20 Reasons Freelance Developing Can Stink
Normally my posts on here are pretty gung-ho about how awesome freelance development is. Heck, I can wake up when I want, make as much money as I want and do the kind of work that I want. What’s not to love?
Unfortunately, like everything in this world, there’s some downsides. After working 16+ hour days for the past week and a half, I’ve gathered a few reasons freelance developing can stink:
- A big name client approaches you with a huge project that needs to be done NOW. You don’t want to turn them down because their name would look awesome in your portfolio. So you work all day, night and weekend to get the work finished, and thus have no life.
- When one person needs a project done, 300 other people bombard you at the same time for their projects, as well as 200 emails.
- When it’s calm, no one wants work and your inbox is empty and you’re bored.
- You never get enough sleep, or you sleep in too late.
- Exercise? What’s that?
- When you’re having a coding problem, you can’t turn to your buddy next to you for help. Instead you’re stuck trying to explain a 100 line long PHP issue in 140 characters or less.
- Your day is planned to the second – wake up, eat breakfast, pee, shower, pee, email, project 1, project 2, lunch, pee, project 3, dinner, project 4, blog, learn, pee and maybe, just maybe…breathe.
- Everyone expects you to drop the client work you’ve had schedule for months just for them at the last minute.
- When something goes bad, you get yelled at, not your boss.
- Your secretary is a bichon frise and you talk to your cat.
- Your inbox is NEVER empty…at least longer for 5 seconds.
- Checking your email, twitter and facebook becomes an automatic reaction every time you sit down somewhere.
- Sick or tired? Suck it up if you have 6 projects due this week.
- Who knows when the client will decide to pay you. They were in a hurry for you to start working, but apparently not in a hurry for their files.
- When a client says he just wants a 15 minute phone meeting, he really means 2 hours.
- It’s ok to call you at 10 p.m about shifting that button 1px to the right.
- “You can make magic work online right? I don’t care if it can’t work, just make it work!”
- Your best friends are the employees at the local Books-A-Million cafe where you choose to “get out of the house” and work at once a week.
- You tell a client you’re too busy to take on another project for three weeks, they then email you the next day asking if you can take on a new project and have an hour long (4 hour) chat about it in 5 minutes.
- Instead of going out on Friday and Saturday night like most people…you’re stuck in your office doing one of three things: 1. coding for work, 2. coding to learn a new coding language, or 3. playing Starcraft II.
All that being said, I wouldn’t trade freelancing for any job in the world.
What do you think?
image by HikingArtist.com
About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic HTML5, CSS3, responsive and WordPress development. She has over 15 years of coding experience and is super cool to work with.
Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?