Not sure if off-topic, but what’s the best way to go about finding coding gigs at the moment? Need some urgent funds so need to reach out to people somehow.
I think of linkedin as a facebook for businesses leading you open to being spammed by agencies, which I don’t really want.
Though I have years of experience of coding across many languages and fields (audio, computer vision, e-commerce backends, etc), and github accounts over the years with some pushes to the core of a few major projects, I haven’t really kept the accounts, and past projects have nearly always been back-ends for clients so can’t exactly add them to a portfolio.
Languages I’m currently using would be python / php (including symfony and laravel), though happy to switch to javascript/html coding, some c/c++ etc, so I’m not tied to one area I guess.
Is there a decent place to advertise or, is there a better way lately? Thanks
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Not sure about freelance, but for a salary in my experience, answer some recruiter spam on LinkedIn. I always thought they’d be crap since they are spammy… But after using some I’ve totally changed my mind. At least in my industry (silicon verification):
- Companies use them.
- You get a foot in the door & can bypass all the HR crap.
- They know all of the relevant companies. I learnt about my current company from the recruiter.
- They give you some hints about the interview process.
- They do all of the chasing up for you.
Also, they get a big payoff if you get a job, so their interests are more or less aligned with yours. The only slight difference is that they just want you to get any job, so they might push you to a job you don’t really want. But it’s minor.
Basically you get a lot of benefits for using them and you aren’t paying the cost - the company is. They won’t pay that cost to you if you don’t use a recruiter and save them cash, so there’s no real reason not to use a recruiter.
It may be very different for less niche sectors; I don’t know.
I’ve mainly worked as an employee so I don’t have as much experience with freelance gigs. But nearly every job I’ve had in 18 years has been through networking. Organizing and speaking at programming meetups opened a lot of doors for me. It gets a lot of attention on me while I get a chance to present myself as an expert.
Eventually I’d worked with enough people that when I’ve been looking for work I find I know people who’ve moved to new companies that are hiring.
Freelancer platforms that have paying stuff do exist, but it requires effort to learn how to use them; and during the long learning curve, one is usually grossly underpaid and sometimes scammed and or cheated.
If in financial emergency it’s often better to not try this and try menial work outside industry. But one can find it as a decent resource stream after some trial and error which can take a year or more to learn
during the long learning curve, one is usually grossly underpaid and sometimes scammed and or cheated.
See, that’s the issue on such sites. Posters want a whole (e.g. e-commerce) project done for $100 because, “it won’t take long” and then challenge your quotes with “well, I can get someone in bum|f*ck|land to do it for $100…”. A game I don’t want to play.
And sticking around and building a rep for a year is difficult when such sites have lots of scammers and sock accounts actively challenging you to make you look bad and their other alt accounts look good.
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Things I learned the hard way:
- Never agree on anything until can see the existing code and talk about everything.
- Milestone payments only. Stay away from any lump sum payments or percentage cuts.
- Full payments in escrow first.
- Never reply to people you don’t know who seek you out, only seek out jobs.
- In first contacts ask questions first, don’t talk about qualifications. If questions good then customer knows you know the tech well.
- Learn to walk away if instincts kick in
- Never reply to people you don’t know who seek you out, only seek out jobs.
Just want to add to this. Don’t take job postings at face value. There are also employment scams to be wary of. Verify as much of their info as you can before you give any PII. Just because you found them on a legit site, doesn’t mean that the job ad is real. The only thing stopping you from getting scammed is yourself. Stay vigilant.
If you figure out the answer let me know. 10+ years of experience and haven’t been able to find a job in the last 2 years.
Mainly looking for:
- Nodejs/Nestjs
- Typescript/JavaScript
- React/React-Native
- Rust
The only thing I’m seeing in abundance is C#/dot net. And everything advertised with PHP smells like WordPress.
