Freelancing Transition Tips and More with @DevOpsDirective

Key Takeaways

if you've ever wanted to get into freelancing i think one of the best ways to get into it is to learn from people who have made that jump with that in mind i've interviewed some freelancers to get as much information out of them as i can that will be useful for you to get into freelancing or to expand as a freelancer so this is my interview with sid palace who is a back end developer but i'll let him tell us more about himself let's go and jump into it right now so my name is sid i'm a software engineer focused mostly on back end devops and cloud infrastructure topics i was living outside of boston massachusetts but i'm currently in the process of moving so all of my belongings are packed up into a an old toyota corolla and we are in south carolina spending a week at the beach uh before we make a drive back across the country to san francisco where we'll be settling down for at least the the near to mid-term future like i said i focus mostly on backup back-end and devops i have been freelancing for the past year before that i worked at various companies including some startups in silicon valley um and yeah that's that's kind of the quick intro before you even got your first job and all that for when it comes to your education i'm just always curious when it comes to especially in this world if people are more self-taught or if you have a degree in comp sci or something like that sure so i'd say it's a bit of both my degrees are all in mechanical engineering i studied mechanical engineering undergrad at duke university and then went and did a master's at mit also in mechanical engineering and my first jobs were in the mechanical engineering space so i think my official titles were research engineer and research scientist i was working on a variety of things ranging from advanced manufacturing technologies to my final position there in that role was was focused on control systems for high-energy lasers so think about the the mirrors that you have to steer and deform to focus a laser beam on a target i was working on building and simulating the algorithms that did that so it was it was an interesting mix between using sort of the control systems mechanical engineering theory but also starting more and more as i evolved into that role adding a software component to it so while my degrees are mechanical in nature i've found that every position i've been in had a strong software component and basically i enjoyed writing software and that element of my role was the most exciting to me and so i decided a few years back to make that transition fully into a software engineering role so i went from being sort of a mechanical engineer who can code and then dove head first into deciding i want to go full bore into software and in san francisco the easiest or the the clearest path for me to do that uh was within web software there's tons of companies and startups that are building uh applications to solve lots of interesting challenges and opportunities and so i decided to make that transition and joined a health technology startup in 2018 uh where i was working as a full-stack engineer and then i found that i wasn't very good at making things look nice on the front end and so now i've i've i've pushed away some of the front-end work and uh now focused mostly on the back-end and cloud infrastructure pieces um when it came time like how did you decide to go from that to freelancing instead yeah it was mostly happenstance so my first freelance gig um in 2018 my wife and i decided to do some traveling before i transitioned from that mechanical engineering role and then we were going to travel the world for a few months come back to san francisco and i was going to start applying for software engineering roles and so i had just resigned from my previous position and i had a few weeks before our flight left for asia and so we i i wasn't even intending to do this but i heard my wife talking about this one project at her company she was at an education nonprofit at the time and they were they had done all of this research around education techniques and how to apply them and they had built up this this large set of google docs where they had documented all of this research and they had all the different elements and it was sort of a semi-structured approach they had various metadata about these topics and then kind of a paragraph blurb describing something and they needed to take all those data and move them from google docs into contentful which is kind of a cms where they were going to host this web app that was going to display all that information and initially their plan was to pay a contractor to manually copy and paste from google docs into contentful and they were i don't know this would have probably taken someone uh three weeks of full-time like copy-paste formatting uh and so she had described this to me and i said whoa whoa whoa what what is this plan that that your company has and why why would they do that like these are both web services with apis we can automate this um and so they they didn't even realize that this was a possibility to automate and so i basically pitched them and said hey you were planning to pay some contractor i don't know 20 bucks an hour to copy and paste this stuff for 60 hours so why don't i just come in and help you do that and i think it took me i don't know a week and a half worth of work and i charged them a few thousand dollars which at the time it was fine i was it was just sort of filling the gap between my previous position and this this travel and so i was happy to do it and i think it was a win-win for everyone where i got a little bit of freelance experience under my belt got a few thousand dollars extra cash that i wasn't expecting and helped them solve this problem where now not only do they get all the data from google docs into contentful but now they also have a script where if they add more google docs they can click the click the run button and it automatically propagates it from one place to another and so yeah that was sort of my accidental entrance into freelancing that was a one-off uh gig that then i went off and traveled and then joined the startup but that was sort of my very first freelance experience i'm curious how you went from being you know i did this one thing helped out your wife's company to deciding to go full time with it whether it was sort of a slow adding a couple projects here and there or if you had uh sort of a big one big client that maybe you got or something in between yeah yeah uh i think it's a little bit of something in between so i i did that project i went off and traveled i came back and joined this health tech startup and was there for about 18 months my software engineering skills advanced rapidly during those 18 months i went from sort of knowing how to code but not knowing sort of the discipline required to operate on a large code base within a team to gaining many of those skills and so that that was a great experience but i did end up a bit burnt out towards the end of that period and so at the end of those 18 months i was taking some time i had resigned from that position i was taking some time between then and when i was gonna either apply to new roles or i wasn't sure what i was going to do and this was basically right at the beginning of the pandemic so february 2020 um i walked out of my role and uh after wrapping up all my projects and decided okay what do i need to do next and i knew i needed a little bit of time to just step back and decompress and figure out what was next and during that time i started a youtube channel i continued to sort of build side projects and i wrote an article about basically the pricing models for managed kubernetes offerings across the different clouds and i hadn't seen anyone do an analysis on that so i just went off and pulled up the pricing pages and calculated out okay for one virtual cpu it cost this for one gigabyte of memory it cost that for the control nodes that caused this for the ingress data it cost that and put together a jupiter notebook that sort of allows you to toggle okay if i have five clusters at this size on this cloud provider what does that cost me per month and wrote up an article on that and it ended up making it to the front page of hacker news which was very exciting um and so that led to some inbound where people found my site i had a brand new blog at devopsdirective.com which is the the name of my llc that i now operate under um and that brought some traffic and people seeing what i was doing and through that it sparked up a conversation with a friend who has a startup in the bay area who's working with kubernetes and he asked hey have you worked with this particular product that interacts with kubernetes in a certain way and i had not but we kind of got to talking and that led to me starting to work for his uh startup on a contract basis initially we had scoped it to helping him and his team migrate onto this particular platform called cube flow which is a machine learning framework on top of kubernetes and so we did that and it went really well and so that that now engagement has extended and i've been working with them since april on maybe a half-time-ish basis um working on a lot of their different infrastructure um pieces and so yeah that's been a sort of my anchor customer that i've worked with it started as a well-scoped freelancing gig but now it's more of just an extended contract where i can help them in whatever way is needed when it comes to other things like dealing you know whether it's marketing accounting email outreach all of that other things like what would your uh sort of balance be when it comes to all of those other things other than doing the actual dev work itself sure sure so i mean for me you're right like having that long contract means that my work with them is very similar to my work uh what my work would look like as a as an employee i'll join their stand-ups a couple of times a week to get a sense of where i'm at with the task that i'm performing where the rest of the team is uh where anyone is blocked on smaller projects you're right there i would say that i don't i don't spend too much time on sort of outbound um marketing or explicit outreach to companies most of what i do uh is from inbound so whether people are finding my content on my website or youtube channel i've had i've had contracts that came through youtube comments that was unexpected but uh fun or another mechanism by which i'll uh find work is taking people who are reaching out about full-time gigs uh and asking that recruiter or that uh person whether whether they really need it to be full-time or whether they'd be open to exploring me helping on a part-time basis uh and targeting specific devops challenges that they may be facing um so yeah i think i would spend less than four hours a week on sort of marketing or accounting etc like i only have one or two clients at a time usually and so i'll send an invoice every other week i'll keep track of my expenses but really my expenses are are quite minimal it's oh i'll buy some computer accessory or some camera microphone accessory and so i think like the total number of purchases that i'm making over the course of the year is in the i don't know 20 ish range um so it's not too hard to keep track of i'm just curious how you decided on your naming and on branding and all of that side of things and how much time you actually spent on that yeah so in 2020 i operated as a sole proprietor and so everything i say will be u.s centric so apologies to other people in the world but i think most countries have similar constructs so you'll just have to map the terminology but yeah i operated as a sole proprietor which means i am the contract is between the company i'm working with and me personally as an individual uh on january 1st 2021 i decided to file the paperwork to create an llc a limited liability company there's a few things that that does for me one i have the option to be taxed as an s corporation which can have some tax benefits where i pay myself a salary and then the rest of any income would come as dividends which is taxed differently i think in 2021 i'll probably just operate as a like you can also alternatively just pass the income through and tax it in the same way that it was before but that is one potential benefit i think it just provides a cleaner split between your personal and business life so you can have your business bank account your business credit card and everything is just separate and so that is easier to deal with from a mental perspective and also from the irs's perspective when they take a look at my tax situation they can very clearly understand what is what and then there are some liability benefits where now a contract is between a company and my llc versus a company and me personally the i think the likelihood that you get sued as a freelancer if you're not doing something nefarious is quite low and you can increasingly minimize that by having good communication with your clients and understanding expectations and setting expectations uh at the beginning and throughout projects so that that benefit is less important to me but more so it was about i'm committing to keeping this clean separation between my business life and my personal life and that helps helps my mental model when thinking about it there are some clients who i think prefer to work with an llc or a company or corporation versus the sole proprietor my understanding is that it can make it less likely for them to get audited i don't know all the details of that but like my status as a contractor is less in question because i have this business entity so it's very clear to the the irs looking at that company who's hiring me oh this is you're hiring this llc not you're hiring sid the random software engineer and why is he different than your normal employees yeah and so it's very different when you're doing back end work and devops type things when it comes to marketing yourself you said you know you're getting leads through your youtube channel and your website obviously that article that did well helped out a lot but in terms like i'm really unfamiliar with it when it comes to how like as a front-end guy having a portfolio is something you do you can show your work and all of that i imagine it's a little bit different uh when it comes to back end um or devops to be able to sort of show what you've done in the past and to give your experiences and all that how does that work yeah so that you're 100 correct that there's not a sexy flashy interface with which to view a ci cd pipeline or your infrastructure as code configuration that doesn't prevent you from publishing those types of things to your github and writing up a clean explanation of what it is all doing so if you go to my github you'll see lots of different projects ranging from terraform configurations to spin up an application on google cloud platform with cloudflare in front and mongodb atlas as the database and sort of all the automation around that using github actions to deploy incremental changes using terraform to spin up the whole infrastructure uh and so for me that is like a portfolio yes it's not as uh cool and there's no fancy animations or anything but it shows sort of an end-to-end system that i can put together and make very streamlined for the developers who will be working with that system so i think you you certainly can build a portfolio it's just not going to look the same you're going to put your projects on there you want to very clearly explain what they are and what they're doing what technologies are being used i saw a really cool i think it's called the cloud resume challenge that some someone had put out there and effectively they it walks through i don't know a 15-step process of of kind of creating your resume as an html and css combined website and then deploying it to aws using all these different technologies to integrate into this end product which ends up just being a a url that goes to your resume but behind all of that there's this fully formulated tech stack that is similar to what you might have in a company developing an application and so i think doing something like that where you have this fully fledged application and the systems around it is probably the way to go um in terms of developing a portfolio and for me i write about the pieces of that on my blog i film tutorials about the different components on my youtube channel and so someone who sees those comes in as a potential client pre-qualified they they just saw me explain uh some technology for an hour uh so they know that i i understand it and can work with it and so there's very there's there's a much smaller sort of interview process at that point because they already know okay i just saw him end to end build out this whole workflow that's exactly what we want to do i i can hire him with high confidence that he'll be able to do it um so i think that is one way to get pre-qualified leads is sort of through publishing content around what you're doing the other is going through your network so there's a number of people that i worked with in my initial role at lockheed martin or at the startup who have now gone off and are doing their own thing also my networks from undergrad and graduate degrees many of them have companies or in positions where they're hiring people to do things and so having built up a reputation within my previous roles enables me to start that discussion from a very strong place where they know the type of work that i i could do and the type of the quality of work that i bring to the table and so it's much easier at that point to come in and establish myself as a candidate for uh assisting them with with their needs there's lots of different methods people take sometimes it's an hourly rate that you discharge obviously if you have a contract for the company it can be different if it's you know going over a long period of time where it's more probably hourly uh sometimes there's value based pricing or project based pricing so i'm just curious about how you sort of how you approach pricing and all of that sure yeah and i'll i've done both um there i think there's kind of a few different pricing models as you mentioned you can think about hourly rates and what you are willing to work for what what number would make you happy as an employee when you think about rates as a contractor you are not getting a lot of the benefits that an employee would get in terms of health insurance or other uh other benefits and so and you also are going to pay a self-employment tax which depending on where you are can be 12 15 of income and so likely if you wanted to have parity between your salaried uh number and your contractor number the rough estimate or sort of rule of thumb that i would throw out is probably somewhere between 40 and 50 percent more so if you if you took your your yearly salary and divided it by the number of weeks in a year the number of hours in a week that you're gonna work and then multiply that by 1.4 that's approximately what uh sort of an equivalent salary would be there's also the fact that it can be hard to fill a full week's worth of work so you're going to be doing some business development you're going to be doing some accounting and other sort of business related items and so that can can lead you to want to increase it even more i have found that relative to my full-time salary that i was making uh as a software engineer at a startup in sf i'm now charging approximately double uh on an hourly basis what i was charging or what my rate calculated out to be um and so with that i'm able to not necessarily worry about filling all 40 hours a week and i can take that that excess time and go focus on my youtube channel or producing content uh or or what have you and so that that's actually been one of the most beneficial things to me is that i don't feel this pressure to always be turned on working for the company sort of when i was working for that startup i had a very hard time separating work and life and felt like every minute i needed to be doing something because it was critical to the mission and it was important but it was unhealthy for me and my mental health and that's kind of what led me to need to to take a step back at the beginning of 2020 and so because i have this flexibility with freelance where it's very clear delineation between am i charging for this hour or am i not charging for this hour uh i don't feel guilty per se if i'm if i'm not doing work and so that's sort of the hourly model you mentioned value-based pricing or project-based pricing i have done that as well it can be challenging to to scope it properly so there's you need to make sure to put a number on it that will enable you to make the the type of rate that you want to command um that can be difficult i think the hardest part is that when you scope a project you have to spend a lot more time up front agreeing on what are the specific conditions that we are meeting upon delivery of this project so what what do i need to accomplish uh in order for it to be at the point where you as the client uh will be happy with this result and so that can be a lot more effort up front uh because there's always there's always unwritten expectations and so you're trying to as the the contractor to sort of tease all that out and if a customer comes to you with a a rough idea of a project being able to ask the right questions to understand what the real needs are and what what the expectations are and documenting that out fully such that now throughout the project i'm showing progress against all of these bullet points in the scope of work that we've agreed upon if there are changes to that based on where the project goes we we may need to take a look at the budget and understand do we extend this project and add more dollar amount do we reduce the scope and and change things that way so yeah i actually right now prefer the hourly based approach just because it makes it much easier you have a rough agreed upon i think this is going to take me a month at half time but then throughout you can adjust accordingly and there's less pressure to have everything defined up front there is sort of a hybrid approach that i haven't tried but i've heard some freelancers use and that is to basically take your hourly number that you would be happy with and agree upon a rough number of hours per week or per month so let's say okay 10 hours a week and then essentially get a monthly retainer with the company where they're they're paying you for 10 hours a month and whether you work 8 hours or 12 hours that's kind of in the weeds and not as important as long as you're making the level of progress that you um that you've agreed upon and so that can help to reduce the tedium of tracking one hour to the next and sending a time sheet oh sorry i just bumped the computer um but also gives you that continuity and that uh the you you're no longer sort of tied to one hour of work equals one hour pay and you can flex your hours accordingly and get stuff done uh in that way and so i haven't explored that yet i may explore it on future projects i know some freelancers who really swear by that and that it can be a powerful tool that gives you the best of both worlds i guess um there's been a few questions that have come up in the chat and it sort of leads to i will just start off for just if you have any general advice for people who are looking to get into freelancing they haven't made that jump yet um if there's you know yeah and if you have any advice for them yeah and so when people think about freelancing and i've been using freelancing and contracting kind of interchangeably uh i think most people think of freelancing as smaller well-defined projects where you come in execute on one block of work and then move on contracting then being sort of this extended part-time relationship with a client where it may be a specific scope of work but it may be more more general i think there's less distinction between those than most people think so oftentimes a freelance client if you do a really really good job they want to i mean it's very hard to hire people to that can do good work and so they will oftentimes want to extend scope expand scope beyond that initial contract and so when you think about these projects definitely show them how you can add value and then really just knock it out of the park in those first few months and that can often lead to more work down the road the other thing that i'll point out is sort of the freelancing without experience versus freelancing as an expert i think a lot of people want to get into freelancing because there's this glamorous association with being able to work from anywhere for at any time all over the world and so there's a lot of demand or excitement of people wanting to get into this industry i think if you don't have prior experience and have established yourself as an expert in something it could be much more challenging to get those initial projects and so i would focus on as someone who wanted to get into freelancing really building up a deep expertise in a particular niche some focus area where you can demonstrate how you add value to companies because really companies are just trying to find people who can help them build their products and add value and so for me that was niching down into this devops and cloud infrastructure space and so i am i have tried very hard to be able to articulate why a company would hire me versus a full-time employee and why a company would would want to hire me particularly versus some other contractor and so the the business value proposition for my niche specifically is usually it's startups like series a or seed stage startups who have a team of somewhere between let's say 5 and 10 developers but none of them are really focused on cloud infrastructure and devops they're more product focused engineers and so generally someone on that team usually one of the founders or maybe an early employee has sort of taken it upon themselves to build out whatever system they are currently using and they may or may not be experts in those technologies and that gets them their their mvp their minimum viable product and they scale to some uh some number of users but at some point they start to those those initial systems start to break down and so they need someone to come in and help them with that they also don't necessarily need someone full time so if if you think about it it's probably i don't know somewhere between quarter and half time of work in terms of all these tasks associated with building out their infrastructure and monitoring and logging and etc and so they don't want to invest in a full-time person when that person just wouldn't necessarily have a full-time role's worth of work and so that's why they would want to hire a part-time contractor and then by leveraging all the the content that i put out there and the experience that i've had with these people through my network is how i can convince them that i am the right person to to add value to their team and so very rarely has it been me competing with some other contractor like if you were to go on to upwork or fiverr it kind of commoditizes the freelancer such that oh i'm just picking from hundreds of potential people and instead it's how can sid help my team by building these these types of integrations and tooling and changing how we approach software development so it's a much more collaborative discussion versus a competitive discussion of uh really trying to bargain on the price point or uh the specific the specifics of who is doing the contracting work um that's really there's a question in the chat now from fabrizio and i think based on what you just said i do think i know what you might answer on it but he's asking as a beginner do you suggest to start freelancing to start the career or is it better to begin at a company my my personal opinion is that it's better to start at a company you'll gain the understanding of how to operate within a large team on a large code base your maturity as a software engineer will ramp up much faster i think you you may find success as a freelancer but you won't have the same level of mentorship that you might get in a larger company you won't necessarily get to work on as deep of problems so i think as a freelancer you work very broadly and and can touch a lot of things especially if you're building out websites for customers in more of a front-end type capacity but you won't always get to to go as deep onto technologies as you might uh working working with a company or working at a company as an employee and so i think establishing that deep expertise in a particular niche that you're excited about is probably the the best thing you can do if you want to go freelance eventually now if you are either looking at getting into freelancing or learning more about freelancing and stepping up your freelancing game i can't help but recommend the freelancing bundle over at studywebdevelopment.com you can check out the link just below for more information on it but it is full of amazing resources it goes into the fundamentals of freelancing creating multiple income streams how to find more clients how to outsource work so you can keep on growing your business how to position yourself and a whole lot more than that it also has a whole bunch of templates that you can use to help get yourself started so you're doing less of that side of things and you're just doing the work that you want to be doing with your business if you're interested in that and interested in stepping up your freelancing game you can use the coupon code kev25 at checkout and get 25 off and that is an affiliate link so not only are you getting 25 off but it's also going to help support my channel as well thank you very much for watching i really hope you enjoyed this a really big thank you to sid for sitting down and talking with me a giant thank you to my supporters of awesome azak and randy and all of my other patrons for their monthly support and of course until next time don't forget to make your internet just a little bit more awesome