“100Offer big player said” is a new column we plan.

In each issue, we invite one of the biggest names in the tech world to share their work experience, growing up story, or their perspective on a hot topic in the tech world.

For the first issue, we have an Xiaohui, a well-known blogger from CSDN.





An Xiaohui is a writer/career planner/developer/lecturer. He is the author of Qt on Android Core Programming, Qt Quick Core Programming, Hello Programmer and other books. CSDN well-known blogger, personal subscription account “program Vision”, focusing on career development.

With the rapid development of Internet technology, the number of professionals who are inclined to become freelancers is increasing in recent years. Among them, programmers who are skilled in programming and earn a high salary but not much per hour seem to be more interested in freelancing.

So telecommuting, cross-country programming, and personal work are not new to the programmer community. Some of the people we’ve talked to in the past have worked as freelancers or had a career goal of “becoming a freelancer.”

So, what kind of programmers are good freelancers?

What kind of work can you do as a freelancer?

What preparations do YOU need to make? What difficulties will you encounter?

An Xiaohui, who has rich free professional experience, will be unveiled one by one.

The following is the text.

—

As a developer in your thirties, you need more and more money to make ends meet as you start a family, buy a house, pay off a mortgage, support your parents and feed your children.

However, after a certain stage of working in a company, there are always some problems:

Even if you become more and more skilled and contribute more and more to the company, the customer will always belong to the company. In order to control the labor cost, the company will set up a strict compensation system and put the value of each employee within the budget.

At this point, the fixed salary, the nine-to-five rhythm, quickly becomes a trap. So, you begin to look forward to “do what you want to do, want to make how much money you want to make” life, freelancing has become a quite desirable choice for you.

So, how do you go about freelancing as a developer?

That’s what this article is about, starting with four common ways to start freelancing, and then talking about five things you should do to get ready to start freelancing. Finally, I will share two personal insights.

4 common ways to start freelancing

Skilled developers usually have the following abilities:

Software development refers to the ability to use thinking, analysis, design and imagination to find answers to specific problems in the field, and to write software to realize the answers through language, technical framework and tools.

Lecturing is the ability to show and make others understand technology, software, solutions, etc.

Consulting is the ability to help others solve problems through the knowledge, skills, experience, framework, etc that you have stored up.

Developers who love to share also have another core competency: writing.

Software development, teaching, writing, and consulting make up four common ways for developers to go freelance.

Software development

Many developers have heard of “private work” and have taken on private work. Private work is a software project undertaken by an individual in a certain way, which is called “private” as opposed to the “public” of the company. There are many terms for this method nowadays, such as outsourcing, crowdsourcing, tasks, etc.

This is the most common way we developers go freelance.

I have personally helped others modify open source code and developed PC software using Qt, so I have some experience with this approach. In addition to software development, you will need the following skills: customer development, business negotiation, and project management.

It’s very straightforward, keep developing clients, take on projects and get paid. The benefit: You get paid by the dollar amount of the project, not monthly. To apply the advertising language of a second-hand car trading platform, there is no middleman to earn price difference.

Think about it, you are in the company, a project is 1 million yuan, you can finish it alone in a month, still get more than 30 thousand yuan salary; If you take the project and finish it in a month, you’ll make $1 million that month (not counting the hidden cost of VAT, personal income tax, etc.). So it’s tempting to develop software projects independently!

There are a few problems with this approach: you don’t always get projects. You need to be upfront about changing requirements and manage the fact that project payments may not arrive on time and balance payments may not be collected.

Also, if you want to take on a larger project on your own, you’ll need to register a company to take on the project (larger projects are both public and private), and there are costs associated with owning a company, such as account payment, property taxes, corporate income taxes, etc.

But now all the package way, will be better, like the liberation, cloud walter guest, code city, programmers inn platform, such as collaborative projects have used this way, you only have to do something you are good at, software development, good, other things are done by others or platform (you need to pay some withdrawals from platform, generally about 10%).

teach

If you’re good at lecturing, you can turn your deep accumulation of expertise in a particular technology stack into something else: lecturing.

Yes, you can teach others what you have learned so well. It’s a very valuable thing!

Many people need good teachers and good tutorials to help them cross the gap from never knowing to knowing and from knowing to doing.

IT skills courses, which help others master a skill and make money, have been in high demand. Online platforms have developed rapidly in recent years, and many students are willing to learn online at low cost. Platforms such as 51CTO Institute, CSDN Institute, MOOC, Geek Institute, netease Cloud Classroom, Tencent Classroom, And Taobao Education are all very popular.

I personally recorded Qt and Node.js courses for sale at 51CTO college and CSDN College, some of which are 3 years old and still being bought.

If you can use your lecturing skills to translate your skills into online courses, you can use online education as a way to freelance.

Many of the 51CTO instructors I’ve been lurking in are former developers who started freelancing through programming courses. During events such as Singles Day and IT Charging Festival, many lecturers sold more than 10,000 yuan in a day.

This approach has several benefits:

Low start-up cost

● Wide audience

● Sell a portion more than once

● Big imagination space

writing

In the second half of 2013, I resumed the update of CSDN technical blog, focusing on sharing Qt technology, and soon became a well-known blog in the Qt field, attracting many people’s attention. Then some editors saw articles and contacted me to publish books on Qt, and I built an impact and a brand with books like Qt On Android Core Programming and Qt Quick Core Programming, which in turn led to more visits to the blog.

In 2015, I opened an official wechat account, updated three articles a week, and published the book Hello programmer in the same year.

In July 2017, with the confidence brought by writing, I left the company and started freelancing, earning income through writing and lecturing.

My friend Yang Kaizhen left the organization in April 2017 and became a freelance writer because of his book MyBatis Technical Principle and Actual Combat, which sold well.

Writing is a programmer’s free wing. It helps you build influence, build a personal brand, and, yes, direct cash. For developers, writing is the most powerful weapon on the road to freedom.

The path of writing has unparalleled benefits:

Low start-up cost

● Individuals can do it independently

● Can directly build influence and personal brand

● A portion of time is sold many times

Have imagination –

Its biggest difficulty is:

● How to write well

● How to capture a broader and stronger need

How do I keep writing

consulting

If you have watched the TV series The First Half of My Life, you must be impressed by He Han. He does consulting work: he uses his knowledge, experience, skills, thinking, framework and so on to help others solve problems.

In the IT field, if you have a good skill tree and rich experience, can stand on a higher level to do the overall thinking, good at tracing the source of analysis and problem solving, you can also engage in consulting and other work, not hired by a specific organization, direct customer service.

Chen Hao, the founder of the famous website database shell, is good at the underlying technical architecture, and has rich experience and experience in high performance, high availability, distributed, high concurrency, and large-scale data processing systems.

He was unable to work at the company for some time, so he earned a good salary by providing technical consulting to other companies.

I’ve been trying for a while to make money by providing technical advice to companies, but it didn’t work out.

I still remember what the boss of one company said to me: You can join our company, take a team and get the project done, and then you can be our consultant.

See, this is the trouble with independent consulting: when you’re not good enough, no one wants to pay you for something you don’t know is going to work, and it’s very, very hard to get clients. Even though many of the consultants at ThoughtWorks have corporate endorsements, they are often criticized for saying, ‘You haven’t done any projects yourself, so why are you giving us advice?

IT’s hard, but IT’s the way to go, and if you’re interested, you can read the Biblical book The Mysteries of Consulting by Gerald Weinberg, a world-renowned IT consultant and computer Hall of Famer in the United States.

In addition, of course, you need to build up a client base before you are free and impress them with your consulting skills so that they can become your foundation.

5 things you should Do to Prepare for freelancing

Once you’ve identified your path to freelancing, it’s time to prepare. Based on my personal experience, here are five must-do preparations:

● Way of liquidation

Market test

● Saturation test

● Expectation management

● Plan B and Z

Realizable way

There are two ways to realize what I’m talking about: selling time and selling products.

The selling time here refers to the working mode of “selling once a time”. When you work in the company, you are on sale hours, 9 to 5, 8 hours a day, and you get paid every month.

Come to fruition in the manner that sell time freelance, essence or use your professional skills to provide exclusive service time level (you cannot at the same time for different customer service), just you are no longer employed by the enterprises, no longer be bound by the rules and regulations, can according to your own intend to arrange in what time complete the services in any way. Outsourcing, crowdsourcing, private work, consulting, etc., all sell time.

Selling products refers to “selling multiple times at a time”. Examples include writing, online courses, and so on. It has more room for imagination than selling time and can generate revenue at scale. You can write a classic, bestselling book, produce a hit course and earn hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Before freelancing, you need to identify your greatest strengths and decide on your primary way to monetize — since your free time is limited and you can’t do many things at once.

Market test

Before you leave organizing freelancing, you need to test how much money you can make from the way you cash out of freelancing.

For example, if you are doing technical courses, you must first develop several courses in your spare time and sell them on online education platforms such as 51CTO College or Tencent Classroom. Check the income to see if it can maintain your acceptable living standard.

For example, if you write a book, publish a copy, watch the sales for six months, see how much royalties you can get. Yang Kaizhen mentioned in front, he is the use of spare time to write the “MyBatis technical principle and combat” this book, sold 20,000 copies in half a year, got more than 100,000 royalties, just decided to free career.

For example, if you do software outsourcing or private work, you should also develop several clients and take several projects to see the income situation; If you do crowdsourcing, you can go to cloud Walker, Jiefang, programmer inn, code market and other places to verify for about half a year, to see how many orders and income your development skills can bring you.

If you don’t do any preparation, don’t market test, the brain is hot and disorganization, often get into the cold start of the mire, regret.

If do the market to test the discovery income is very low, do not rise, do not be discouraged, want to see others, especially the person with your experience, level, identity about the same, have done good.

For example, when I write books, the royalties are very low. I sell three or five thousand copies and I don’t make any money. But Yang Kaizhen sold 20,000 copies of a book in half a year and negotiated high royalties, so he had a considerable income. Then at this time, to find the gap, see how to improve.

Saturation test

Freelancing doesn’t mean you don’t work, it just means you don’t work in an organization, and you still have to put in enough hours to produce a decent output and make the money you want.

When you work in the workplace, the bosses will arrange things for you, you don’t have to worry about whether the workload is full or not, even if you have nothing to do all day, you can get a salary. After freelancing, it’s different. You have to take the initiative to schedule your work so that you have enough load, otherwise you will be stuck in the mire for a short time.

The saturation test is designed to get you acclimated to the nature of freelancing and see if you can fill up your time with the things you’ve planned to do while freelancing.

This can be done in two steps: concentrate on it first and see if you can fill up your spare time now. If fill malcontent, OK, you need not free profession, continue present job, amateur time does the thing that you want to do, earn income outside one share went.

If you don’t have enough free time right now, make an estimate of how much it will take up, a few hours a day on average. If you average 4 hours a day, then OK, what do you do with the other 4 hours? You need to find something to fill it up with. It could be something that makes money, or it could be a hobby, a hobby, leisure. If you have too much time and nothing to do, you’re going to have a problem.

Expectation management

Expectations management includes four aspects:

Cold start cycle. Projects, books, and online courses all come with a payback cycle, so you should figure out how long you can afford to start without income, and set aside some money for that. For example, if you expect a three month cycle, you should set aside at least three months ‘worth of money.

Revenue forecast, the size of expected revenue in the next three years.

Time expectancy, how long you are prepared to do it to prove that you can really go on.

Achievement expectations, what you intend to achieve and build a reputation for in which direction.

B and Z

You have to think about what you’re going to do in case the thing you’re planning now doesn’t pay as much as you’d like and doesn’t maintain your standard of living. So that’s your plan B, you have to have at least two things that you can cash in.

Consider the worst-case scenario: if you can’t support yourself anyway, what should you do? Go back to work? Or eat your savings and keep going? Make sure you file well in advance so you can handle it in stride.

The freedom and anxiety of freelancing

At the beginning of this article, we said that “you aspire to a life of doing whatever you want and making as much money as you want”, so you consider freelancing. However, real freelancing may not be as beautiful as imagined. It has freedom and not freedom. There is high income and the anxiety that comes with freedom and uncertainty.

free

Daughter see a tooth, the time is about Monday afternoon, it doesn’t matter, go directly, don’t ask for leave. The second visit is scheduled for Friday afternoon. It doesn’t matter. I went directly without asking for leave.

My friends made an appointment to meet and chat at noon on Wednesday. It didn’t matter. I went there directly without asking for leave, because I didn’t need to consider work.

Today I am tired, so I get up late. It doesn’t matter, don’t worry about being late for work. I’m in the mood to write until 2am tonight. Never mind, I don’t have to work the next day.

You see, that’s the best thing about freelancing: the freedom to arrange your hours. As long as you get the job done and solve the problem, it doesn’t matter what hours you work.

However, your freedom is based on self-discipline. Your freedom is the freedom to arrange your work, not the freedom to do whatever you want without working (that’s financial freedom) — because you have to earn money to support yourself.

For example, you promised the client to finish the development and deliver the first version of the software on Thursday, but you are busy on Monday and Tuesday, and the code is not finished. Can you change the delivery date to next Monday? No way!

If you’re working on something at work, approach your boss and say, “Oops, boss, there’s been a situation, so this is going to have to be postponed for a week…” Maybe the boss will say yes and you’ll have time again.

But when you’re freelancing and you don’t have a boss, you have to maintain an image of yourself as “trustworthy” and trustworthy to your employer. So, you promise to do it, even if you stay up late!

This is a kind of unfreedom.

anxiety

One of the best things about going to work is that you don’t have to worry about what you’re going to do or whether it’s going to create financial value. You get paid a fixed monthly salary anyway. As long as you stay in the unit, even if you brush a day moments, also get money! What a great happiness!

But freelancers are different: if you don’t work, you don’t get paid. And, even more awkwardly, you don’t have to be rich to do it.

As a result, freelancers are plagued with uncertainty every day. For example, I use bookkeeping software to record my income and expenditure. Every time I see a big red color, I get anxious and think: “Oh, when will my money arrive in my account?” If you see that your expenses have far exceeded your income this month, you may feel anxious and say, “Oh, I missed so much. Can I make up for it next month?”

This is your anxiety about the volatility of your income, especially when you’re new to freelancing.

There’s a second kind of anxiety: whether what you’re doing will last.

In my case, I intend to write two books and take two courses a year, but is that really possible? That’s fine for a year or two, but can it really go on forever? Is three years, five years, 10 years all right? I’ll always have something to write about, okay? Will there always be systematic courses to develop?

When I’m good, I don’t think this is a problem, because if I can find something to talk about before, I’m sure something new will come up in the future. When the state is poor, the meeting is anxious: the topic that can think of all did almost, where is the next topic? What if there’s nothing to write about next year?

There you have it all: 4 common ways for developers to achieve freelancing, 5 must-do preparations, and possible freedom and anxiety. Are you ready to get started?

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