I spent close to 20 years doing freelance and consulting work on my own as an individual that focuses mostly on smaller businesses (1-50 employees). There's a lot of truth to this article.
One thing that I really like about it is it's not just coding coding coding (I do this too), but you get a chance to really break down the domain of a company and work with someone on how to solve bigger picture problems. It's not just empty bs recommendations either, it's things that get directly implemented and in my case often times I got my hands dirty with the implementation. If not doing the implementation, at least doing the research while ironing out and documenting a step by step plan for someone to do it.
I would say I spend about 60% of my time coding and 40% of my time chatting with developers / CTOs, getting paid to do R&D and write documentation. For the coding bits it's everything from building web apps to doing ops related things like provisioning infrastructure and making it easier for other developers to release code changes.
With that said, for the first time in my life I took a W2 job this week. I'm only bringing that up because if you decide you do want to transition into a W2 job later often times you may get fast tracked through any hiring hoops if one of your contract clients wants to hire you full time. In my case I didn't have to do an interview because I had worked with them for 10-30 hours a month for the last 3 years. It was an instant hire where all I had to do was let them know a start date.
In a bunch of longer term contracts I was involved with there were always hints or offers to join them full time. Up until recently I never had an urge to pick one but this role is interesting and you only live once so I decided to try what life is like on the other side of the fence.
> but you get a chance to really break down the domain of a company and work with someone on how to solve bigger picture problems.
I did a very brief stint doing work that was similar to consulting, and I think this is the biggest net gain for me. I really developed skill at identifying the actual problems and solutions by understanding the domain and not simply building what a customer said they wanted built.
One thing that I really like about it is it's not just coding coding coding (I do this too), but you get a chance to really break down the domain of a company and work with someone on how to solve bigger picture problems. It's not just empty bs recommendations either, it's things that get directly implemented and in my case often times I got my hands dirty with the implementation. If not doing the implementation, at least doing the research while ironing out and documenting a step by step plan for someone to do it.
I would say I spend about 60% of my time coding and 40% of my time chatting with developers / CTOs, getting paid to do R&D and write documentation. For the coding bits it's everything from building web apps to doing ops related things like provisioning infrastructure and making it easier for other developers to release code changes.
With that said, for the first time in my life I took a W2 job this week. I'm only bringing that up because if you decide you do want to transition into a W2 job later often times you may get fast tracked through any hiring hoops if one of your contract clients wants to hire you full time. In my case I didn't have to do an interview because I had worked with them for 10-30 hours a month for the last 3 years. It was an instant hire where all I had to do was let them know a start date.
In a bunch of longer term contracts I was involved with there were always hints or offers to join them full time. Up until recently I never had an urge to pick one but this role is interesting and you only live once so I decided to try what life is like on the other side of the fence.