How does your self-employed career compare to a parallel salaried career in your industry across 20 years? (In terms of year-averaged income, hours worked, etc.)
I imagine I've worked a lot, lot more for a lot, lot less, on average. And all while having greater tax/admin obligations. Which is why I don't have any particular sympathy for the undulations in the job market of a salaried employee - at any point, they can freelance like I have to fill the gaps. 960 people fired means 960 people were employed for a given period, but it's often viewed as a horrible and heartless gesture by the company. I've had flat periods just as others have been looking for a job. Been part of the gig economy for 20 years so I'm quite bemused when stories focus on it with Uber and their ilk like it's a 2020 thing.
I've had periods being the sole operator at my company where I've had to work through family holidays and endured extreme stress. My earnings are absolutely famine and feast; had times without paying myself for months and months.
However (and it's a massive however), the freedom has been priceless and I suspect I could never work for someone else in a typical job. I had a typical job once when I was about 20 and not since (I'm 43 now); I don't expect I will have a CV or an employer again in my life. I quit uni/college and have no degree. I don't think I'm very good at what I do.
I've had years earning less than $15k. But I've also had a year where I went around the world through 20+ countries, and many other years where I travelled 3+ months out of the year. Last year I gutted a bus overseas, renovated it (shubbo.com), and travelled with wife and three kids twice across a continent over three months - it was the greatest experience of my life and I don't think I could've done it as an employee.
I currently have a mixture of income streams including one where I photograph/film while travelling (serio.com.au); it barely feels like work. I wouldn't change it for a thing.
> Which is why I don't have any particular sympathy for the undulations in the job market of a salaried employee - at any point, they can freelance like I have to fill the gaps.
Congratulations on your successful gig career that gives you great freedom and the means to support yourself. However, not everyone can freelance. They may have skills which have zero demand right now, they are unable to work remotely, or they have mortgages or health/family situations which prevent them relocating or doing gig work.
There's a lot of sentiment on this thread that these people losing their jobs at LinkedIn are deadweight but in my experience the people let go in the midst of a great economic crisis include superstars who have the floor vanish beneath them, through no fault of their own.
I worked as an attorney for 6 years. The employer I worked the longest for is a major US law firm; you would probably recognize the name. I worked there for four years. Each year I received a high review -- averaged 4.3 out of 5. I had just received a promotion (I wasn't associate/partner track so we worked differently). Then my group started bleeding cash due to an abruptly changing market.
There was no single massive layoff. Instead there was a 6 month period of people slowly fading away. The most bizarre experience of my professional life. Then one Monday, with zero warning, I was brought into a meeting with my supervisor and HR and was told I was being let go. There was an extremely flimsy excuse related to performance; when I asked why it wasn't reflected in my reviews they had no answer.
So from feeling like I had good job stability and support to out of work in about 1 hour flat. I obviously saw the writing on the wall in general but never would have expected me to be one that was asked to leave. My only guess is the promotion made me a target due to higher salary. Luckily I took that as a sign from the universe that it was finally time to attempt the career switch to software dev that I had been planning and working towards for 4 years, and I made it, so for me it was oddly a net positive.
Now I'm not claiming I was some legal superstar. But there were a lot of very good workers that were let go. And the legal job market is brutal. The vast majority of lawyers in this country do not fit your TV view of lawyers. Most of them are your standard 9-5 types working for well under 6 figures with astronomical loan burdens. And good luck telling a lawyer to freelance.
I wouldn't call my career especially successful. I have slogged for 20 years at this. The one programming language I know how to use is probably the least fashionable and most laughed at around. I'm just saying that the focus in a "cutting x staff" thread is always on the loss of a job and not that the job was provided. I have multiple mortgages and a family that has limited my relocating. Being a small web studio getting eaten away by platforms has been seriously challenging, taking a client to court to get paid is challenging, etc.
Someone with a mortgage losing a job has to cover for the downtime, sure. I've had to cover for the peaks and troughs for 20 years. At no point have I had the safety of a predictable pay cheque.
If superstars were let go, wouldn't they often be in a position to capitalise? Or have the intelligence to up-skill or diversify skill set? My line of work has been savaged by platforms. What was once "We have a $10k budget to build a site" has become "So I've done 99% of my site on [platform] but I can't work out the last bit. My budget for the most annoying and least predictable remaining bit of the job is $100."
An employee is at the mercy of their employer just like I am at the mercy of my clients. Any individual has some responsibility to maintain their skills or diversify (against platforms) or stockpile for hard times. I absolutely have sympathy for someone losing their job but I don't have any particular sympathy given it's the flipside of a coin that sees them get a regular wage for a given period.
Consider that some of the people being let go may be here on employment visas, and this may jeopardize their (and their family's) ability to remain in the country.
And they may have got into the country with the support of that company in the first place? I'm not heartless. I'm just saying that there is rarely much appreciation of the original opportunity in discussion about it ending.
Seconding this question. It'd be fascinating to hear a detailed perspective from someone who has spent 20 years working for themselves, without also reaching traditional "success" (i.e. getting rich).
It's starting to feel like getting rich is overrated when it requires so much of your life to make it happen. Hearing from someone who ended up with similar freedoms (working for yourself is no small one!) would be cool.
I'm almost 50 and have been doing my "own thing" full time since 2004. I'm not rich, but have been able to be home while my 3 daughters have grown up. I spent 18 months traveling around the country with my wife and kids (we homeschool). I've been lucky enough to work on the things I want to work on, for the most part when I want to work on them. I have had years where my income has been under $12k and years where I've made over $300k - it's been an absolute roller coaster ride. No doubt if I had stayed employed by 401k would certainly be bigger, but the "cost" to me has been 100% worth it.
One thing that really made the decision easier for me when I left my job to do my own thing was that I could have been in many different situations around the world where I would not have even HAD the opportunity to do my own thing - and by NOT doing it I felt it was disrespectful to all those who would take the chance if given the opportunity to be in my place.
5 years experience web development/full stack/mobile here. 29 years old. I’ve never had a salaried job in my life. I’m able to pull down $150/hr for a couple months a year (8 hour days), $125/hr for another 6 months full time, then take a couple months off and I’m making a decent salary when it all shakes out. That’s fully remote and working for friends or friends of friends, occasionally taking a contract with a mega FAANG corp for a while, but usually working the contract with a buddy.
If you’re savvy, good at networking and self motivated, you can make money which is comparable to most full time jobs. Just gotta be careful about the taxes and make sure you save for the lean times.
I have a similar story, but my rates aren’t quite that great. What part of the country are you in and what stacks are you writing in for contracts that pay at that level? I tend to top out around 100/hr in the Midwest, just short of that post covid.
Not the OP, but the best 'tax tips' come from a tax professional in your region.
I'm in the US, and use a payroll service to pay myself a regular salary. The payroll service deducts and pays appropriate taxes and paperwork. I then also make estimated quarterly tax payments as well, to deal with any estimated overage I may earn/owe. I then pay a tax professional to reconcile everything at the start of the tax season.
Meet with a tax professional. Meet with 2 or 3. Find someone you're comfortable with who has clients like you. Or... find people like you and get referrals as to who they use.
Personally I have an offset account against my mortgage and stockpile funds there. Then live well within my means so I can handle tax when it arrives. Someone who doesn't naturally live within their means could estimate in advance and push money to a separate account to isolate it.
Don't you have to pay estimated taxes anyways? Or do you just mean within the quarter between estimated tax payments? (I am salaried and already just budget by quarter for everything)
Where I live, a salaried person will have tax automatically withheld and paid to authorities by their employer each week/fortnight. Someone self-employed usually has an estimate they pay quarterly or monthly, and then adjustments at the end of the financial year if the situation has varied from the estimate. I'm just saying I stockpile between tax bills (holding the cash against my mortgage to minimise interest) and my general style of living/spending means I can just redraw from the mortgage to make tax payments.
You don’t _have_ to pay estimated taxes. If you choose not to you just pay a penalty at tax time (essentially interest on what you didn’t pay throughout the year). It’s up to you to decide if it’s worth it. I freelanced for a few years and just paid the penalty because I didn’t want to spend time thinking about taxes more than once a year. For how much I was making at the time I was fine with this trade off.
It's a complex thing over that sort of timescale. You can get a feel for what I do at my site - http://isaacforman.com.au/ - I've had a basic web business since 1998 that chews up a lot of time for often-meagre returns, then various side projects beside that along the way. I've often wondered if I would've been better off just having a job all this time, and I worry about guiding my kids from my experience.
I am not rich compared to my peers but I wouldn't ever trade my life for any of their lives. I couldn't handle having to ask for leave. I get by with less and travel more (which is something very, very important to me). A lot of the best things in life like being outdoors, hanging out with friends and family, are effectively free.
That said, if I were having to buy into the housing market now rather than 15+ years ago, the mortgage stress might be completely different, and doing it without a regular pay cheque could be a serious challenge.
Full freelance since 2013. I traveled and lived abroad for six years. I wrote some articles about my experience on typicalprogrammer.com.
I make more than many salaried programmers I know, less than quite a few. I work 4 hrs/day, 5 days/wk on average, so by hourly income I do about as well as my friends at Google and Apple.
I don't have a "stack." I've been writing software for 40 years, too many languages, tools, etc. to list.
My freelance practice mainly involves taking over web applications that the original developer didn't finish or abandoned, leaving the customer holding the bag. There's plenty of this kind of work, lots of development relationships go sour, but the software is salvageable. Fixing a few problems without complaining that I have to rewrite it from scratch in Rust gives me long-term clients who trust me, and my 40 years of expertise in multiple business domains gives me consulting work.
That's my niche now that I'm too old to get hired at a cool company, and too cranky to submit myself to a bullshit interview.
Most of the time I work with PHP, MySQL, some WordPress, Zendesk, Shopify, Hubspot. I get some Go, Ruby, Python, other stuff once in a while. I can learn pretty much any "stack" because I have done web dev since web development started (ASP, ColdFusion, Perl back then). I also do a lot of system admin on AWS, Google Cloud, etc.
