teekay

500 days on Duolingo and it has felt like it was produced by ChatGPT 3.5 this entire time.

500 days of learning various bits & pieces and not being able to have a simple conversation - but I could probably say "There is a monkey in his backpack" if pressed hard!

I used to hate learning from actual textbooks as the conversations felt "dumb" or "forced" but that dumbing down as at least justified by having to progress from zero. Duolingo doesn't feel "plain dumb" but "weird dumb".

So yeah, if they replace their contractors (who must've used the cheapest models) with O3 or o4-mini-high or whatever, it should be an improvement!

A good way to get started is not to ask "How do I become a freelancer/consultant" but rather "what valuable business outcomes can I deliver with my technical skills" and then find clients who have those problems and solve them.

Yes, this ignores the hard part of "finding those clients".

I know people with expertise in improving website performance, for example, and the mindset shift here is not to think about response times but rather improvement in conversion rates, decrease in shopping cart abandonment rate, etc. Clients don't really care about caching or asset preloading but they really, really care about squeezing the extra dollar from their website visitors. Help them make that extra dollar and you get to keep some portion of it.

Once you establish this foundation, getting to the right clients is easier than if you put yourself out there advertising "will write Python code for $$$".

So for instance, I wouldn't necessarily attend technical conferences / meetups but perhaps conferences where, I don't know, ecommerce website operators discuss issues that are critical to them. Those are your potential clients who can be perceptive to the right pitch. I think that technical conferences are a better fit if you're looking for a job and selling your resume.

Having said all of this, when I started out as a freelance dev, I did use Upwork to get some experience and reviews that I could later repurpose as testimonials on my website.

There's nothing wrong with hands-on freelance coding to get started somehow. It can be hard to define what specific business outcomes I could deliver with technical skills/existing resume, so getting some real-world experience can help with refining that. Always be on a lookout for that answer: once you understand "why" your clients keep paying you (hint: not for the code itself), you can find your niche and improve your sales pitch.

Finally: yes, it's critical to get out there and connect with people! Be it on LinkedIn, email, forums, Discords: you won't get clients unless you talk to people. Talking to past connections could also be a good way to find contract opportunities esp. if you've kept in touch over the years. Being a solo dev/consultant is 80% people work and only 20% technical work.

PS There's another way: you can ignore all of the above and apply to contract jobs (1099) using recruiters to get to clients. That's very similar to employment (clients tend to treat you just like staff) but you can potentially get better rates. I've been doing this for years with "success" but frankly, it's only marginally better than employment plus you get no benefits like vacation days etc. Real, actual consulting/freelance work can be a lot more satisfying if you can make it work!

You are right. Thank you! I edited it and removed the hourly billing bits so that I could better express my thesis.

One thing that has worked really well for me in the past was joining Toastmasters International.

This is a group of people who are working on their speaking skills, but the effect goes way beyond improving one's public speaking.

I've seen many introverted people who could barely speak about themselves for one minute during the first "Ice-breaker" presentation undergoing a complete transformation within 6 months.

You'll meet once a week and exercise your communication muscle in a variety of ways. For instance, one fun part of Toastmasters meetings are brief, impromptu speeches on a topic you are given on the spot. There are also many less challenging roles in the meetings, and beginners typically work their way through those to get the experience and lose their fears.

I credit Toastmasters for becoming more engaging and less boring in a social setting ;)

That said, the key is what jamager said: listening and honestly caring about others. That should be the underlying value. I would emphasize that because it's also possible to get really good at public speaking and being very performative without actually connecting with anyone.

I made such transition years ago, and then went back to technical roles.

The primary benefit of doing this is that you develop a product and people-oriented mindset. All of a sudden, you are thinking about the "whys" instead of "hows". You think about customers and their pains and wants. This can be very rewarding if your natural disposition is to help others.

Technically, there's very little onboarding you'd have to do. Unlike programming, there's no language to learn, except English (or whatever language your business people speak). And by that I mean learning to speak the customer's language and using it to define the problem domain.

Long time ago, product managers (or business analysts, to be precise) would also use technical "languages" such as UML to describe the product. This fell out of favor in most industries. Agile mostly killed deep technical analysis (outside of code). It also killed use cases in favor of "user stories", which are a terrible way to describe a product in my opinion. But I digress.

Depending on your industry experience, you might have to do some onboarding in terms of understanding the market, customers, their purchasing decisions, and where do your company's products fit in all of this. I would start in an industry that you already know well.

All things considered, if you already have an offer and like it, trying on the product manager's hat will broaden your expertise and if you ever decide to go back to programming, this will be very valuable to you and your clients or employers.