My get-not-poor-slowly scheme

[rah]

What's the old scam. Low ball the programming, High ball the documentation.

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Without hijacking Elok's thread too badly: how do you freelancers find jobs? I've often thought of getting into freelance programming but I have no idea how I'd go about finding work - I've often worked as a proxy contractor where I'm an employee of company A who hires me out to company B where company A's only roles are getting me group health coverage, finding me work, and taking a huge chunk of my paycheck, and it would be nice to cut out the middleman.

May not be too helpful an answer, but clients generally came to me when I was doing it. Most of them either knew me or had been told they should talk to me. It seems like the thing that kicked it off was unsolicited advice on how things should work - so, I'm hanging around with someone, they start complaining about a problem, and I tell them how it should be working instead of whatever is going on with it now. Not really trashing the existing system, just describing one that's better. Then a couple weeks/months later I get a call and they ask me to build it. I spent several years raising my rates and turning down work based on word of mouth alone. YMMV though, this was an area where good tech help was a scarce resource.

[C0ckney]

Without hijacking Elok's thread too badly: how do you freelancers find jobs? I've often thought of getting into freelance programming but I have no idea how I'd go about finding work - I've often worked as a proxy contractor where I'm an employee of company A who hires me out to company B where company A's only roles are getting me group health coverage, finding me work, and taking a huge chunk of my paycheck, and it would be nice to cut out the middleman.

there are quite a few out there. aeson mentioned upwork. there's also guru, twago and no doubt plenty more. i signed up to a few back in the day but very rarely did any work (not a lot of what i do, low rates) through them. however, for other areas they may be more useful. you can take a look through them to see what kind of work there is and how frequently it is posted, what the rates are, etc..

to apply for jobs you need to sign up. it's usually a freemium model, which means that you can only apply for a limited number of jobs and/or a certain value each week/month; after that you need to pay a subscription fee. most work on a bidding system; you see the job description, put in a quote, talk to the job poster and then get the job. payment is usually handled via a system on each site which pays out to your paypal or similar. they usually have a reputation system so clients and freelancers can rate each other, which is a good way of avoiding potential non-payment problems and also means if you build a good rep more work will come your way.

[Sava]

i'm smoking your rent right now

[loinburger]

Hmm, that's a good point - you could start at the bottom of the ladder as "spambot" and eventually get promoted to "Nigerian prince" or something

[C0ckney]

i'm told the nigerian prince market is pretty crowded these days.

[spambot]

Hmm, that's a good point - you could start at the bottom of the ladder as "spambot" and eventually get promoted to "Nigerian prince" or something

Nothing outranks spambots.

[ricketyclik]

If you have no actual job skills you're pretty much stuck with either being a teacher, politician or middle manager.

Being good at any of those things is not trivial.