leknarf

If we've ignored you, it's unintentional and I apologize.

Ken and I (Andrew) list our email addresses on our home page. Similarly, every automated email we send comes with the reply address set to one of our personal email addresses. Sometimes, people reply to those automated messages asking for things we can't really help with. I try to respond to everyone, but honestly, sometimes messages just slip through.

I've considered removing our email addresses from our web page. I'm sure that would decrease the number of messages we receive, which would increase the percentage we could reply to. But that would ultimately make us less available.

If you have any suggestions on how we can keep track of a high volume of inquires, I would love to hear them. Neither of us have run a startup at this scale before, so we're naturally trying to figure things out as we go.

This is non-news for most hackers, but is actually surprising to people outside of the industry. The atlantic has a wide readership. A lot of people are having trouble finding any work. They'd be surprised that some people would find 30 job offers irritating.

Founder of Lambda (http://getlambda.com) here. We negotiate these sorts of deals for a living.

We charge more for short-term trials (say 1 week), not less. Employers understand that flexibility is valuable and are often willing to pay more to avoid commitments. Conversely, they usually expect discounts for "buying in bulk", so it's reasonable to offer reduced rates for long-term (say longer than 3 months) contracts.

That said, $15/hr is way too low in any situation. There's a reason we set Lambda's minimum to $100/hr: doing so cuts out most clients that we don't want to deal with. I don't know much about your experience level, but a few years programming experience and some time spent as a startup founder should be enough for you to ask for $100/hr. I'm less familiar with the Texas market (we do business in NYC and SF), so $75/hr might be more appropriate, but I wouldn't go any lower than that.

If you send me an email, I'd be happy to hop on a quick call. We don't have many clients in Texas, so I don't think I'd be able to get you a better offer immediately, but I could give you some general negotiating advice.

Consider applying for an in-house job with a digital media agency or a dev shop. You'll get paid a normal salary while building up a portfolio of client work. If you work with a small team, you'll also get a chance to learn what sort of clients are looking for outsourced development work, which is obviously helpful when striking out on your own.

You haven't told us much about your experience level, so I can't comment on whether you're qualified to land desirable freelance projects yet. I can tell you that most of the freelancers we have on Lambda (http://getlambda.com) have at least 5 years experience and have either done some client work before or are currently launching a startup. I don't think we have anyone with an empty slate.

Right now, it's much easier for developers to get in-house positions. Almost everyone I speak with is looking to expand their in-house team and they need some convincing to try working with a freelancer instead. Freelancers can make a lot more than salaried developers, but they also tend to be more experienced.

Last year, we built this site: http://www.thecostofcarbon.org/, which was part of a project for Al Gore's climate change non-profit.

Currently, we're looking for devs for a company that helps museums keep track of their collections, another that makes it easier for people to cook healthy meals at home, and a third that's encouraging universities to incorporate 3d-printing into their curriculum.

So there's quite a bit of variety in the types of projects we take on. Social good is a vague concept that means different things to different people, but we can certainly try to match you with projects that fit your interests.

It's pretty much just the USA. In fact, most of our clients are looking for devs in NYC or the SF Bay Area, so even US devs outside those areas are on the waiting list.

This thread is weird if you're using the "Cloud to Butt Plus" chrome extension.

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First, talk to people looking for developers. That part is fairly easy: just about any networking event in NYC has a dozens of people looking for devs. I don't know where you're located, but the same is probably true for your area.

Once you're talking, convince them that working with you will be easier/quicker/more-effective than working with anyone else. That's the hard part, which definitely requires some practice. Pro-tip: don't try to convince anyone that you'll be the cheapest option, which is almost always a losing game to play.

If you prefer, I'd be happy to do the hard work for you. I run a startup that connects senior freelance developers with high-paying companies: http://getlambda.com.

Online rent payment. Rent and taxes are my only regular expenses that aren't automatically deducted from my credit card or bank account. And even the IRS accepts online (albeit manual) payments. In fact, rent is the only reason I have a paper checkbook at all.

It's an easy win on both sides. In exchange for letting me schedule automatic payments, my landlord could get much more timely payments. I think I'm reasonably responsible as folks go, but still occasionally forget to mail a check on time.

The US also has usury laws, which I found fairly surprisingly when I was just starting out. I previously thought usury was a strictly a historic crime, like adultery or eating bacon on the sabbath. But some people are very much offended by the idea of lenders charging too high an interest rate.

They actually become relevant for late fees, since you usually do want your fee to be punitive enough to encourage timely payments. The usual practice is set your fee to 1.5% per month or the highest percent allowed by law (i.e. just below usury if that's applicable in your state).

Most of our clients have been in NYC or the SF Bay area and they usually prefer local developers. Even if someone is working remotely, it's helpful to be able to meet once a week or so.

We're happy to take applications from developers elsewhere, but we might not be able to get back to you for a while.

Sorry, it's US only right now. In fact, it's mostly local work (NYC or SF) so even US-based remote devs are at a disadvantage.

Great article overall. I particularly liked the three mistakes you pointed out:

I nickled-and-dimed a client on change requests, alienating that client and making myself appear less professional. ... I would have been better served by her loving me than making a little more money.

I completely agree. In fact, this is part of the reason new freelancers often regret setting their hourly rate too low. It's important that you set a high enough rate that you can throw in unbillable work now and then without destroying your earnings. The best freelancers consistently under-promise and over-deliver.

For pricing my services, I need to start high and work my way down. I generally start client conversations on my hourly rate at what I would consider a reasonable ultimate number, and then allow myself to be driven down from there — generally because the client wants a long-term contract and expects to save on my hourly based on the length of the engagement.

Constant haggling will make every new project a frustrating experience. I usually recommend setting a fair rate and then holding the line when clients ask for a discount. That's tough to do with your first few projects, but becomes easier once you're more confident about your rate and abilities.

More projects, less hourly. When starting as a consultant, I was really selling only my hours. Now Symonds & Son is a business in its own right, and I’ve hired designers and developers to help with my workload. Working with other talented individuals makes much more sense on a project basis, where I can package their (and my) hours together.

This depends on what type of projects you're looking to take on. Landing pages and presentation work will probably pay more if you charge per project (since clients won't believe you can more 10x faster than cheaper devs), but building new product features for startups is probably better at an hourly rate (since startup clients always change what they're looking to build).

If anyone is looking to get started as a freelancer/consultant or just looking to expand their existing business, take a look at our startup: http://getlambda.com.

We started Lambda (http://getlambda.com) as an Elance/Odesk competitor for precisely these reasons. Most of the people looking for developers on the big offshoring platforms aren't the types of clients we'd want to work with ourselves.

The big problem is education. We speak with a surprising amount of people who've never hired a developer before. They often don't understand the difference between Wordpress dev and someone who's been doing high-performance numerical computing. If they tried to hire a dev on Elance, it would almost certainly be a frustrating experience for both parties, since they're unable to write a reasonable job description.

Our solution has been to take a very unsexy approach: anyone who wants to hire a dev through our service needs to first hop on a phone call and tell me a little about what they're looking for. Sometimes we reject potential clients outright (particularly if they have poor expectations about price) other times we suggest they hire a different type of dev than they initially thought they needed.

Unless Elance is willing to start offering this sort of concierge service, it's unlikely to grow into the sort of place where qualified devs will want to find qualified clients.

In our case, the explanation is even simpler. Most of our work is for local devs, where the clients prefer to be able to meet the freelancer face-to-face occasionally. Even for a project where most of the work will be done remotely, kick-off meetings and in-person collaboration is still valuable.

That's right for the customers side: it's a lot of personal networking and referrals.

For consultants, we've had a lot of resonance with various social media channels. It's really nothing fancy or surprising, just making a consistent effort to engage with various communities (like HN) has been fantastic.

Even with two technical co-founders (we're both developers), we're still following this strategy with Lambda (http://getlambda.com). With the exception of our homepage (which is a Jekyll site), we haven't written any code and don't have any immediate plans to start coding either. We've been able to bring in >100k in sales in one month and expect to be able clear over a million next year.

We've discussed some ideas we could start developing, but in each case, we've always been able to come up with a quicker/cheaper way to test the relevant concept without development work. Sticking to a "no code" strategy has been a good way to focus our efforts on activities that actually matter. We both like to code and would probably be happier spending a week hacking instead of taking sales calls, but the latter is more important to our company right now.

Just because you can write code doesn't mean you have to.

SEEKING FREELANCERS - NYC or Bay Area preferred - Remote is okay

Lambda is a talent agency for freelance developers and designers. We help you find clients, negotiate for higher rates, and take care of the business side of freelancing.

  - Exceptional talent only: $100/hr minimum rate.
  - No recruiters or spam. We're developers too and we only match consultants with projects that fit their expertise and interest.
  - Serious clients only: Wanna hear about a disruptive social network for cats that "just needs a coder"? Neither do we.
  - Freelancers with side projects or startups are especially welcome!

We've posted about this on HN a few times and have been amazed by the response. I apologize in advance if it takes a while for us to get back to you -- we interview everyone personally and are still ramping up the process.

Right now, we're particularly looking for NYC Rails devs and SF iOS devs, but anyone else based in the US is still welcome to apply!

I've heard this suggestion before, but most of the professional freelancers I know do not spend a large amount of time working on nights or weekends. Why would they? It's fairly straightforward for a freelance developer to earn 6 figures a year, which is enough for most people. At that point, more personal time is more appealing than more spending money.

This is important, since professionalism is a huge factor in how well freelancers perform. You almost certainly want to work with freelancers that work predictable daytime hours and can thus respond quickly when you have questions.

I certainly don't mean to suggest that someone working on a weekend can't be professional (I'm on HN myself right now). But I don't think it's wise to intentionally avoid the 9-5 crowd.

Shameless self-promotion: I run Lambda (http://getlambda.com), which is a talent agency for freelance developers. We're essentially like odesk/elance, but we screen every developer on the network and we curate a short list of potential developers for every project.

Instead of posting a description that anyone can respond to, we'd setup a brief phone call where you and I can discuss your project. I'm a developer myself, so I help you figure exactly what sort of experience would be best for your project.

Having visited the bay area from NYC, the point about travel time (1 hr on average) is useful. Before visiting the area, I had heard that things were more stretched out than on the east coast, but I still underestimated how much time we'd spend in transit.

In NYC, I take a lot of meetings (more than 5 a week on average), but rarely need to spend more than 30 minutes in transit. I'd guess the average is closer to 15.

That's interesting. I love to talk with you sometime about your experience with those higher priced jobs. I'm particularly curious about what kinds of clients are mosting higher price jobs on elance, since our experience has been that it's mostly a race to the bottom. Could you send me an email: andrew at getlambda dotcom

For the types of projects we work with, "exceptional developers" might be better described as "competent developers, great entrepreneurs". Of course, that wouldn't be ideal marketing copy :)

In general, raw technical ability isn't a huge factor in commanding higher rates. There's definitely a minimum threshold someone needs to pass, but you'd probably clear that easily if you've been freelancing for 5+ years.

Instead of learning to code faster, you'd be better served by learning to code less. Clients often have big ideas that would take 6+ months to build in their entirety, but which could be shipped in weeks by eliminating unnecessary features. Convincing them to cut those features is a skill in of itself, which is often what separates "freelancers" from "consultants".

Most traditional recruiters charge around 20-30% of the first year salary. 10% of the first 2 years is actually a bit cheaper.

Our startup Lambda (http://getlambda.com) competes with both, but we're not the least bit concerned. I already thought of elance/odesk as being effectively the same, in the sense that they're both known as places to find cheap, off-shore labor. I don't know any devs in NYC who've seriously considered working through either site and don't expect that to change. Likewise, I don't know many hiring companies that have used their sites for anything more than throwaway projects.

We have a few other competitors targeting the high-end of the freelancer market, but that's still open territory.

Yes, I strongly agree. You'd be better off applying directly.

A machine readable CV just makes it easier for someone to match keywords. Those matches are almost always terrible. I.e., I see you have the word "javascript" on your resume, perhaps you'd like this "java" job post.

There's definitely a glass ceiling on developer salaries that tends to cap developer salaries at around 150k. That's problematic for the profession, given how early someone can max out his earnings early in his career. A proficient developer with 5 years development experience can earn 125k fairly easily, which is around 80% of the apparent industry max. So there's not much incentive to improve one's craft beyond the minimum in a salaried track.

Most devs I know who've broken above 150k fall into one of two categories: startup founders or freelancers. That clearly resonates with the "break from the pack" pitch in the article. The founder path is difficult and risky, but fairly understood at this point (no one is surprised if a successful startup pays their founders well).

Conversely, A lot of people are surprised by how much a successful freelancer can earn. There's still an industry misconception that the skilled people must prefer salaried work and that contractors are somehow in a second tier. But 150k is a fairly easy goal to hit for a new freelancer. Someone billing at 125/hr for 1,200 hours will reach that in pre-tax dollars.

That's only assuming a 60% utilization rate (there are around 2,000 total billable hours in a year). Booking a few more hours or slightly increasing the rate lets freelancers dramatically exceed their in-house peers. Most experienced freelancers I know are earning around 2-4x what they earned as a salaried employee.

This is big deal. Forming an LLC to protect a new business is a fairly cheap and easy process. I paid an online service $300 to handle all the details for mine. The additional 2k for publication fees is just outrageous in comparison.

Employers don't need your CV, the recruitment firms do. They always ask for them in a .DOC format because many have internal databases. Providing a .DOC makes it easier for them to upload the file to that system, where they can then search for prospective applicants by keyword.

Providing a CV won't make it any easier for you to get the job you're actually discussing. It just makes it easier for them to send you emails like: "I see you have 4 years experience with JavaScript. We have an exciting opportunity to join a team of rockstars working with Java and Spring".

There's another concern to be aware of: some unscrupulous recruiters will edit your CV. That is, if they see a job posting looking for someone with x years experience with Spring, they might just add that to your CV, even if you've never worked with a java stack.

The key insight here is that it's complelety acceptable for freelancers to charge different rates for different clients. Many new freelancers, even if they accept that premise in theory, are uncomfortable asking one client to pay 300/hr if another is paying 100/hr.

That's only possible if you can infer a client's ability to pay and match your quote to their expectations. You can earn much more if you're able to adjust your rates on the fly, which is one of the reasons most freelancers do not list a rate on their public website.

Freelancers and consultants have one more option: offer the boss two choices: (1) do the work during regular business hours, or (2) do the work now for twice your normal rate. Actually, in-house employees have this option too, it's just less socially acceptable to ask for overtime pay in many organizations.

Sometimes business emergencies do just pop up, but it's surprising how quickly an emergency dissipates as soon as there's an extra cost associated with solving it (or not surprising, depending on how jaded you are). Assigning explicit costs to emergency work is an easy way to make a team more efficient.