frlnc_throwaway

Not conspiracy-theory-esque at all. Great insights. You sound like a more sane and balanced version of michaelochurch. Maybe you are extrapolating too much from a limited set of experiences, but your basic logic seems sound.

I've spent most of the first few years of my career working for small startups, or teams where I was the only dev, so I've seen lots of engineering projects "managed" by people who don't understand engineering. I was quite capable of self-managing, so it was often frustrating being straightjacketed by someone who didn't really know what they were doing.

I wasted a lot of time and probably would have been better off in a larger start-up or company with proper engineering management and a defined career track.

Step 1 is to build a specialised skillset.

Step 2 is to network with people a few years ahead of you in your specialism, who can help you figure out how to do more "high-level" work in whatever you do and maybe bring you on as a junior person for some of their projects

Step 3 is to demonstrate credibility (portfolio of projects using your specialism, professional online presence, know how to sell yourself to clients, etc)

Step 4 is to increase your rates and start labeling yourself as a consultant

And finally - I never ended up doing freelance work for that long. It was only something I ended up doing in-between other stuff. I realised that it was not a career path I wanted to pursue -- if you are a very ambitious person, doing client work can become a grind after a few years. However, if you want to run a nice small business, starting off as a freelancer and growing into a small consultancy or digital agency can be a very good path to take. You will not become a billionaire, but plenty of people become millionaires that way.

I heard that advice from HN when I started freelance out of university at age 23.

I ended up embarassing myself a couple of times, by either:

- asking for a high day rate when I lacked experience (e.g., for freelance Rails work, when I kinda knew Rails but lacked experience with most of the tooling, testing frameworks, etc)

- trying to sell "consulting" work when I had only a vague idea how consulting worked.

So, yeah, while "charge more!!!" might be a useful message for underconfident programmers who don't know their own value, it's too simplistic and it omits many essential steps.

My takeway: if you plan to freelance long-term, you should treat it as a business, and plan to build a specialism. Once you've built a specialised skillset, and demonstrated credibility, then you should start systematically looking for higher-paying clients, and be confident in asking for what you are worth. But you have to know you are worth it, first. Once you've done that for a while, then you can start thinking about business-level problems and doing something higher level (which requires nailing a whole bunch of soft skills, too).

Another factor to consider is that if you're in a major city, there are probably other programmers doing freelance/contract work in your skillset, which you can use to gauge what a sensible rate would be, and what knowledge you need to gain.

Oh and - there's also the factor that as a newbie freelancer you often find the really crappy low-end clients that have a fixed budget and high expectations (e.g., small local businesses. I have nothing against small local businesses, but they're not good clients for freelance coding work). I went through a lot of stress working on such projects. Working for more high-paying, professional clients (digital agencies, banks that hire a lot of contractors, etc) is ironically a lot less stressful.