Contracting and working from home as a free lance developer- how viable is it as a career option (x/post /r/cscareerquestions)?

If you genuinely just want to 'get by' (earning a few hundred a month) then it's relatively easy to do the freelancing thing as long as your are happy topping up your income with tax credits and housing benefit if you need to (they're easy to apply for).

The difficulty of it is overstated by people that lack the self-discipline to work freelance or just don't have the ability/drive to turn their skills into an actual business. Or perhaps they thought they'd be earning the same wage within a year of starting their own business.

I think for a programmer you'd be better off trying to find a company specifically looking for someone to work full-time remotely rather than going it alone and finding your own clients.

The thing is once you become a freelancer a large part of your job is managing clients, marketing yourself, and finding work before the work you're doing finishes.

Finding clients is a crapshoot and many will have no clue what they want from you and they are more than happy to rip you off. The worst clients are the ones who go through a torturous hiring process, develop their enormous plans for their company with you, hire you for two small tasks and then just go completely silent and never speak to you again.

If you think it's tedious to work for an idiot now imagine someone even more clueless who feels no obligation to keep giving you work. That's most clients.

I can't tell you how to become a freelance programmer but I'm sure if you're serious about it you'll find the information online somewhere.

The real question is whether it will fix your 9-to-5 blues and the answer depends a lot on you.

I spend a lot of time feeling like it's a terrible way to live. I'm alone a lot and I can go half mad some days. I do miss banter and being part of a group. If I dick around now for 30 minutes I don't get paid for it.

In the beginning especially it feels like you are just drifting in and out of unemployment and you need to do several job interviews a month.

Getting sick or going on holiday can potentially lose me thousands if a client doesn't feel like waiting and chasing people up for money that could realistically never pay is nerve-racking.

But then I look at going back to the 9-5 and I'm quickly reminded how much I hated it. Often the amount of work I'd do in an eight hour office day can be done in 3 hours. You always seem to have a boss that sets up tedious ways of doing things and if you're 10 minutes late for work you're Satan.

There's all this stupid office politics and you'll be in a silent feud with at least one dickhead for some reason or another. I remember having to commute every day in my stiff office clothes and having to cut my morning crap off early to catch the train and having stomach pains all day.

It's a trade off. If you really want to do it then it's perfectly possible and with Brexit looming the ability to easily move country, have foreign clients, and get paid in dollars might be very inviting.

/r/AskUK Thread