2021-05-17 15:41:07

My question is simple. Do any of you do Freelancing work? Anything related to coding? I have a full-time job, and I'm great financially, but just wondering to get maybe some more side income cause you never know. I'm thinking maybe making websites for clients, although my first thought is not too much success with visual parts.

2021-05-17 16:57:42

I've helped run a small programming company for a year.  You can do this no problem but only if you can pull off frontend or have a sighted person who can.  I don't think I've ever seen freelance backend-only work.

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2021-05-19 15:42:34

my question is ...

how do you handle frunt end (css included) when you are blind?
Obviously you can code the colors in to your stylesheet, but how do you ensure your widths and heights don't over lap and all those other stuff that makes your web pages unreadable?
how do you deel with it?

best regards
never give up on what ever you are doing.

2021-05-19 16:46:19

You don't.  You get a sighted partner or coworker, or you have enough vision left that you can get by.

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2021-05-19 19:35:09

I am freelancing

Who am I? Simply me!

2021-05-19 23:16:49

i do, but as a sound designer.
its verry unreliable though. it shouldn't be your only source of income.

2021-05-19 23:35:07

Programming is different.  Programming is reliable if you're any good and can network.  There's more demand than good programmers.  But you'll need a portfolio and all that.  Our attempt at it could have succeeded but fell apart due to interpersonal issues and overhead of trying to run a multi-person company without all being roommates.  Also because two of us (me being one of them) wanted to stop.

because here's the problem.  You know all those horror stories about the dev team who worked 80 hours to meet the deadline while being talked to by the entire technically inept company who thinks it's just flipping switches?  Those are entirely true.  Except that there's no one between you and the client to act as a buffer unless you're big enough to have a dedicated sales person or whatever, so you're the programmer *and* have to fend them off long enough to program.  They'll have no problem changing the requirements because surely x is a small change.  And if they're unsatisfied they'll just not pay you.  Plus you have no benefits or anything except that if you get enough money you can technically take as much vacation as you want.  As a side job with a sighted partner and in the kind of situation where you can be really choosy about your clients maybe it's better, but speaking from experience it's not for the faint of heart unless you can get the company to be big enough that you can have the luxury of the supporting teams and things that normal companies have to insulate the programmers from the clients.  I don't mean this in a "people suck" way but the problem is that unlike sound or art or whatever, there's no understanding on the part of the client as to what's going on.  You're just this weird black box where requirements come in and software comes out with some weird arbitrary timeline plus you keep asking nonsensical questions that seem stupid over and over and every time they change something that they think is small you say no or move the deadline out.  I wouldn't like being on the other end of that dynamic either, but there's no way to avoid it.  So now you've got your 40 hours or more of coding plus your however much of promptly dealing with clients, and probably you need to run multiple contracts in parallel to keep the lights on or whatever so that the pipeline never runs dry.

So yeah blindness is an issue.  And maybe someone is going to be like "but it's great, what do you mean".  It's possible my experience with it was just particularly bad.  But blindness isn't the primary reason I'd avoid it.

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2021-05-19 23:48:31

So question. If these companies hiring programmers think they’re so smart, why do they hire programmers in the first place? Obviously they know everything, so why don’t they just do it themselves and figure it out? It's so simple, after all. I'm sure they can figure it out, right? BTW, by figure out I mean they try in their infinite wisdom to fix something and end up breaking something and learn that they really do need to sit back and be quiet while the real experts do their jobs.

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2021-05-20 00:16:31

You're misunderstanding.  I'm not being disparaging as such.  If you hire Omer for sound, say, there's going to be a lot of back and forth.  But it's back and forth that's easily explained.  "I need x because y" or "it will take z additional time because these steps".  Which is fine.  When it's the client asking it's about "please justify why I gave you the money".  When it's the other side asking it's about "I need to refine what's going on".  All good.  Everyone involved understands who is in what role.  The client knows they don't know.  This is all the same mostly.  It's fine on the Ethiccal level and the is someone being stupid level.

But the exchange with programming is something like (slightly modified true story).  Client: we need to track every user action going through the system and turn them into billing data now because person X got back from vacation and noticed this critical oversight.  Programmer: sorry, you didn't tell us that and we have to start the project over, give us an additional month.  Client: Why?  Programmer: insert a bunch of stuff about design patterns and databases that might as well be Latin.

Any exchange between the average Joe and an expert in some field is somewhat like this.  I'm sure that if we looked we could find other fields with the same problem.  But Omer probably never tells clients that sorry, we can't make this change without me literally deleting all my work, or anything like that.  And when they do say something they can probably demo why it doesn't work or whatever else.  if you tell someone that the problem is that you rent a recording studio or something and it's not available till Tuesday, that's a good explanation in the sense that it's easy to communicate.

But programming is like hiring Gandalf.  He'll say something about how the stars are bright tonight and you shouldn't go via Moria and the moon is auspicious, so give him until next month and your problems will be solved.  But you're paying upwards of $50/hour for that minimum, you only find out if you got Gandalf when the software is done, and every time you ask a question on the way through you get some other answer, maybe about how mars is aligned with Venus so we need an extra week, or Pluto's orbit wobbled so sorry the server was down for your critical demo with investors, or whatever.  I'm not doing freelancing anymore but high level programming stuff is such that I literally can't explain my job to anyone who isn't also a programmer other than basically saying "I make software" and maybe mentioning a few of the clients I'm allowed to admit to.

So like.  You can deal with it.  But it quickly becomes a lot of your job.  Sales is an entirely different skillset.  Translating from the backend architecture to something the client understands is a skillset.  Saying no repeatedly without alienating someone takes time and energy.  Dragging all the info out of the client at the beginning without losing them is a whole thing.  because let me tell you, they don't know what you need and they will totally forget to mention some really important thing until week 3.

But no, it's not the client's fault.  It's not your fault either.  But it is prone to getting to a place where the client doesn't understand why the answers you're giving them are basically "trust us".  Saying "trust us" over and over isn't going to make anyone happy at all if they're giving you $50/hour and you're doing 40 hour weeks.  Nor is saying "no, we an't do that" to really small-seeming things like adding an additional dashboard or whatever else.  The rates are great, but the business/communication overhead, which I might add you're not paid for usually, is brutal.  Consider how many people around here struggle for years to get good enough to make a game.  The newest coder on this forum is more informed than your clients.  your clients are going to think that you code in binary or insert any other stereotype you care to think of.  Again. This. Is. Not. Wrong.  They're not being idiots.  They know they need you because they don't' know how this works.  But the dynamic is very energy-intensive anyway.

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2021-05-20 00:35:21

I was Morceau talking about the unreasonable people. I’ve heard so many stories about company is asking programmers why nothing has gotten done, programmers telling them that they needed a little more time, and the company saying no you have to do things this way. I can’t cite any stories off the top of my head, but there’s this one that sticks out to me where this guy‘s boss asked him to do something that couldn’t reasonably be accomplished in the deadline that was set, and his boss essentially told him to force it or check out. I could be paraphrasing this a little, but that's as much as I can remember. It's one thing to be skeptical, but it's entirely different to set unreasonable expectations and kick your employees to the curb when they inevitably fail. Granted, not all companies are like that, in fact I'm sure most aren't. It's the unreasonable people I directed that post towards. Hopefully I cleared up the confusion with my post.

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2021-05-20 00:57:57

Well if you're not talking about freelancing, that's different, and yeah bad companies exist.  If you decide to build a tech team as employees and you aren't willing to trust them you should either get a different tech team or not do one.  But freelancing doesn't usually turn into that sort of relationship.

Even so, even in employee land, there's definitely a different dynamic when you know more than your manager by enough that your manager can't even tell if you're working.

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2021-05-20 01:07:49

Yeah, true. I wasn’t sure if it was related to freelancing or not. Actually, can you even be fired from a freelancing thing? I don’t really know enough about it to be honest with you.

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2021-05-20 01:41:01

Ok, let me rephrase: when I say freelancing doesn't turn into that sort of relationship I mean that it doesn't turn into the sort of relationship where you have trust with clients and can say "sorry it's going to be late because".  If you want those sorts of horror stories as described in post 10, freelancing will definitely give you one in very short order.

before I go into the rest of this let me just say that 99% of the people who freelance don't have these sorts of problems 99% of the time, but it will happen at some point and you do have to be prepared for the worst.

In normal employee land, you can be fired but being fired still gets you paid for the work you did because employers can't go "we fired you and also you're not getting this month's salary".  far as I know that's illegal.  You also have to really go all out before your employer will sue you or something.  In freelancing land, you don't have these protections.  It depends what your contract says, but usually there will be clauses and things in the client's favor to the effect of "if we get really unhappy you have to give the money back" or what have you.  It also depends on jurisdiction and some other things, but "if you don't meet the deadline we can sue you for $100000" is actually the sort of thing that can end up in your contract for example.  It'll be phrased something like you promise January 17, not having January 17 is a breach of contract, on breach of contract you owe us $100000 in damages.  I'm simplifying but the effect is the same.  Obviously when you're small you can just walk away from the really bad contracts like that of course--they can't force you to sign.

When I did this, and also from my friend doing it now, the most common thing is you end up doing a few weeks of work for free, but if you're up against someone with the money they can just sue your ass out of existence if you make them mad enough no problem.  We had one client seriously threaten that.  They don't have to win, they just have to out-money you.  In all seriousness don't work for lawyers, out-moneying you for them is free.

In normal employment land, firing is the worst bad thing that can happen to you.  in freelancing land, firing is the *best* bad thing that can happen to you.

You want to be behind an LLC and with the corporate veil in place.  If you aren't then the worst bad thing that can happen to you is you get sued for $100000 or something and the judge says "sorry, you didn't have a corporation in place, better sell your house".  I'm not kidding.  That can happen to any small business that's not using a corporation of some sort.  Fortunately at least in the U.S. they're like $300 a year and you can start one by filling out an online form in 20 minutes, but there is some overhead.  basically the more you run your LLC like a proper business the better off you are: you definitely want a business bank account, you probably want to consider paying yourself and recording what you paid yourself, and you should probably talk to a lawyer because I'm a programmer and this is really important to get right.  If you have all of this in place, then the worst that someone can do in the vast majority of cases is take all your business assets.  If you don't, then your personal property and personal finances can also be seized by lawsuits and the like and you can *literally* end up with not a penny to your name.  Fortunately this is very very easy to avoid.

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2021-05-20 17:30:34

It turns out to be less than $300 if you establish your LLC in a place like Nevada or Delaware, which also have the added benefit of not taxing out-of-state income last time I looked. Certain states like California impose further restrictions if you do business their, but California is a minority here.

I don't know when you last looked into this, but there's actually a pretty big market for backend development now. I've signed smaller contracts for database management and automation and such, for instance. It's definitely not unheard of, but if you want to actually create full websites and get good reviews doing it, expect to need some sighted help.

Freelancing isn't for the faint of heart, and a lot of folks successfully do it to get a bit of extra income on the side. Expect to hustle pretty consistently, and experience unpredictable rough patches. If you aren't structured by nature and/or haven't mastered the skill of time management, you're going to struggle. Also depending on how far you go, expect to have to manage bookkeeping, sales, taxes and upkeep in addition to the actual work.

My suggestion would be to be very particular about how you market yourself and stick to a certain skillset. A jack of all trades is well and good until a client has you doing something visual, and then you have to explain why you can't.

The protections you get are outlined in your contract, and it's up to you to examine it from top to bottom. This is very important and cannot be understated.

Just some random tips, HTH.