company and get an email the next day asking for an interview two days later which I accept and attend. They want someone to convert their website from Wix to WordPress while keeping the same look, I would have about a month to do it (then after that create an e-commerce page). So far I can do that. They email me 2 hours after the interview asking for a 2nd interview on the following Monday which I accept and attend. There I meet one of the founders (I guess) and he really asks me about SEO and what keyword tool I use (they didn't ask about seo keywords in the job posting or at the 1st interview) then he tells me that the website needs to be converted over in 4 days (instead of the 1 month I was told 2 days earlier). Then he asks what I quote. I gave him a number (less than $10,000) and he looked at me like I had 3 heads, I then said I needed some time to come up with a quote. He said no problem, email the guy who 1st interviewed you the quote before the end of the day and if we like it you will start tomorrow.

I then went to a nearby restaurant and thought it over then made up an email telling him that I wouldn't take on the project. There were so many red flags, and the fact that they want it done in 4 days would have meant working at least 12 hour days. A couple of hours later I emailed them to say no, they didn't reply and their website is still on Wix today.

If something needs to be done quickly then know it's going to cost you (and tell someone your budget in the 1st interview).

A company called me for a job interview for my internship. As they saw my LinkedIn, they said I had a great skill set built up as I was studying Software Engineering and working aside as a freelancer.

After a short talk they mentioned my international business management (IBMS) minor that I have taken and criticized me that I took a wrong path of my career, told me to rethink my position of my studies and said they will not take me into consideration for the position.

That left me puzzled. Like what was the reason of that call, just to criticize my decisions?

Can't remember the company name that called me here in The Netherlands.

"HTML, CSS or Java Freelancer needed"
Interesting combo

This happened like 6-7 years ago when I used to do some logo and Web theme designs as a side job. There was this motel owner client who wanted me to make a website for him . he didn't give me much to go on except some themes he liked and some pictures of the motel. I finished the website on time but of course he didn't like it, he told me that he wanted it to be bluer(?). So I played with the colors a bit and showed it to him a couple days later, but now he didn't like the font that I used he wanted a font that stand out, like those Gotik ones; I politely told him it would not look professional when he refused I told him it would look like a teenage Lamer at Tumblr. After that he settled down for a less idiotic font. I finished the final cuts the next day and went to the motel to setup the website and show him how to use it. After a good hour of teaching him in the ways of the Internet I told him I needed my payment now. But the guy only wanted to pay half of what we agreed upon because I delivered it late and also didn't do his requests. I reminded him, that this is my job I worked hard for this. That he owed me what he promised. His counter argument was That all I do is press some buttons on a keyboard and that I don't know what working hard really means. That was the last drop. You see I usually have somewhat good pr skills but I can only tolerate limited amount of bulls*** at a time. So I deleted the www folder from filezilla and told him to go F*** himself and left. Never been a freelancer ever since

What's the shittiest IT company you seen ?

I'll tell one i know - it had the shittiest web site I've ever seen, they built Android app that "enables users to pray to God" , a basic shitty app with pictures of Hindu gods and a button labelled "Perform e-pooja" Also the app description said "Share the app with friends and family" to receive free Gods blessing.

Really dude?! How low can you go?...have some basic ethics!

P.S: This company came to our institution with job offers and my teacher asked why i didn't attend their interview.

No thanks, I'd rather start as freelancer and work on building my own company than wasting my life in such retarded company.

NO FUCKING WAY YOU ARE GONNA PAY SOMEONE THE EQUIVALENT OF TWO MONTHS WHAT I MAKE TO DO SOMETHING I CAN DO IN A FUCKING WEEKEND BECAUSE "I HAVE SO MUCH TO DO ALREADY AND COMPANY STUPID POLICY DOESN'T ALLOW EMPLOYEES TO BE CONTRACTED AS FREELANCER ON THEIR SPARE TIME!!
HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT TO MY FACE YOU STUPID COCK SUCKER! I BET YOU CANT EVEN SUCK A FUCKING DICK PROPERLY STUPID FUCK!!!!!!!

OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!!
HOW CAN SOMEONE BE A FREELANCER/WEB DEV AND TYPE SO FUCKING SLOW AND HAVE TROUBLE WITH FUCKING LETTERS ALL THE TIME?!

I'm gonna push this mother fucker so hard that he will learn not to "lie" in an interview never again and become a fucking dev.

Worst experience was my first job after study. They told me at the interview that the job has very low travel activity... "we are doing most of the projects in-house...just traveling to the customer now and then for kick offs or when the software has to be trained"

A half year later I had to travel every fucking week to the customer. Fixing shitty code from a freelancer who never worked in a team, in a language I've never used before (they told me the first day at the customer). Don't get me wrong, I love learning new stuff but this project and architecture was a totally fucked up mess. Flew every monday to the customer (had to get up at 4am monday morning to get the flight) and friday back. Quit the job after living 3 months from a fucking suitcase.

A moment of silence to those working on multiple clients with multiple deadlines at the same time but still got time here.

I fucking hate it to work for clients ... also i fucking hate it not to have any clients to work for.

Got a client who Always delays payment (~2weeks) and is rude and ignores me after I deliver. As a freelancer and Student I rely on the money and on my time. So I will deliver tomorrow the next project, guy promised he will pay on monday, but I count with weeks again. I have developed a locking mechanism so I can lock the whole Software from my Cloud in case he wont pay on time. What do you guys think?

(Disclaimer: This rant is satire and only here to feed an algorithm by @PrivateGER)

This FUCKING fuck company where I had my fucking shit internship - just fucking asked me to freaking work for another project and fucking baiting me with a shitty damn payment for my little shit project I had (and still fucking work on today) while I had this damn internship. This idiot wants me to fucking waste my free time besides FUCKING SCHOOL (doing my absolute nonsense uselessfuck Abitur) and my lovely PASSIONATE GAME PROJECT with shit damn HTML-ing and CSS-ing and good damn JS-ing - for a SHITHEAD-200€ JOB. This bastard wants me to register my ass as a "Kleingewerbe" (dunno english therm but it's a small similar for to being freelancer) probably to enslave me or USE me as a cheapass worker. I'll call this dude today and politely tell him to FUCK OFF!!

(Nothing against the company, they're freaking cool! The dude too)

Employer: Need a freelancer to die for me

Freelancer: I'm a professional dier

The thought of becoming a freelancer.

WTF freelancer, just won a design contest and it’s so fucking hard to withdraw the money to my bank account.

“There is some invalid bank details in your withdraw request, please confirm with your bank”

I never withdraw money before so i have to wait 15 days for my first withdrawal for each withdrawal methods.

The first method (express withdrawal with no fees) was failed because the bank details issue, talk with the cs and they told me to confirm to my bank, confirmed and tried again (only 1 or 2 days waiting time) but still failed, been trying this 3 times.

Trying the second method a.k.a wire transfer, i have confirmed the bank about what details are required to receive money from overseas first so i can prevent some stupid errors.

Wait another 15 days and ...

STILL FAILED WITH SAME PROBLEM

FUCK

This is the first time i regret when i won something.

ＦＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵ

Looking for job opportunities, one grabbed my attention and I decided to apply. First, I had to fill a form with 40 questions, explaining and justifying development processes, best practices and overall knowledge. Ok, no problem. Form submitted, and I see a step 2. Now I have to build a single page site from scratch, and send another form with code, link, and more justifications regarding development. After that, my application will be sent.

Then I found this observation, saying the position was for a freelancer, that will receive work occasionally. Not a full time position as I thought.

Sometimes cleaning bathrooms sounds a better option.

You know the worst thing about being a freelancer? You're expected to wear every fucking hat and you don't get normal hours.

Over the past few days I have been working with a client of a client attampting to fix his server. He's running CentOS on VMWare and somehow ended up breaking the system.

Upon inspection there was no way to fix his system remotely. It wouldn't even boot in recovery mode. So we've been attempting to recover his data so that we can reinstall CentOS and not have to start completely from scratch.

So for the past 3 days straight I have been remotely logging in to a Debian Live CD and manually sending folders to a FTP server of his. He has somewhere close to 30 sites on this server, and upwards of 1 million files in total.

Yesterday either the system freaked out or he did something, but the entire fucking system stopped responding which forced me to reboot it, reinsert the live CD, reinstall evertything, and re-mount his broken systems drives.

Here we are 3 days in, we're still not done, and I'm getting slightly pissy because if you don't know Linux well enough to fix this shit yourself, you shouldn't be acting as your own sysadmin for 30+ sites.

Also, backups are a thing right? VMWare also has snapshots. I know the extra storage isn't cheap, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than paying soemone like me $35/hr to go and fix all of your shitty mistakes.

Hi guys! This is my first rant, please be easy on me.

This is for all who always rant about how horible old codes on existing systems are, compared to what new tech they knew and how better they are as programmers compared to the seniors in the team and how they could have done it better... im getting an impression that it's either your a newbie on a corporate world or a freelancer that has not worked well with a system whos been there for ages... first, most of us devs thinks that they can do better than the previous ones, it is a never ending curse for us proud race but as time goes we would also regret our decision..2nd: cost.. migrating a battle-tested / fully functional system to a new tech would take time and money including training, which the management wont agree unless of course you do it for free.. 3rd: standards.. the company has built a pretty solid standards that changing to a new tech would affect it..there are so many more reasons that the only thing we can do is accept our fate.. coding is fun until the system grows to become an abomination that even its creator regret doing it... it's not our fault, blame the marketting guys! :D
Thank you for reading!

How does GDPR affect you as a freelancer in mobile/web development?

I'm asking because I eventually plan on freelancing but I have no clue how to deal with these stuff.

Very small project like the Youtube. 30$ should suffice.

when you realise it may work

(the meeting)

I've had a non-IT world colleague ask me to build a website, I asked if it's a static website like resume etc with no database & stuff. I quoted $1000 if that's the case since that's minimal maintenance
He goes he needs a simple website, like eBay to sell his products. Also need features like Amazon, integration of various payments. And this and that.

For $1000 !!

I felt good that he thinks I can make an e-commerce site but f¢k that thinking man.. I told him to hire a freelancer and told him about few sites.

Maybe we'll see a thousand dollar e-commerce site, haha I only hope the payments part is secure 😂😂 I ain't buying anything anyways. I'm 99 % sure nobody's gonna do it and next time we talk, he's gonna be like 1000 and a 50 haha

Well. I'm running out of money. Time to get new clients. Merry Christmas everyone.

General approach : I'm wasting my time by just sitting in front of computer all day. Since I'm freelancer, almost all of my work can be done at one place. They think, I should get a REAL job.

When they need help with tech : I'm the guy who knows everything about tech and can fix their mobile, printer, toaster, washing machine and nuclear warfare.

When it comes to admiring what I do, I'm just a useless piece of shit but, when they need technical assistance I'm their lord and savior!!

Guess who got fucking fired. They want someone more experienced. Well fuck off. Its no wonder why there are no front end developers in your company. Now until the end of this month I have to find some job because of bills.. Going to try freelancer and check a couple of companies in my area. Any tips on how to get a freelance job?

Why people like thit still exists!!!
#Ffffdddddduuuuuuuucccckkkkk

A few weeks ago a client came to us asking for edits on their site. They had a developer in their office but they fired him a few days prior. After some looking at the piece of garbage they called a website I told my supervisors that it was built in Adobe Muse and from what I could find in a few quick searches it's shit and I didn't want to learn to use a shit tool. Apparently as a company we decided to hire a freelancer to handle this despite the fact that we didn't build the site and the client isn't paying for maintenance so I'm not sure why it's our fault.

Fast forward to today:
I've been in the office for 19 hours straight trying to learn how to use Muse and fix the client's site because somehow the freelancer managed to delete the mobile version of the site. When I ask my supervisors why I'm fixing and supporting a site we didn't build and don't have experience working in and the response is: we're presenting the client with a $50k proposal and we need all the good graces we can get.

Unless I'm gonna see some of the commission it doesn't really matter what we charge for the site, I make the same whether it's a free site or a $100k site.

Few weeks passed, and I as a freelancer without job all I did was seek for one and couldn't find anything.

Now I'm overwhelmed with all the work and interviews I got in the past weeks xD

Never balanced...
No work at all, or too much work.

We worked with that freelancer some time ago. Most talented coder I've ever known. Coding for only 3 years, and only 1 technology, but technical thinking already up to par with my own 15+ years of experience. Very rude but to the point. We loved it - "one of us". We hired that asshole for different remote projects over 20 times in 3 years. We send spec, answer questions, collaborate on chat, review work on svn, add tickets, get solutions. After about a year working like that we had minor issue with finance that revealed our prized freelancer is a chick.

Changed nothing.

I am getting depressed every time I open freelancer.

Friend asked to create a small website. I didnt ask for an upfront pay because I trusted him. Finished the website and sent him an invoice.

We're now strangers.

He didn't pay

The Last Rodeo

Hi dear ranters. I've been a dev since I was 12, that makes 18 freakin years. Although I love my job and being someone who not only consumes but also produces, I am a bit grown tired of the industry.

About 6 years ago I cut ties from the last agency I worked with to become a freelancer. I ignited many projects, helped many of my customers (still helping most of them) to realize their goals. But I've come to realize that my country doesn't like old school laborers like myself (for some reasons I would explain if asked).

So I've been thinking: what would I do if I wasn't doing this job? What would you do for living if you were to stop being a developer? Let's have a chat.

I've been lurking around this place for months now and never found a reason to make an account. Well, now I just did.

I was browsing freelancer.com looking for projects and I found one. Guy wants a website for booking seats, with a shopping cart and whatever. At the end, he mentions the only restrictions are we can't use ajax and json.

I made a bid explaining that the very site he was on(the freelancer website) made more then 25 ajax requests when loading a page, and that most if not all of them were transferring data in json.

I'm wondering what do they need that many requests for, but that's already another issue.

Now I'm curious to see if he answers back

I find it amusing to scroll through lists of available freelancer jobs and see who has the most illegal and/or absurd request

If your client doesn't know what the fuck he wants to see on his website even with all text and images included - don't take this fucking job.

They will let you choose a template and you end up switching it 5 times. "Oh we don't like it. What else do you have? Oh, this looks better." Next day "We don't like this theme anymore. We want to switch to what we had before."

If people can't draw their home page on a paper I tell them go fuck yourself straight in a face. I always put these people on my reference list so my future clients know I'm straightforward, not lazy, not low skilled, but honest with dumbasses like some of my previous clients.

You are asking for a basic website with 5 pages, you have a shitty budget and then I have to customize the entire theme and tweak every fucking possible element in CSS, HTML and PHP. Go fuck yourself. All you get for your money is WordPress with 15 min consultation how to copy paste your shit and save it. Never do fixed budgets, never work on projects like this if it's under $500-1000. Meet with the client to understand him/her better and see if he is a jackass-perfectionist or a chill person who won't be picky.

That's my memories of being a freelancer, trying to get any job for any budget just to build my portfolio. Never going back to this, at least not for small businesses with less than $5,000 budget. Reading people before you start working with them is a good thing.

As a freelancer I get side requests from bigger development companies from time to time that don't have the time or capacity to deal with it themselves.

So usually the employees are pretty friendly but they do not like to read any of the documentation I send with the code. They call me up with stupid questions that are usually answered in the documentation.

I had sent them everything they had requested last Thursday so they called me on Friday to ask the usual stupid question. However, this time I had beforehand decided to have some fun! I told them I had to leave for the weekend and to call me back on Monday. Of course they called me during the weekend, but I didn't answer. So they called me today.

What I had done before handing it all in was I had named the methods that I wrote illogically, while stating and explaining the whole situation in the documentation extra clearly.

So I answered the call today and the first thing they did was apologize. Since I didn't answer their calls during the weekend they finally realized that the best way to go is reading the documentation instead of calling me all the time. They were freaked out at first because they thought there was something completely wrong with the code and they had to tell their client that the deadline had to be pushed back.

We are all good now :)

The freelancer web dev life:
Add a 5 line styletag. Get 50 bux.

Yeah so i'm not very happy with my current "job"

When i applied, they asked for a couple tests to access what i know, a simple CRUD, designing some databases according to the needs of hipothetical clients etc. It was simple, but i've made myself clear that i was a beginner.

They proposed to me to work in the support team, to gain knowledge so then i could work with the Dev team. The excuse was that the project was "too big" to wrap my head around it right now. And i was to familiarize myself by _using_ the software while in support.

Welp i guess they believe that poking at the black box and getting outputs instead of looking what's inside is a better way to understand how it works. Besides, most of what i do is migrate client retail data, basically picking data from one database and putting in a particular structure to be able to import in the new system (from our company) so if i'm learning something is about the structure of other retail softwares.

So far, they didn't give me any feedback on the tests i've send them (the crud and stuff), because nobody had the time to look at it, literally, i can see who accessed my files and nobody has ever opened it.

So there i am, in a dark corner of the room, far away from my "team". In the first week i made a simple portable app that automated at least 50% of my work, showed it to them and they liked it. But now i was spending half my time doing nothing, sometimes a whole day doing nothing.

They said i were to be trained to be on support, but they didn't train me, and i'm 90% sure they expect me to be rovering over their pcs while they're doing stuff and ask what is it that they're doing. I'm not doing it, it's invasive, i personally hate to have people close to me asking what i'm doing. So i spend my time in the corner refactoring my app and learning new stuff.

They wanted to send my app to some partners that also migrate systems, so of course i asked for a code review before it was rolled to "production". Welp no, nobody looked at my code, and they send it anyway.

Now the head of the company asked me to do an app to easy the emission of tax tickets, and i'm doing it, alone again, while no one is available to look at my code. I was learning as i go, and that meant refactoring the project multiple times because i didn't know about desktop app architecture and design back then (it's _kind_ of MVVM rn). And so far it's in the thousands of lines of code.

This whole thing is very dismotivating, i'm basically working as freelancer but with company designated restraints, my code has never been read by other people besides me. If i speak about a security flaw in their system, they don't even bother to listen. And so far i'm not officially in any team, and it's been 3 months. I'm tired of doing things by myself.

Thank you for reading.

a client today wanted a specialized high performance, extremely stable, stock management software for pharmaceutical products, he also wants the software distributed, cross platform, and expect the delivery to be in a week or so, oh and did i mention that he also wants it to have an extremely good looking ui,
he got offended that i said you can only have one or two of those things not all of them,
for context, I'm just a freelancer not a big company and doing what he wants is impossible for me, also it was a billion ages since i worked on anything desktop related, web is all I'm diving into lately

The more I go through devRant the more I think I wanna work alone... or with a small group of devs I know 😐 (as in, freelancer or something. Not in a company)

Step 1: Become a freelancer
Step 2: Enjoy working
Step 3: Get annoyed by doing all the backoffce
Step 4: Get hired instead
Step 5: Work hard
Step 6: Boss notices your talent
Step 7: Boss founds startup with you
Step 8: Repeat Step2 until you have to repeat Step4

I don't want to sound ethnocentric but is anyone else annoyed by having to correct the spelling of variable, class, table name, and other code after it was built overseas? I'm in a third round of combing consecutively deeper into the code to ferret out these misspellings so they don't go into production. Is it too much to ask that the freelancer who says he speaks and writes native English not then turn that work over to a subcontractor who clearly does not?

Yaaay, I received my last payroll with extras. Now to pay all stuff to start as a freelancer!

This is a big step for me and I wanted to share it with you

Let's go!

We founded a 3 man startup.
I am on holiday for two weeks and my mates paid 50k to someone so he programs a prototype app without any specifications. They told him about what the app should display without any mockups or images via Skype. Returned Monday, found out about it, and on the following Monday we will see the current status..
Oh boy, dog help me. I expect a clickdummy made with Adobesomething, and we paid 50k for that. Why didn't they wait for 2 weeks?!

Hey! I will start as a freelancer in a few days and i want to know what tools do you use in your each day, to manage tasks, time trackings and that sort of things? And if you give some advice will be appreciated, thanks!

Freelancer/coworker: "Why don't you just use source tree instead of git in the command line?"... me: *face palm*

My first freelance project - happened to be with the worst client. They didnt wanna pay more than $500 and also had no clue what they want, so each time i present something they request additional features or changing the ones implemented. In the end i kept the half downpayment for my time and bailed without deploying or anything. I introduced them to another freelancer to take the project and never went near them again.

To clarify, it was not my first project/ just my first time dealing with clients for projects instead of doing them at work. Ever since then i have a strict no dealing with clients directly policy.

As student in Belgium in computer science I finally become a freelancer !! I am now officially a developer who get paid for his job :D

I've had a client for 3 months now and they still haven't paid ($100 just for the site) and are surprised at the monthly cost (they wanted site hosting and maintenance which comes out to $75/month) and I want to fire them without burning bridges since the main person is a friend.

This moment when you have to reject dream projects as a freelancer. Other projects came early and will pay more and longer. :'(

I need a twin!

"_rootAccess, you need to stop letting 'freelancer' beat you to the office. You set the standard."

-my boss
missing the irony that he's telling me this after showing up 30m late... -_-

My worst legacy code experience was when I worked as a freelancer and got a tiny job to improve a VBA module in some Excel file for a very big company. So what's worse than VBA? Having to change parts of VBA code that was passed around to other freelancers before like the cheapest dockside whore. After meddling in there for about half an hour I felt like all those cheap ass punter, so I decided to write the whole thing from scratch. What a relief, after 3 hours I was very proud of the thing and it looked clean and well maintained again so I let it back on the streets. 😉
To the coder who comes after me: Please treat her (the code) nice or I will burry you alive in dog poop and burn the whole thing!

When there are employers that assign you a "test" (low payment) to prove your skills and after you successfully deliver it, he wants to "test" you on another assignment...

There was this motherfucker searching a dev to build a vue component on freelancer.

I applied. 🙄

Then he started to ask me out about Upwork. How he wants to use my account through TeamViewer. And how he will pay me for this monthly.

Why am I magnetic to idiots and scammers? Can some one please Avada Kedavra all idiots? I will pay you monthly. I swear.

How in the fuck do you start getting clients as a freelancer? Do I just throw stuff on my GitHub and pray someone hits me up on Fiverr? Upwork won't accept my account and it's been fucking four months of me trying. I took to becoming a full-time designer to push our startup's products to completion but a fucking failure over there too everytime.

Everything is a fucking shitfest and I'm just whining at this point but I needed to take this off of my fucking chest. A good fucking day to you too.

Working as a freelancer I have to hand in a monthly timesheet. I was told to print it out three times and sign them. A photocopied signature would not be acceptable.
After one year I found out that the manager signs one of the sheets, throws the other two away and makes two copies of the signed one.
I asked him why I have to give him three sheets then.
He answered: I don't know either.

Now the fun fact: the next copier is a 2min walk from his office

Well, being a British freelancer just became a thing of the past!

Had a look on freelancer, motherfuckers want websites and apps built for $25 haha. Surely they mean per hour!

Sometimes, I ponder whether I am jobless or freelancer without work .

How do you set a price for an hour of your time?
This week I made a project that took me 14 hours in a row to finish it and they paid me 25$.
Being honest I consider that project would have taken them at least 40-50 hours ?

How much money would you have asked them?

I want to program everyday for a whole year because I want to use the programming knowledge that I learned and use it in ways that will make me think outside the box. Hopefully, I can grab freelance work as a Web Developer, which has been in high demand these past few years.

I'll be documenting the process on my YouTube channel, which I'll share when I publish the first video.

I will NOT procrastinate... I WILL DO THIS!!

I'm in a situation here, I had an idea for an app and I started coding it. Since I'm a front end developer I find it not amusing to do the backend part. I then started to share the idea and such with good classmate (not a coder). I then made him join me on this adventure. After a lot of coding he said he wanted to contribute with something since I'm coding all day and he's not. Then we agreed freelancing the back end part.

Some time later we got a pretty good deal on some Indians doing the whole app. I thought to myself "this feels kinda good!" so we went on with the freelancer.

Days went to months and we finally got the app back. I did a mistake of paying him all the milestones without testing the app in its wholeness, later finding out that one part of the login system didn't work. That lead to a deeper debug to find out that the core function of the app was commented out.. I then wrote the freelancer back with minimal and slow response.

Now the deadline of the app is like in 2 months. If not we miss a whole year.

My classmate knows about this and he's the one who played for the freelancing. Now we have talked about me doing the whole backend myself.

The only issue I have now is that I feel like he's just sitting home doing nothing other than flashing money around and me busting my ass of writing code that I really am not good at. (basically learning more than coding)

But he played a lot of money for this.. So I feel kinda bad for him.

Rip life.

I've been working for a company as freelancer for almost a year now .
Anyway 4 to 5 months ago I've finished what I was supposed to do and the CEO called me to help him finish a project . This project took way more then it's suppose to be (more then 2 years instead of 6 month) and this is because it was designed and written by the devil himself as the most evil thing on earth. Adding to that the constant demands and changes given by the client kept this project always in a mess. When I agreed to help they gave me a list of the remaining tasks, just finish them and we're done .
A month and a half later , we've had a meeting with the client to present what I thought was the last version of the project , and as usual he kept on adding changes and new features .
Another month later I completed those changes and told the company I'll be quitting working with you because I found other opportunities .They told me we'll just do this last meeting and we're done . But guess what ? BINGO same fucking thing happens but this time with big changes and the client wants it in like 2 to 3 weeks.
Now the CEO is begging me to complete these tasks before leaving (because he won't get the final check if I don't ) and on the other hand I've got a lot of the other work to do and it's really hard to setup a schedule for everything .

So I'm a freelancer celebrating my second year at this one client (yes, times are good). When I first got to my current (not customer-facing) project, lots of "externals" (other freelancers) had come and gone, "internals" had been assigned and reassigned to and from this project and nobody knew exactly what was in the (angularjs) codebase.

One of my first
"quick win" assignments was to see if load times could be reduced. After some looking around it turned out someone had used moment.js (with locales, 67k gzipped) for some feature that had since been abandoned... and then accidentally dropped it into the source folder, checked it into source control (svn!), from whence it was happily packaged by the CI job and released every month.

Removing it reduced the pre-render javascript by about 40%. (also yes, that said "nobody knew exactly what was in the client-side codebase")

So, there was this guy where i worked, who was doing some freelancing.

He asked me to do some front-end stuff for him and i said ok.

After some gigs, my boss found out about him working as a freelancer and got really pissed, because, according to him, it was forbidden by company policies (though i never saw it on contract).

After that, the boss started talking to me about shit that the guy did on the past, like stealing, liying about been sick for months, bad mouth the entire company to others companys, etc. Some really bad shit.

End of the story, the company fired that guy, threatened to do the same to me, made me go on record about that shit in court, and that fucking motherfucker didnt even payd me for my last work.

I hope he rot in hell, fucking piece of shit.

Sorry for the long text, but (today) i find it as amusing story.

For being a student and working as freelancer you need to be pro googler, otherwise you'll fail in both.

Agree?

I got my last job more or less by luck.
The freelancer platform I was active on, had once an offer for 100.- if you find a parttime webdev for some small business.
I was looking for this kind of job anyways to finance my parttime study so I wrote back.
15 minutes later, their boss called me and wanted to meet me for an interview.

3 days later, at the interview, we talked roughly 10 minutes about my experience and then it was all about the upcoming project and at the end, about when I want to start and what I want as my salary.
Needless to say I got the job and the best: Also the 100.- 😎

Life of a freelancer:

Freelance platforms are technologically advanced form of slave trade

Client assumes the position of lord and we the slave as soon as he hires us 😑

Signed up on Freelancer as a soft engg. graduate with quite a lot of projects in Android and web services. A guy inboxes me regarding an applied bid and once everything's clear and mutually agreed upon with, he presents me with this one God damn question - "how many years of experience have you got?"
With truth said, all I get in response is, "looking for people with more exp. thanks for your time".
Yeah I'm sure he was born with 5+ y experience right off the bat. 😠

About to start my first ever freelance job. The problem is I think I've overestimated myself and under quoted for the project.

Hoping for the best and I'm any case, this will be a good experience in terms of learning about the freelance world right?

Is it me or freelancing jobs at Freelancer are incredibly vague.

Jobs titled "build me a website" with descriptions like "I need an expert dev to work on a python website".

How the hell can you put a price and time to it?!
Am I missing something here? I'm totally new at this and it's kinda baffling.

Don't you hate those startup clients who just don't understand "please give us all your requirements as early as possible" and keep making revisions even after product is released? *cries in the corner*

When I was freelancing and still studying 60 hrs a week.
~20 hrs. bread-and-butter job
~20 hrs. for University
~20 hrs. writing a full-stack application for a startup

I did that for about 3 months, afterwards I luckily had no classes left.
Only, the thesis is still open. But on the other hand, the freelance work for the startup was a pretty good reference for scoring an actual, well-paid position which made me leave my old job as well as freelancing.

Now I work roughly 40 hours a week with nearly as much freedom as a freelancer but less paperwork.

A short bittersweet story.

Ever since I quit my previous job a couple of months and started working as a freelancer, I haven't felt the need to visit devRant.

Everything that's rant worthy is essentially my fault.

"We're gonna use React Native for our project."

Me:"If that's your decision, then I would decline your offer."

After few weeks...

"Are you vacant for this kind of job? We'll be switching to Flutter".

----
I don't know what happened. I worked for him as a freelancer using VueJS for their project. and he insisted to use React Native to make that web into mobile. I declined his offer. Now he wants to work with me again using Flutter.

Hello guys im observing since some time your rants.
Here are people which are quite experienced.

I want to start as Freelancer in Germany, mostly for Web development.
All of my Customers are looking for a neat looking, responsive and fast Website.

What should I use and what Templates​/framework I could take as a blueprint for the future websites.

Any suggest are welcome!

The first thing I do when I go to the office is to make my bed.
-just freelancer stuff

My ideal job is something that I don't consider a job. I would enjoy to be a freelancer and work on my side projects every once in a while.

My Biggest dev. fear.
Hire a freelancer/partner to share your work load and he might start developing whole project parallaly himself

The agency I own built a WordPress plugin for a client using a freelancer developer. The client, out of ambivalence, withheld information that would have drastically changed the design of the plugin, but by the time we found out it was much to late to start over. The developer moved overseas in the middle of it all and from then on was not very responsive to communications about the project which delayed things by months. I tried to find a replacement developer but nobody else had experience with the third-party API. The live version of the API ended up not being able to support what we were trying to get it to do with the plugin even though the test version of the API was fine and the vendor was unhelpful. And because we spent so much time and money on the plugin, we weren’t able to even begin on another part of the project. The client complained of over $30,000 in lost revenue due to these issues. Complete fail all around. I’m never doing another custom software project again. It’s all just website design from here.

Story time... (Not long though)

My current employment status is quite strange. Basically I'm a freelancer. My former boss asked me to throw a half paid job and include three days worth of work for free just because it would be convenient.

When I told him no way - he was very uppset and offended and told me how disappointed he was.

Lesson learned: If you work for free and offer to "help" someone out, it will mostly lead to more queries for free of charge gigs. Don't do it like I did. Fuck that shit, thanks for appreciating my effort.

Do you have any annoying you want to get rid off, but you can't because of reasons?
I do. They are 4, but for now I'll talk about the gold medal winner.

When we met about 8-9 ago, she had just come back to town due to some very bad personal experience (not her fault). Anyway, she is polite, but her major flaw is that she is pushy. REAL BAD! And she gets mad when other people (including me) try to do it on her. Another one is having calls during random inappropriate times, because she had fight #N with her boyfriend, and last but not least, she will call when needs something out of someone.

Lately, her project is finding us a job, since we're both unemployed. Any job. The sad part is when she sends me job ads for dev jobs I don't qualify, e.g. Company X is looking for a dev with Y year of experience, knowing A, B, C & D technologies. I've told her that I don't qualify for most of the dev jobs she sends me, but she insists I should send my CV anyway, cause of reasons. Also, for some reason, I should be accounted to her for all my current choices when what I would honestly say is "BUG OFF".

Her latest endeavour is getting me one of her friends (a psychologist) as a "client". Her friend wants to have a professional website with writing posts/articles as a side dish. I'm not registered as a freelancer, so everything will be done under the counter, and her friend is OK with that. I'm no web developer, but I didn't refuse because of her backlash and also that would be a positive experience for me. Now, the juicy part. She gave her my phone number without my permission and she told me straight away. Her plan was having the three of us meet, though I don't know why and I didn't want her being around. I asked her to call me immediately, which it didn't happen. After being pestered by my friend for a couple of weeks if her friend called me, she finally did it on Monday. She didn't say to me anything I didn't know, but at least I have her phone now.

What I can offer her is a website skeleton with the usabilities she's asking. What I can't offer her is graphics/banner and security. And now I have to come up with reasonable price. Teams here ask 400-600€ for a complete website the way she asks, including VAT. I'm thinking around 100€ and I don't know when I can deliver the project. I've had some experience with Ruby and Sinatra, so I'll go with that, and I'll learn CSS along the way.

Thanks for reading till the end! 😃

Now that I work from home as a freelancer, my favourite way to get through a tough day is:

1. Scream internally
2. Realise I’m getting over-stressed
3. Roll myself a blunt
4. Smoke said blunt
5. Dick about on YouTube / internet for a while
6. Make myself a drink (tea etc)
7. Come back and work the problem with a better perspective and fresh eyes.

was jobless for some time but in those days I was seeing this smoking-hot mulata friend of a cousin. After several visits and "movie days" I asked her out for dinner which, to my surprise because I'm a nobody, she accepted.

we went out and eat some tacos in her favorite soda around the corner. And we went out a second time IIRC.

needless to say, the money that paid that modest dinner with such amazona was earned working as a freelancer in PeoplePerHour doing junior-level stuff in Python, I learned the language during my four last years in high school.

ah, how I miss that girl 🤷‍♂️.

Just found this great JQuery selector in a bit of code a freelancer wrote:

var showErrorFor = $('[name="newPass"]').attr('name')

Boss hired a freelancer to work on a new reporting dashboard. Freelancer also built a backed. Boss wants me to work on fixing that backend. I check out the DB first only to find plaintext passwords. I threw up a little.

When you decide to create a startup and then look for someone on freelancer.com to create your Million Dollar product with a budget of 750-1500

I’m terminally short of cash.

I can pay the mortgage and everything else, but I’d like a bit more for a rainy day fund.

My question is, how do you get into doing some freelance work?

I’ve looked on places like Freelancer, but it seems to be full of people offering £100 for a fully working amazon clone etc.

Anyone else find they work better between the hours of say 10am - 2am rather than the "normal office hours" of 9am - 5pm?
The problem is if I start later then the people who I work with are so absorbed in their work that I don't receive a reply to my email.

Being a freelancer is not only coding. Mostly (for me at least) it's mailing until you mail your client: "I'm done for today."

FUCK!!!

Why is it so hard to find a designer/front-end dev partner and/or freelancer that can make mobile specific designs!?

Just started my career as a Web Developer in a corporate setting. Any advice on what to do and not to do?

Been working as a Freelancer for so long and it feels I am missing something..

I think some of my co-workers see me as real life human version of Google search engine.

Hope they would understand that just because I'm little bit more up to date in tech knowledge and an accidental Google nerd doesn't make me a know it all..

But i understand their tendency to trust my recommendation over their googling skills

They want me to find

1- best freelancing website
2- best platform or service for someone who wants to do online teaching

Results that I'm aware of:

1- freelancer, guru, upwork
2- YouTube, udemy, Pluralsight, skillshare, thinkific

Any other recommendations?

working as a freelancer,. one thing my family should learn is that,. no one should ever disturb a programmer on full concentration.

[Definition] Freelancer Programmer: Programmer who don't like to be programed.

I am currently a freelancer and I get most of my work from forums and existing clients. I never had any success at those freelancing websites which basically devalue the developers.

How does it work for you? How do you get your work?

I hate UpWork and Freelancer.com fees and policies about the privacy (or lack) for your projects. But I grudgingly admit they offer protections against fraud. If you're a freelancer, or if you employ freelancers, and do so without the fraud protections of these types of services, how do you guard against being taken advantage of by clients or freelancers? I mean, anyone can write and sign contracts but in the end they're just paper promises not worth anything if the people you're working with or for are "dogs on the Internet" who can simply disappear.

That'd be last year, on my first job as a registered employee.

After working years as a freelancer, and without a degree related to IT (I'm an advertising professional), kinda applied to the job and my application was accepted!

When I saw this, I had to spend the night learning how to use gulp, bower and AngularJS, since my JS experience was really small.

I did pass the test, he really recognized the effort, told me I did everything and even a bit more than requested and I was one of the two applicants that would be hired.

I really felt pround when I was told "we really like how your GitHub is mostly documented and well maintained, most applicants don't even care about it, some don't have a GitHub account".

After I got in, besides doing my AngularJS tasks, I did get mentored on how to code and think better, handling and developing APIs, better using Git and he also helped me get rid of all my doubts and fears about using Node.

Also, everyone on the IT dept. helped me get better with bits and pieces, and it really felt like the whole team kinda mentored me in some way.

Even though the job only lasted for 4 months, due to new CEO changing things, we still keep in touch and the CTO called me to do a really nice freelance job together.

Thanks to this job and his help, my React and JS skills really went up, and I could accept better jobs once I returned to the freelance route. :D

Sometimes I still have go down the PHP route (welp, money :/), but I'm forever thankful to the experience. :D

freelancer

I think I have made a big mistake. I posted a freelancer project to a FB group. I was trying to be very careful and vet people closely so there would be less chance of fraud. The guy I gave the work, and a deposit, to was either very, very, very good at constructing a bulletproof social media profile con game or he's just too busy to get back to me on a status report I asked for two days ago. :(

Working 40 hours per week while doing freelancer stuff and now a fking masters degree due september this year. How do you guys manage it? I dont know if I could do it all... Fuck it

Well, I posted this rant a few days ago where I was expressing my desires to get a job as a Software Developer... Here I am again re-posting.

________________________________

FFS! Can I get a remote job as soft-dev?? I know a little bit of java, I mean I have a GitHub repo for a project if anyone wants to see what I'm doing.

If anyone knows or feel that can help me, please lend me a hand, I need to start working (to get real experience) and earn a little (prevent from starving in this fucking shithole country).

I'm not asking for money, I'm asking for a freaking job, a task, anything.

Little brief of my situation... I'm from Venezuela... Done!

Now for real, I'm a freelancer IT technician for almost 8 yrs, now I'm studying software engineering (8th Semester), I'm 31 years old, have a family (7 yrs old daughter, newborn baby boy), work is not flowing since the hourly price got high due to the economic crisis and clients are hiring people instead of outsourcing.

I'm not expecting to earn the minimum wage of UUSS, 150$/month can do the job! This due to the black market price of the USD (10X.000BsF so far), where 1$ represents the 1/8 part of the minimum wage here, to put it in perspective, toothpaste cost 200.000Bsf, 1/4 of the minimum wage.

Perhaps you will be asking yourself "Damn! so how do you do to survive!?" well, at least once a week a client calls and that saves the entire week, this isn't life my people, this is surviving... And if you don't believe me, I can show a receipt from the supermarket, and show you the average salary or my incomings.

Anyway enough drama and whining for today, I'm not doing this again in my life, I'm a person who achieves goals and earns what deserve (even this situation, I know that I deserve it for not thinking properly in the past, but we can't be victims of our past or do we?)

As a new freelancer I didn't have much clients , so I paired with a web designer +10 years exp. who work with me as a pm and that was a bad decision.
Although I am a back-end dev , half of the projects were frontend/WordPress theme (less price than back-end projecrs) - so 30% of the projects were cancelled .
sometimes I receive project's which have requirement, like magento, I don't know anything about ,
I tried to push myself but I burned out after six month.
he deals with clients, partner with other companies ,and I don't know anything about the terms.
at the end I was like an employee without any benefits from his company .
moreover I get my money after 45 day!!!
and not all my money .
this is a project I work for another company through him
A requirement for mobile back-end server was integrating with parse and that was my first time working with Facebook parse so ....
after two weeks ..
we received email from parse that they'll shutdown their service after a year .

so we moved to Amazon sns again my first time working with aws .
at the end I can't charge for extra money but my pm became a gold partner for that company .
the only thing that made me hold is that I need some high quality projects for my c.v.
-----------
he didn't show on hangout because I need my money .
this will be my last project with him.
wow I write too much ... I feel better now .😥

Bad part of working as a freelancer who builds things from scratch.
.
.
.
There will be always a other guy quoting to the same projects far less by using WordPress and your clients never gets the difference between them 😑

Those working as freelancer, how many times has a potential client told you that if you do this job for cheap he would refer you in his business circle and you would for sure get atleast X projects in next quarter ?

Is there anyone who works full-time remotely for a company which is based in some other country?
Not as a freelancer but as a proper employee.

So I just got asked for a quote for developing an app for a client's friend. He wanted an app that requires me to build let's just say a combination of what you see on uber with the live tracking of your uber driver, seeing all cars around your location and determining the closest one (It wasn't necessarily cars) plus profiles and another app for another set of users (I can easily make this one and determine the logged in user and in turn tailor the features for that user but they wanted two). An admin portal also was included and I had to do various integrations with Google maps. In app purchases was also necessary. Logs as the app has to keep track of all activities basically. A wallet feature was also to be implemented, scheduling, rating and complains section was also something requested and finally a mini accounting system was also to be developed. I was going to do this singlehandly as a freelancer. Obviously this is a lot of work. I also gave them a timeline of about 3 months for development. Which meant I was going to be putting all my time into developing this. Front end and backend for the app and front-end and backend for the server and database architecture. I charged them $10,000 not only for the work but also because they were going to be making money off of the app. They go "wow and why does it cost so much"...Judging from their reactions I don't think they will move further with this with me because of costs...😂 I can't even begin to wonder why they think that isn't a fair price. I have learnt from previous work before that you always state a cost for which you are absolutely sure you would want to work for else you would start doing the work and once you see how little you are being paid for so much work you end up hating the work and completing it ends up being a difficult task.

Any tips for keep motivation as freelancer? Any advice is good

It's so goddamn hard to get work on freelancer, upwork, people per hour sites when you're just starting, how are you meant to get your foot in the door when nobody fives you chance!

No racist but most of the self-claimed expert freelance programmers from India really pissed me off! Their resume has one common pattern, many of them are expert in more than 5 languages.

What are some of the worst problems, faced by you, as a freelancer?

I have decided to leave my fucking corporate job because of nonsense going on with the management fuckers. a high throughout distributed system with multiple components interacting together was asked to deliver in 2 fucking days starting from scratch.
I am asking for some tips regarding freelancer or remote job work. How do you guys find clients ? From where do I start ? I feel lost

Things I've only thought since becoming a freelancer:
How to politely phrase "b*tch better have my money" in an email after nearly a month of waiting on an invoice.