I've been thinking of a way to work around these traits, and what I have come up with is - work part time, on B2B, with invoices instead of employment contracts. I'm hoping that with B2B it will be easier to find work, fast. It should be more flexible to employers.
But where do I find people to do work for?
Edit: I'm a full stack developer, mainly focused on Go and React.
When you're freelancing you're essentially interviewing for your job every single minute you're in front of or have an active project with the client. Soft skills and doing work that has nothing to do with engineering is even more of a requirement.
Yes, I would pay a recruiter to keep around so that I do not have to spend time sending resumes and searching job boards whenever a contract dries up.
Right now I am looking for work. If you're a recruiter (or another engineer for that matter) interested in such an arrangement, email is in my profile.
It’s a weird prerequisite, but without it there generally isn’t enough context to do meaningful work sans a lot of hand holding.
Find companies for whom you are a total catch of a full time hire, and negotiate a part time contract.
I was on a 20h/wk max retainer for one co, and another I could flexibly bill anywhere from 15-40h max depending on load. They both asked me to come full time before and after working a few months. But I held the advantage. I also worked for slightly less pay than ideal, but the lifestyle was the point for me.
That's my big takeaway from freelancing. The power relationship is different. You want to be in a position where they really need you.
In my experience as a python/full stack freelancer, you're best off starting with a full time and then reducing your hours per week after getting familiar with the project. I've done this several times, either because the project went in to more of a maintenance phase, or at my request (normally to spend more time on a side project).
I think you have to have enough experience that you (and the employer) are comfortable skipping the interview gauntlet. After all, if you're contract if you're not doing good work they can just stop. One thing that is helpful is to suggest working on a small, limited project for like 2-4 weeks, and they can decide if they want to continue working with you or not. (of course, you have to do a good job on the project).
It's a little weird, there are times when I'm scrambling for work and it seems like there's nothing out there, and other times when I'm turning away work, but if you can deal with the unpredictability it can be good.
Because they were well-respected in the WP community, there wasn’t much interviewing needed other than discussing the specifics of the project.
I found them via the plugin GitHub.
I'm looking for a contractor at the moment: https://travelmap.net/jobs/fullstack-web-developer
We did eventually build up a stable of long-term clients, but we got those by doing lots of short-term work, each one of which was at least one interview-equivalent. You also have to learn how to judge when to pitch - you will get a lot of nibbles for jobs that don't make sense, are not serious, scams or beyond your capabilities. You need a well-tuned bullshit detector, and especially when you're hungry, correctly judging situations can be tricky. But writing proposals and estimates for everyone will bleed you dry, and you'll probably develop a rep as a sucker - a lot of companies solicit proposals they never intend to act on for various reasons.
In any case, good clients for consultants generally come from word of mouth. So you want to do good work for someone who knows lots of small business owners. Go look for those people. Small IT support shops are less plentiful now with the rise of cloudified commodity services, but that was my angle.
FWIW, I went back to full-time employment. We cold make it work, but we couldn't thrive, and it is hard to grow a shop on contract work (2x the workload generally means 2x the employees - there's very little leverage). I make significantly more as a wage slave than I did as "my own boss".
But you might well do way better. And there absolutely is a bright side - freedom is a big one. It was very hard to give up ownership of my time again. You also meet a lot of folks who can be very different from the sort you run in to in HugeCo technical silos.
Have you considered the consulting industry? Project rotation is high (2-3 projects/year) but you don't look jumpy in your resume (although to be honest, I have done the same before and only once a potential employer brought it up as a red flag)
We're always looking for experienced software developers who are personable and can go deep into a topic with learners, work through exercises, help them correct mistakes and so on. It's 1-2 hours of well-paid work per session:
https://apply.workable.com/skiller-whale/j/2D3E071FD5/
(Warning you do have to prepare each session quite well - it's much harder to teach something that you know as a working programmer than as a teacher, because you're probably not used to saying what you know out loud!)
But if you know the topic and like helping other software devs it might be exactly the kind of short-term you're looking for.
Happy to answer any questions here, and I'd probably be involved in an interview session too.
I was the only person working on the codebase, deployment was broken, but the code was actually pretty good and had a test suite. The guy I was working with was easy going and let me take the reigns.
It was one of the best gigs I've had. Sadly the work stopped (their business was a casualty of the pandemic).
I'm not sure how you'd go about finding these types of jobs, but they do exist!
Best of luck.
I don’t know any where you live, but it is a thing. They’ll connect you to clients and my experience is that nobody throws leetcode interviews at consultants.
If you are willing to work full time you can also join a consultancy and they’ll find you something to do.
(It certainly doesn't help that agents post jobs as part-time only to lure you to apply so they can start nagging you.)
The part-time roles that are available are usually either very simple, short-term tasks, Or companies with extremely limited budgets that will under-pay you, and try to squeeze the most out of you and give you trouble with payment and hours worked.
I suggest opening a company, adding some friends, and taking up multiple contracts simultaniously.
You can pick “part-time” availability and “small” or “medium” company size (whatever looks good) and you’ll only hear about part-time jobs at small companies.
Source: I launched my own software consulting business back in July 2022 and I work with a handful of customers "part-time" (e.g. project based work, 10 hours a week).
But due to resource constraints those things just get pushed. Specially IT things like backups
Why not?
I heard good things about them but haven't got in myself because they require leetcode puzzles which I suck at atm.
This is first to me. Why'd recruiters not like if you've worked on only one project for a long time? On the contrary, I think it's a plus - shows stability and 'long-term' mindset individual.