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!

*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.

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.

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.

The life of a freelancer:

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

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.

My hero.... This motherfucker client actually asked for an e-commerce affiliate website made by german devs for under 40€.

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

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.

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 😑

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?

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?)

!rant

So, when I was young, I wanted to be a freelancing nomad. You know, live the live, work remote and travel.

But I didn't have the bones to pursue that. After 10 years of struggling as a normal "programmer", I did a little of everything. I did normal boring "erp maintenance" in C#, Oracle and some legacy stuff called Visual WEB GUI , which was fun, but required a full 9,5 hours work day, 8:00 am to 6:30pm, and the bosses where squares, and I was young and wanted to try something out of the corporate world.

Then I did some work for a newly funded consulting company that used python, Django, and postgresql, but the bosses promised a lot and delivered none, (I was supposed to work backend and have frontend support, which I did not have, and that hurt my productivity and bosses instead of looking at what they promised but did not deliver, they just discounted my salary 3 months in a row, so Bye bye MFs!!

Then I did some remote work for some guys, that, I managed to sustain for a whole year, the pay was good, the stack was simple, just node.js and pug templates, that gig was good, but communication with the bosses was hard, and eventually things started to get hard for them and me, and we had to say farewell to each other, I miss those guys. This is the only time I remember having fun working, I could work whenever I wanted, I only had to reach the weekly goals, and then my time was mine, I could work from home in the odd hours, or rent a chair in a co working space if I wanted to socialize.

Then fate got me one big gig with a multinational company, and I could hire some people, but I delegated too much and was asking too little of myself, and that project eventually died because I did not know how to negotiate.

So, I quit the whole entrepreneur idea, and got a public job at my University, I was a public employee with all the perks, but none of the fun, I just had to clock-in, work, and clock-out. That experience led me to discover a lot of myself, I worked as a public employee for a year and a half, and in that time, I discovered more about myself than what I learnt in 27 years of previous life experience.

Then, I grew bored of that life, and wanted some action, and I found more than enough fun in a VC funded startup ran by young narcissists that did not have a clue of what they were doing, I helped them organize themselves into "closing stuff", you know, finish the things you say you have finished. Just to give you an idea of what it was like before I got there, the were working for 3 months already on this project, they had on paper 50% of the system done and working, when I tried to use the app, I couldn't even sign-up without hacking some database commands, (this was supposedly done). So I spent a month there teaching these guys how to finish stuff, they got, Sign Up, (their sign up was a mess, it is one of those KYC rich things, that financial apps have), Login, and some core functionality working in a month, while in the previous 4 months they only did parallel work, writing endpoints that were not tried, and an app that did not communicate with the backend. But the bosses weren't happy with me, because I told them time and time again that we were not going to reach the goal they needed to reach to keep receiving funds from the investors, and I had to quit before it became a mayhem of toxic employer/employee relationship.

So now I decided to re-engage with life, I have funds to survive about a month and half, I have a good line of credit in case I need some more funds, and the time of the world.

So wish me luck!!! And I'll be posting often, because I would like opinions, hear from people with similar life experiences and share anecdotes.

Next post, it's going to be about how I discovered taskwarrior, and how implemented my first weekend following some of the aspects of GTD to do all my housekeeping chores, because, I think that organizing myself will be key to survive as a freelancer nomad.

I have two potential client meetings next week. The first one now knows she needs a website (but I have no clue what her budget is), I think she wants me to host the site as well as do site maintenance. The second potential client I'm working using the barter system (but I think she will end up owing me some money at the end). We will see how they both go.

So I am in a dilemma right now... I have like two lifes right now: One the one side I am a student in applied computer science and on the other side I am already working in a Dev company and as a freelancer. Compared to my work, university is boring as hell. I would love to just skip university and start my own company with my other freelancer friend! We already have some clients so we would have a good start. But many people, like my parents for example, told me that need at least degree to achieve something in life. I told them that I would try do earn some certificates (like Cisco) but they are still not happy with this idea. So I would love to hear your opinion guys... Do you think that a degree is absolutely necessary? Thanks in advance!

I need a life advise - pls share your wisdom!

I have my first client located in the US. He wants to pay with a cashier's check and I have no idea how that works. How do you European or even german freelancer are getting paid by american clients?

So, I'm about to be up shit's Creek. I need a new source of income, ideally either a new job or becoming a freelancer. I have been making intranet sites with ASP.NET for a while now, and I can tell two things:
1. It's too corporate minded, so I'll need a fucking degree
2. It's too corporate minded, so I'll be stuck with people like my boss, who still use tables to align content despite the project having bootstrap.

I need to do something more fulfilling, but I probably will have to leave my job by December anyway due to some major fuck ups in my life, do I need to get something lined up. I have been brushing up on my HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills, but when it comes down to it, I suck at design so my "portfolio" is blatant clones to learn CSS and shitty Spartan things.

Basically, I'm anxious, terrified, and unable to figure out what comes next. Do I keep sending job applications and praying to whatever deity will listen, it do I start figuring out this freelance thing? If freelance, then how do I get into it? I'm terrified and desperate.

Prigression is stopped at the current job. I work with PHP, java and other related languages aaand jquery. I feel like I should start learning vue/angular and rewrite the 2000line jquery mess i have now for one of the projects.
Working as a freelancer after work - how do you guys find time to learn new languages/libraries and have a life at the same time?

I think I'm ready for freelancer work
but I'm not sure how this will effect my life
I want to do this for extra bucks, and eventual freedom

So, the story starts with me getting a job. Full-time job for the first time in my 21 years old life. After short conversation about how amazing this company is, after countless lies and stood questions they decided to hire me. I had to get come on Monday a week later with everything prepared.

So of course I did that and got to my workplace on designated time. Turned out nobody was expecting me, nothing was prepared for a new programmer and everyone seemed angry at me for no apparent reason.

After long talk with my new boss I got some less than 100$ pc with CPU that couldn't handle virtualization and expected me to work on software that needed extensive use of virtual machine.

PC is of course filled with all kinds of spying software that uses most of the resources. IT teams only job is to check if programmers are working their assess off for at least 8 hours a day.

I've filled a ticket about granting me access to Debian machine on the mainframe so I could work. No response for two weeks. I've lost hope already.

I have to work on open space with more than 30 engineers. Screams, phone calls, alarms, all at once, all the time. My colleagues seem to not care and I can't understand how.

I was tasked with rewriting major application because old developer did some half assed piece of burning shit. It took him more than one year, I'm finishing it in less than two weeks.

Of course nobody except for me is preparing any kinds of documentation. I had to reverse-engineer whole API for alarm system.

Salary is less than a junior programmer should earn.

But I'm stuck here for at least a year because nobody's here wants a guy whose only experience is as a freelancer.

Hi Guys! Currently I'm learning backend web development on freecodecamp.com. Before this I've learned python, just for fun, but I 'painfully' enjoy both. I'm working on an other field now (cnc machining), but I tought I could become a developer. Now I've lost my confindent because a few article on Quora. There a guy (and not only he) said, technicly it'll take over my life. Unbelievable amount of extra time exclude working hours, stress and 18 hours working days. My long plan was to be an independent freelancer, with an easy working schedule (I don't want to be rich, jus have a food valanced life). I've been hoped in a fairy tale? It'll drain my life?