Where are the good platforms for contract work?

One thing that makes me sad, is the old "contract agent" seems to have gone the way of the dodo.

I clearly remember these folks. They acted in almost exactly the same way as literary or artist agents; searching out opportunities for their clients, and setting up interviews, etc. As a hiring manager, I dealt with them frequently, and had friends that used them.

They used to make a lot of money, because they would charge a percentage of the rate they negotiated for you.

Nowadays, it looks like they have been replaced by "race to the bottom" sites, like Upwork, or these contract companies, that hire you at a fairly low rate, and shop you out for very high rates. You get to "enjoy" the crappy treatment most companies give to contractors, but at rates lower than the employees that sit next to you, shooting spitballs at you.

I encountered this, when working with recruiters, after leaving my last company. The ones that didn't immediately hang up on me, after finding out I was older, started trying to lowball me into being one of their contract shop employees. They would love telling me that I shouldn't ask for too much, "because of my age," before "generously" mentioning that they happen to have a contract shop that would be willing to do me the huge favor of "throwing some work at me."

It's a real slime-pit, these days.

I was very successful on UpWork. However, it is not something you can jump into with no work history on the site, like "I have 16 years experience so my rate is $125/hr." People don't believe you when you say that. They want to see proof from a third party. So you need to start lower ($30 to $50/hr), stay in a niche, and successfully complete jobs while gradually raising your rates.

When someone sees glowing reviews and completed jobs, you become the "easy button" and they will pay more to decrease their risk. When they see 10 completed jobs with 5 star reviews, all mentioning the exact type of work they need, they can be pretty sure the 11th will be successful. It's possible to charge $125 or more an hour on UpWork and have to keep your settings updated so that you are not spammed with invites.

Toptal is trash if you're in the US or in EU. They have shit hourly rates and you compete against developers from anywhere in the world, so you can't ever match the rates they are throwing in.

If you are in the EU, check out Freelancermap, Austin Fraser, Hays, Malt, Darwin Recruitment, Upper.co (for less pay, but startup work).

I think one thing which is restricting your search is your tech stack. I'd honestly concentrate on finding something for Go, as I think you'll have the easiest time with that. You can try https://www.golangprojects.com/ and https://golang.cafe/ for that.

Hey! I did freelancing for a long time. It takes a while to build up work, but ultimately the only sustainable model is word of mouth. But you have to get your first few clients...

There's lots of ways to build up work, but the way I did it was by creating a few fun projects and blog posts that ended up on HN. Each one had a "I'm doing freelancing work!" ad on them. (You're kinda doing this right now!)

It might not work for everyone, but I had by far the best success by creating something that would intrigue the people I wanted to hire me.

Contracting platforms are a race to the bottom.

Successful freelancing requires a lot of outreach. Start with your network and then move on to cold outreach to companies that might need your services.

Hint: If a company has full-time job postings for your work domain, it means they need your services. You can pitch them on contract work and offer to augment their teams on a contractual basis while they search for a full-time hire.

I have been contracting for the last 20 years, never used any platform (Toptal, etc.).

I'm based in Europe and I have mostly worked in EU countries, except for a couple of very lucrative contracts in the Middle East. I can see you are based in London: London has tons of contract gigs, especially in the financial sector (mostly using JVM languages I'm afraid). If you can move around, Switzerland has also lots of contract work at the moment - and low taxes.

Take a look at jobserve.com for UK contracts.

What has worked for me so far:

- Find some good recruiters from reputable hiring agencies. Once you establish a relationship with them, they can provide a stream of constant contract opportunities. You can accept or refuse, based on location, rate, tech stack etc.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done, because the bar for entering an hiring agency is quite low these days and you get all sort of cowboys. Personally, I prefer to work with older dudes with at least 10 years of experience in the fields (reverse ageism!).

- Never, ever leave a company slamming the door. If you do a good job, they will call you back

- Linkedin lists contract gigs sometime, I have never really got anything out of it, but it's good to keep an eye

- At some point, I wrote a book that landed me a couple of good gigs. I'm not suggesting to write a book, but you can try to establish yourself as an authority is some field (Elixir, Rust, etc). Again, easier said than done

Ultimately, the hiring agencies are the gateways to the majority of contract gigs, so you really want to talk to them.

Good luck!

There are no good platforms for contract work.

There are two routes: 1) Get in touch with local hiring agencies, there are tons of contract positions 2) Become a studio yourself and take on clients (much harder than #1)

Good luck.

I've worked with A Team (www.a.team) for about a year now and I've had an amazing experience with them so far. Really interesting projects, good pay and their team is very supportive with getting you up and running. Can't recommend enough

I've been working in software consulting for over 10 years. I've worked for 5 different agencies, some small, and some household names. Every single one of these companies has hired out to independent consultants (or smaller agencies) willing to take on part time, hourly work. You have to remember most firms that are billing are constantly juggling the chicken and egg of having too much billable work in the pipeline or not enough.

My advice - figure out your core niche (i.e. GCP, Go, Rust) and reach out to 2-3 firms and propose your services and availability. Look in your LinkedIn network for any 1st or 2nd connections working at consulting firms.

>I find I'm close to having to abandon 10 years of consulting because I have no idea where to find anything else than full-time employment.

I'm sure that many of the clients you made happy during those years will gladly work with you again or make introductions. Between you and an unknown, you have a leg up. That's one of the advantages of consulting and having a track record of always delivering.

If you want to start your own thing, I've written a tiny Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/131066829330549965...

It's also good you included your contact information in your profile.

I did a quick search for companies using Elixir. One site for example: https://elixir-companies.com/en

You could reach out to them and do the same for Rust, Go, etc.

This drew my attention:

>Starting as a freelance consultant, was hired in 2018 as Technical Director to oversee the engineering aspect of the company. In 2020 took on part of the administrative concerns, such as managing the employees day-to-day and preparing for a smooth handover in case of sale.

You can't mass produce people who can do this. That comes with real world experience. You can package that Interim Savior experience and make it lucrative. What are the signals and selectors of an organization that needs that?

You can also reflect back on all the entities you served during these years and can segment by sector/industry (and many roles), by one role across sectors/industries, or by problem. Then decide the approach you want to take depending on your preferences: maybe you like to work within a certain sector, maybe you like to work with certain roles (devs, salespeople, marketing people, designers, etc.)

I’ve been a freelancer / consultant in the UK since 2013. Here’s the approach I took.

Initially, I stuck with the ‘permanent’ day job and start freelancing part time, in the evenings. This allowed me to focus on building a network of connections without the stress of needing to find a contract that would pay for my cost of living.

My first contract was through upwork (when it was called elance). I found a UK-based client who needed a small job doing for $25/hour. This merged into a new opportunity with the same client. 9 years on, and I’m about to go back to working for the same client once more, on a different project, at a much higher rate.

In parallel with this, as the pressure was not on to earn a living from freelancing (yet), I didn’t feel the need to fill every spare hour with billable work. Instead, I signed up to a bunch of different meetups, and volunteered to help run a couple of them. Through this I built a network of connections and opportunities, which led to _every_ other client I have worked for. I can’t stress enough how important this was for my freelancing career - visibility is everything. Tell everyone who will listen that you are a freelancer and you are open to new opportunities.

The contract market is rich and lucrative in the UK but you can’t expect to be handed opportunities via platforms. As others have mentioned, the best gigs come to those who put themselves out there. Speak to other developers at meetups and conferences, tell people you are a freelancer and eventually something will crop up.

Good luck!

Best of luck, I recently perused this path and abandoned it pretty quickly. I found a couple of companies looking for contractors that seemed to be a good fit, however, they kept delaying their projects and telling me they'd get in touch in a month or two (presumably over economic uncertainty).

I get the sense that yes, contracting platforms are a race to the bottom, but also this is a pretty bad time to be launching a freelance career.

As a person who is starting a new freelance career in 10 days with 12 years of experience, I’ll keep an eye on the answers in that thread :)

Contract work is about relationships.

Since you have 16 years of experience, talking to all the people you have worked for and with over your career might be the best place to start.

As a rule of thumb, a good working hypothesis is that there are already enough contractors/consultants in the market to meet demand...or another way of thinking about it is that established businesses already have logistical solutions to their normal operational requirements.

This means that random potential clients won't be excited that you are suddenly available. They already have consultants. Those consultants work hard to keep them as clients.

Easy button websites for finding consulting work are races to the bottom because new consultants only get the worst work. Good work is regular well paying work and regular work means there are a regular cadre of consultant/contractors in that workflow.

Quite simply, contracting/consulting is not driven by performance but by sales. The easy button is Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Good luck.

There are no platforms, or no good ones anyway.

You have to network on your own.

As a fallback, you can approach a larger agency and see if you can subcontract through them on some of their projects.

Looks like you’re based on London, so first thing is to change resume to CV when speaking to UK based people. Calling it a resume will out then off for timezone, tax and cost issues.

Also, you’re in London so start meeting people - go to tech meet-ups, go to marketing meet-ups and tell people you’re a freelance developer.

Networking is the way to success in the freelance world. Also reach out to old employers and clients and ask if they have work.

(The reason I say marketing meet-ups is that many marketing agencies need dev work doing but don’t want devs on staff - I get freelance work for this)

Also speak to other agencies as offer yourself as overflow resource.

Note that even on TopTal clients usually prefer full-time contractors.

You might try job boards such as RemoteOk (assuming you don't want to come into client offices) and just reach out to see if a company may be okay with that.

Platforms are all crap, consulting agencies will cut in half your potential profits, recruiters have jobs with terrible rates.

You need to network in person - which is hard, thanks to the BS lockdowns of the last few years.

Try to leverage previous contacts / other contractor friends. Eg. My current client (which I found via contacts from a previous jobs) pays pretty decent and I'm referring my friends there. Before that I was referred in some nice places by friends.

Networking is everything, don't feed recruiters or contractor resellers.

How did you find jobs in the past?

I just found a 6 month contract at £600/day after a 2.5 week job hunt. 2.5 weeks from first message to a recruiter to getting a verbal offer. The actual contract took another week to come through.

I just went to all of the job boards, searched for contract jobs and applied by sending my CV with no cover letter. Four recruiters got back to me and one of them had a contract that was at a good company.

Just send out lots of applications and you'll get something.

I think platforms for contract work are designed to turn things into "a complete race to the bottom".

I’ve always wondered if this model would work:

Find an extroverted person with a sales type personality who seems to attend all kinds of tech meet ups and offer them a 10% referral fee for any work they find you. They’re already networking constantly.

Long time UK contractor/freelancer here, I've also done a lot of hiring in the UK.

The problem over the past few years has been IR35 which has effectively gutted/killed the UK contractor market (including lorry drivers and temp roles).

Because of this many companies will only take on contractors within scope of IR35 which drives down the day rate. So employers have found it easier to focus on permanent recruitment.

Your best bet is to look for contracts overseas, or just move out of the UK. I've had some success with braintrust (usebraintrust.com) but with US orgs

https://www.moonlightwork.com/

https://clouddevs.com/ is Latin-america specific. Came up in "Toptal trying to sue us for saying there are Toptal alternatives that cost less" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32472398) last month.

You have experience in languages that have relatively limited hiring pools. My advice would be to look for full-time roles that need help in these languages, email the hiring manager/company, and offer your services part-time or on a contract basis. I would bet a lot of them would be happy to get someone in the role quickly than have no one at all. Good luck.

I saw the same problems with part-time/contract work and I'm in the process of building a job board specifically catered towards this. I have many startups lined up based on some of my writing on https://parttimetech.substack.com/. Hope to get the job board up shortly. Check it out if interested.

A few related insights (some you've already mentioned):

* existing job boards are not built for this

* there is actually a pretty wide range of what contract/part-time work could look like. my hope is to help companies explore this a bit further to create better outcomes for employers and employees

* employers need help seeing when contract/part-time work is actually the right tool for the job. i hope to emphasize this more in future posts. most just don't think of it as an option.

What are the good platforms?

Emailing the CEO of small, local software companies with your experience and your rate.

Also, posting your info on the monthly HN Who's Hiring Freelancers post.

I've recently talked to these guys https://forward.id/. From the hiring manager's perspective the conditions look attractive.

If you’re trying to get a decent rate for your services, you’re likely to have better luck relying on things that are somewhat differentiated by you: your network of past satisfied clients, your particular technical and sales skills, your particular location and ability to be on-site for key meetings.

If you’re looking to avoid all the sales work and differentiated value you can bring, then you can jump on the platforms, but then expect to be compared against everyone else on the platform rather than against everyone for whom a trusted associated has vouched for.

Hacker News seeking freelancer threads can still be great. I’ve found two assignments this way, including recently. Majority I find via recruiters though. Avoid “platforms” they’re all awful

Never worked with them but I have with a contractor who had good things to say: https://www.a.team/

Another route is to apply for full time jobs and ask early in the process if they’ll consider hiring you as a contractor. Give your honest reasons why you want to go this route. If they continue with the interview process, knock their socks off so they can’t afford not to use you at whatever terms you want.

Don’t use a platform, they’re designed to screw you. Idk where you’re based but it’s best to take on work you can find through people you know (even tenuously). You can usually find work by bugging people you’ve worked with in the past (or if you’re new, friends from university or school). There is ample work to go around, but it’s not out on those boards.

lakecityquietpills.com.

Oh, not that kind of contract work? Well then...My first stop when hiring extra help is a tech-focused temp agency, here in the SF Bay Area I've had outstanding luck with Robert Half. Their recruiters speak tech and understand my company's needs. Temps I've used/interviewed really know their stuff and have been happy with the arrangement (pay, flexibility, possibility of benefits through the temp agency). As far as I've experienced they treat customers and their temps fairly as they understand the value of all involved. I'm contacting them this week for a database setup gig. Downside is buyout cost if we really like the temp and want to hire.

For finding contractors, schmoozing at conferences and personal network have been the best, but that takes time. Have spec'ed things out on Upwork and had good work done (I've never based contractor selection on low price).

Best of luck on your search!

> All the job boards are looking for full time employees, and on Hacker News the only recommendation is Toptal.

I've just spent 30 second on jobserve.co.uk and found 3 contract positions for Golang developers in London. Which job boards were you checking out?

Someone I know has recommended YunoJuno. Edit: It looks like it's UK only.

Working on an idea that would largely be reputation based starting with a community that then provides work to each other. https://m3o.org

I've talked to the founder of and have been keeping an eye on Maasive: https://joinmaasive.com/

If you're in the EU, Malt is great

I am a manager in huge transnational outstaff/outsource/consulting service provider responsible for a group of customers with projects and individual consultants.

I make my living building, fixing, running and dismantling IT organizations.

I'd like to share my vision of why it's happening with the market.

1. Supply and Demand: Demand for individual contractors is low, supply of people who want to be self-employed is huge. Means customer has leverage in negotiations and thus race to the bottom. Demand for FTE is huge, while supply is low. Means employee can dominate the market and ask for high compensations.

2. Cost-To-Company: Everyone compares cash on hands with rate billed to customer. While company bears cost for extra taxes, benefits and internal services (Payroll, Operations, Internal IT e.t.c.). That's could be called direct costs.

3. Cost of developer/employee acquisition (On average pass rate is 1:20 (hire:Active Candidate) for developed countries and 1:90 for developing countries, and 1:200 for some consultancy roles) consisting off interview cost, recruiter bonus and other expenses.

4. Cost of customer acquisition: Mostly time spent by salesmans, architects, analysts, managers, designers and also representative costs. (Some presales can take 3 years, and all payed from company pocket)

5. Scale and Complexity: While it's still possible to find solo assignment there is a hoard of people who wants to take it, and it's a tiny part of market. 80% of a market it's a long term team play. And customer wants to have a team starting on Monday.

6. Economy of Scale and Offshore: Service providers are able to keep back office costs low while providing flexibility, scalability and risk management.

7. Bureaucrats: There's a ton of bullshit work needs to be done to get a contract (Legal, compliance, certifications), individual contractor theoretically can walk the route, but it will take forever and cost a fortune.

It's harder to compete with leviathans than ever before, but all is not lost. Here's the recipe.

1. Specialization. Focus on one language (Like Java) or even one technical problem (Like migrating to microservices). Focus on one business domain like e-commerce.

2. Sales and Marketing. Make your own blog, linkedin page, youtube, attend conferences, get certificates, talk to your ex-colleagues, managers, customers in a search for new assignments.

3. Market. You probably should avoid big-co's and focus on SMB's. Your ideal company should be small and unregulated internally and externally. Ideally Decision maker should be as far from IT as possible and inexperienced as manager to buy your 2. Sales and Marketing.

4. Convenience. You should emulate convenience to hire you, get yourself a personal assistant and lawyer to make paperwork. Choose trusted location to work from, to eliminate legal risks.

5. Jack of All Trades. Advertise as expert, work as problem-solver, talk to business, make documentation, code, test, build infra, sell your solutions.

6. Play long - stay focused. Onboarding to some roles might take even 6 month, no one needs jobhoppers. Work 1 contract at a time, avoid multi-contracting, better to jack the rate.

7. Build a team. Maintain a pool of few dozen of trusted partners to take on larger engagements.

8. Lazy support. Provide on demand support for solutions you have delivered for stand by cost.

Maybe I have forgot something but for the most part this is it.

YunoJuno