What it means to be a freelancer dev

When I mentor coding schools as a judge, I sometimes come across students who are planning to become freelancers right after graduating.

But I also sometimes come across students whose internship companies offer to employ them as freelancers !

Yes indeed, you read that correctly...

And quite often these students are tempted to accept, without really understanding what their future freelance life entails, the advantages but also the downsides that you live with day to day.

Here is my vision of independence in the web development world through my 4 years of experience with this status !

1 - Having to sell yourself well

This is one of the keys to surviving. Adding your profile to a freelance platform like Malt isn't enough to have you swamped with client requests, and above all a first contact doesn't mean you're going to land the contract.

Very often, a company contacts several freelancers in order to assess which one they most want to collaborate with, and if you don't have at least a bit of a salesperson's soul, you'd better have some pretty solid experience to show in order to pull through !

Knowing how to sell yourself well also means knowing how to estimate your time so you don't get shortchanged while working on the project. Of course you improve over time and I myself made mistakes on my first contracts, but you're going to have to get good very fast.

2 - Having uneven income

I think the current period demonstrates this point perfectly, but even without talking about Covid-19, this is one of the biggest differences from being an employee.

You might earn nothing for more than two months before receiving payment for a €10,000 contract the following month, so managing your professional and personal budget becomes an integral part of your daily private life.

You also have to take into account project cancellations, (numerous) client payment delays, and learn to require deposits before starting projects.

For example in 2019, one of my former clients went into liquidation and I saw an invoice worth over €2,000 vanish, and I'm not the only one this happens to !

3 - Being responsible for your successes but also your failures

When you work as an employee, it's your employer who receives client complaints, positive feedback and negative feedback. Then it's up to the company to decide how it passes the message on to the teams.

But as a freelancer, your employer is you. A bug (or a security flaw) makes your client lose money : you're the one responsible. And if instead everything goes well, you've probably just gained a client for life who will call on you whenever they need to !

Note that a web developer has no obligation to take out professional liability insurance, but it's still advisable to get one for extra peace of mind.

4 - Having to be autonomous and know how to organize yourself

It's not uncommon to be contacted by clients who have no in-house development team and to have to manage the entire technical side of the project, while being able to relay the right information at the right time in a way that's understandable to the client.

So sometimes you'll have no technical help at all, and your only companions will be your search engine and your task management tool !

Knowing how to alert your team is essential within a company, but knowing how to alert your client as a freelancer then becomes vital !

4 - Doing administrative work

Setting up your business, finding accounting software to create your quotes and invoices (no, Excel is done !), paying your contributions and sometimes even calculating your VAT, even if you hate admin work, it's unavoidable.

And even though the accounting for a sole proprietor (auto-entrepreneur) is simplified, it will take you a while before you're comfortable with all the terms used and are sure you're not making mistakes in your filings !

5 - Often working alone

What you may have seen during lockdown really shows some people's ability to adapt to working alone at home, while it's impossible for others.

When you're a freelancer, you may sometimes end up working in your clients' offices for a while, but you also have to work alone (or in a coworking space) from time to time.

When it comes to coworking, working next to other people doesn't mean working with those people, the nuance may seem slight, but it's very real !

7 - Being free, or almost...

This is the equivalent of the Holy Grail for everyone starting out as an independent, freeing yourself from the yoke of a boss, fixed hours, and other obligations to work in a given place.

And it's true, being independent means gaining more freedom of action, but to say there's only a small step from that to becoming a "digital nomad" and traveling all year while working remotely, that's a sweet fantasy !

Your boss now is your clients, because they're the ones who keep you afloat and whom you want to satisfy in order to keep working with them.

Yes it's true, you can go on vacation from one day to the next, except if you have a project that needs to ship faster than planned, or one you're behind on, or because you haven't landed a contract yet for the coming weeks, etc...

Sometimes you end up with clients who cross lines that even your former boss would never have crossed !

Conclusion

Rest assured, I love being independent and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world for now, and even if this article seems to say the opposite, that's because it's inspired by my early days, and that's the toughest part of the adventure.

Personally, I really started having a blast as a freelancer over the past two years, being able to choose the projects I work on, and having a more peaceful life than when I was an employee.

But since we all inevitably go through the beginning, and since many people sell being independent as "Get rich in 1 year", I decided to demystify this status and tell the truth, nothing but the truth !

But if you're someone who's self-sufficient, who's good with words, who kind of enjoys business and client contact, who's a good developer, and who's persistent, the freelance status might just be made for you !