Discussion of article "Better Programmer (Part 07): Notes on becoming a successful freelance developer"
That's funny.
First. A person has done 4 jobs and received 2 negative reviews and after that decided to write an article "How to become a successful performer".
It follows that he doesn't understand anything about it, and his other articles about programming are the same. He must have rewritten other people's articles from the Internet.
Another question is: "Is it necessary to become a successful executor and how much can you earn by working 10 hours a day?".
So I decided to write it as it is. My profile is open, you can see for yourself how much work I have done and my income. If you are going to count my money, take the last year - it was better before.
Work means not only fulfilling orders, but also keeping correspondence with potential clients, tracking the list of new work.After all, even if you did not take any work today, you could spend the whole day tracking applications all day or correspond with a potential client (or several), who then "fell off" after two hours of correspondence.
Even if you've taken the work and done the work, over 50% of clients ask for additional work to be done "for free". And many also have to explain how to install an Expert Advisor in Metatrader, what price slippage is, the difference between Ask and Bid prices, etc.
In about 1 out of 10 cases we have to connect to the client's computer via remote desktop because it is faster to find the problem "why it doesn't work". Starting from the fact that MQL5 renames file names and adds "_" instead of a space,
and ending with the fact that the client changes the names of indicators or paths to them and then the Expert Advisor does not work. It also happens that you need to download history, change strategy tester settings, etc. A lot of reasons.
Note for all these moments you are not paid, you can spend 2-3 hours on coding and 2-7 days to explain to the client all his questions or corrections, because the client wrote so, but in truth thought so and forgot to write about it. There are times that you have to rewrite the entire logic completely.
I wanted to say what work is definitely not worth taking - this work where the title has the words "Simple" and "Easy". This means that really this client does not want to pay money and offers a minimum amount of $ 30, and by labour costs for this work you will spend a lot of time, and your earnings will be even less than the earnings of a cleaner in Pyaterochka. You can easily spend several days trying to fulfil the wishes of the client, just so that he does not open arbitration.
Prepare for severe stress, some customers do not behave adequately. In general, there is a suspicion that after freelancing, you can get a job in tech support of some MTS. Already endure.
Forget about weekends and holidays. If you rest, the money may not be enough even for food, it's like a map will lie down - there are months with good income, and there are what, there is almost no work, and then you start to think: "And whether I do what I do?".
There are no pension contributions, sick leave, holidays and social security and yes taxes are not paid for you either.
I worked on 31 December and 1-10 January too. Well, I've already written about it.
Large orders are better not to take, as they are long to do, long to close the work, the money is frozen for a fortnight. Yes, and rarely who offers such, with normal payment.
Take need to work with a clear description, which you can 100% fulfil. It is better not to take everything in a row.
About earnings. The main earnings bring regular solvent clients. Usually the first work is rarely with normal payment. There is seasonality, in summer there is less work, on weekends and on Monday, Tuesday too.
Now many people are into cryptocurrencies, forex is losing now, so orders are falling.
According to my observations, many performers with more than 1000 jobs are no longer working. Apparently, they changed their profile.
Now in general the number of orders has fallen in times, before I could take a couple of works almost every day from new clients, now only 7 works for 17 days, of which a few from old clients.
Freelancing is mostly newbies now.
Why am I still doing it? I used to go on business trips, automate factories, disappeared for half a year on business trips. I got bored, so I decided to change my profile. There's not much work in my profession, factories are closing down.
Now here is also think to change, perhaps retraining on the developer of sites, you need time to do it, in this area of my friends income is many times more, you can also work remotely.
For 17 days of this month I earned $252, performed 7 works, this is without deducting taxes, withdrawal costs and conversion. Need something else to set aside in case of illness.
.
So think whether you should do it.
So you prefer the opinion of someone with 4 jobs. That's like trusting a car locksmith who has only repaired 4 cars. Simple logic. Harsh reality defeated the rose-coloured glasses. Or did the rose-coloured glasses win?
Well, everything is clear with you, you have nothing to say. I outlined my vision on the basis of my experience to warn. And you go ahead! Tell me later, it will be interesting.
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New article Better Programmer (Part 07): Notes on becoming a successful freelance developer has been published:
Do you wish to become a successful Freelance developer on MQL5? If the answer is yes, this article is right for you.
Do not apply for a job that you are not sure how you are going to do, just because the price is high. Since money is sweet and I believe is the first reason why you decided to become a freelance developer in the first place, it is easy to get persuaded into thinking that you are going to figure and sort things out along the way as you work. To my experience, this mindset does not work in the freelance, especially to serious customers who know exactly what they are looking for and to jobs with tight deadlines.
See, most areas in programming require a lot of work and effort in learning to master them, so thinking that you are going to learn something and be able to effectively implement it several hours is disgusting.
The second job that I did in the freelance was a job to create several indicators, to convert some from MQL4 to MQL5 and to create one Expert Advisor that uses all of them. The job was only 30 $, but I decided to take it. Honestly, I knew that the indicators he wanted were going to be difficult for me to create after he fully explained to me all the logic and what he wanted on the discussion section of the job because I was a noob to the subject of indicators (till this day), because I don't learn them, code them, or use them. As a result of me taking that job, I ended up executing the job in 81 days.
If we take the math on how much I was being paid per day during the entire time.
30 / 81 = 0.37 $
I was earning 37 cents per day during the entire time. What a waste of time! I know 81 days sounds a long time but trust me when I say that you won't do it every day. There are some weeks that I did not do anything to it because it was hard and boring and was not something that I wanted to do. Neither did I not want arbitration because I made a mistake accepting the job and I wanted to finish it no matter what.
If you see a job on a certain subject that you are ignorant of and you want to learn, take note of it and learn by doing it outside of the work on your normal learning routines. The same job will probably appear in the future.
Author: Omega J Msigwa