This 100%.
Just to give another viewpoint on this, having just started going full time on my solo agency, I actually love doing the sales and marketing stuff and scoping the work for clients. Yes, it does take a lot of time away from pure technical work but I do enjoy the balance of it. So, it does depend on your own interests and how you like to spend your time. Freelancing/Consulting is definitely not for everyone. And tbh, lets see maybe in a year or two I will be fed up of the sales/marketing stuff too.
One thing I will say though is that, it also comes with a lot of flexibility and freedom and you set our own hours and location which in itself is very valuable. Of course has its own pros and cons and you have to be quite disciplined to begin with.
The best is proof of work. If you don't have any, build something and show that off. Even listing out the companies you have worked for will be good. Cold email could work if its not completely "cold", i.e, find companies/people who are in the space/industry where you have worked so that they can see you have solved a similar problem before. 10+ years of software engineering is quite valuable, you just have to present yourself in a way where the value can be seen.
Also, never, ever work for free. One, your time is worth more than you think. Second, it makes you sound a bit less serious and less valuable and you will attract clients that are not fun to work with. Not worth your time at all. The only people who MAYBE should be working for free are students who are in high school.
I have been freelancing on and off on the side for the past 8 years and this year pulled the plug and going full time on it and tbh I am now oversubscribed. So, there's definitely a need for it.
My first few clients (8 years ago) were through posting on reddit (/r/forhire) and then also on the monthly HN freelancer thread (was shocked they stopped doing that, I have gotten 2 solid clients from those!).
I am not yet aware of an AI that is able to straight up remove hours out of a timeline. Time goes by pretty fast recently though, maybe AI is the reason?
[put my hand up]. I recently had to/wanted to convert my lecture slides from latex-beamer/lyx into html/reveal.js. I did a couple of slides per hand, and then asked AI to convert the rest, following my example. Saved me hours of tedious and boring work.
Don’t know why this is downvoted. AI helps in productivity in many places so it is definitely a fair point.
I run searches that otherwise would take 15 min in google. The energy to power the monitor for that much time itself is higher than one prompt that solved my search query.
Because it's wrong. AI doesn't save any CO2 or hours.
> AI helps in productivity in many places so it is definitely a fair point.
The productivity per hours might be higher, but the CO2 per hours is also higher, per definition. This isn't about productivity though, OP talked about CO2 emissions, and they can only rise, per capitalism's definition. If any company owner says "Okay we're doing a workday's work in an hour now, so now we'll just leave the office after one hour", then yes, we may save CO2. But this is not what's happening.
The hours still go by as fast as before, but instead of only having working humans, we have additional data centers that pollute the air.
In comparison to effectiveness, AI may (or may not, I saw studies that suggested otherwise) may reduce the CO2/LoC cost, but saying "AI saves CO2" is just entirely wrong and a misconception. It adds a massive amount of CO2. The rich people running the companies only earn money a little more faster than before.
> I run searches that otherwise would take 15 min in google. The energy to power the monitor for that much time itself is higher than one prompt that solved my search query.
But the time didn't go away. You consumed more energy in a smaller timeframe, but the rest of the 15 mins that you "saved" didn't go away. You probably did something else in there. So it just added CO2.
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I have experience in IoT as well but the rate and length for that is different.
Any advice on how to transition from a day programming job to contracting? Any useful resources? Where to find contracting jobs/ through agency or directly approaching clients?
Only just noticed this, I guess if you check your comments you can pick this up at some point.
Best advice is do it early, use your usual job sites (Monster etc.). Resources will depend on your country but the only real administrative hurdle is insurance and taxes so you will need to look up what your country's business rules are. Most people tend to set up as a small limited company or something of that nature and then get the necessary insurance and taxes once you actually land your first contract.
I love BeOS and had NeXTSTEP 3.3 (& later OpenStep) and BeOS running in my office. There was no real comparison, NeXTSTEP was better in every way except doing video demos. It was easier to program and had a decent UNIX. NeXTSTEP was multi-user. BeOS was superior to quite a lot of the other OSes at the time though.
We will really never know, but I suspect there were some serious problems when Palm bought the code and couldn't build a phone / PDA OS out of it.
It seems like noreply@pubmail.io is stuck in some sort of a loop?. I apologize if I somehow caused that. I just tried to email myself (okokok@pubmail.io)... :/
One thing I will say though is that, it also comes with a lot of flexibility and freedom and you set our own hours and location which in itself is very valuable. Of course has its own pros and cons and you have to be quite disciplined to begin with.
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