My experience with this is over a couple of decades old at this point. So I don’t know that any of it is relevant or useful.

At the time I was certified in Lotus Notes development and administration. It was a bit of a niche, but it was used lots of places. I created a business to do business under.

There are websites that deal with corp to corp contract work. So you can find work that way. There was also a specialist independent sales person who worked with IBM customers (Lotus Notes was an IBM brand at the time) who offered to be my sales branch. I never made enough money to hire him. Maybe I should’ve, but I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get leads and it would be a waste of money.

I worked with small and medium businesses so there was some word of mouth business from managers knowing one another and recommending me. I tried to go to user group events and meet managers and contractors that way. Having a good relationship and recommending each other for various things is another way of getting business. You could also find some c2c opportunities in other places like dice.com.

Ultimately, I was not cut out for sales or business ownership. I lasted the better part of a year. During that year I got unemployment from being laid off from my last job but I didn’t pay myself a regular wage from my company — maybe that wasn’t strictly legal, I don’t know, but the money wasn’t coming in regularly enough to pay myself any kind of regular wage. Anyway, I got away with it so whatever.

I had a couple of good months and a lot of shit months. Between unemployment to help smooth the lows and the business I was able to bring in, I was able to pay for a very shitty house for my family and food. We did have to sell a car. I didn’t plan for it, I just got laid off and walked out the door with 2 weeks of severance and a list of customers I’d been working with.

I took the next job offer that came along. But if you don’t hate the relationship building and sales work and negotiation, and you have some savings set aside to weather lean months, and stick with it for a few years, you could probably do better than I did. Or maybe it’s all different now anyway. Probably a lot more Twitter and self promotion.

I was a freelance/contract dev that over a year ago transitioned to a sort of code review for AI/LLMs type deal with companies. I make more money doing this than dev work. Essentially I review the slop that their vibe coders churn out and tell them how it’s not going to work and everything that’s wrong with it and then 9 times out of 10 suggest a complete rebuild without utilizing AI.

that’s it. that’s all I’m doing now. I have so much more free time and I’m making way more than I was previously. Majority of my new clients come from linkedin via tech bro posts.

I’m not a freelance but I have thought about it, and a friend of mine has been doing this for years. He’s a software project manager but developers are still popular of course.

You will have some kind of administrative stuff to take care of. In France you can use the “portage salarial” which is a company that takes care of getting money from your clients, pays taxes, and gives you some kind of healthcare and retirement program.

You will make much more money but you have to make sure your taxes are taken care of.

As for the clients themselves, you can have long missions (up to 3, 4, or 5 years) but most of the time it seems that my friend finds new jobs thanks to previous clients of coworkers. If you’re new, you can bootstrap your clients’ list with full-remote offers from LinkedIn or other job boards.

I’ve been self employed for over 25 years as an ICT professional, writing software, troubleshooting, training, doing research, data analysis, designing databases, reverse engineering code, writing reports, helping startups, installing satellite communications, rescuing ransomware victims, building Arctic capable GPS trackers, doing events, public speaking, voice overs and plenty more.

It’s a tough gig with lots of ups and downs. You have to be extremely self motivated and persistent. Work comes and goes. Sometimes you’re so busy that there’s not enough hours in the day, other times you have nothing coming in for weeks, months or even years. If you have a holiday, everything costs twice as much because you’re spending money while not earning any, and if you’re not earning enough, there’s no holiday pay, sick leave or retirement funds.

I’ve seen some interesting and scary software in production and met and worked with an utterly amazing variety of humanity.

It’s not for everyone and if you asked me today if I’m better off mentally, physically and financially as a result of this, I’d be hard pressed to give you an answer.