From Bloomberg Business, Selina Wang shares stories of freelancers who are doing better working independently than they were working as employees. While much of the media has focused on stories of companies exploiting workers, Selina’s article tells the story of independent workers being more successful. Selina writes:
James Knight recently made an unorthodox career move for a 27-year-old coder: quitting a well-paid gig writing software for Google to go freelance. No more catered lunches, gold-plated benefits or million-dollar views from the search giant’s Manhattan office.
Knight is willing to sacrifice those perks because as an independent he’s pulling down about twice as much as he did at Google. Plus, he has more freedom. In March, Knight and his wife plan to travel to Spain and hopscotch across Europe—all the while writing code for a dating app and a self-portrait app, among others.
“I’d rather control my own destiny and take on the risk and forgo the benefits of nap pods and food,” Knight says.
Amid an accelerating war for tech talent, big companies and startups alike are paying top dollar—as much as $1,000 a hour, according to a person who gets coders gigs—for freelancers with the right combination of skills. While companies still recruit many of the best minds, they’re turning to independent software developers to get a stalled project moving or to gain a competitive edge. In some cases, the right person can be the difference between a failed and successful product.Last spring, Aaron Rubin hired a freelance coder through recruiter Toptal for about four weeks to help get ShipHero, his cloud-based logistics startup, off the ground. “To find someone that talented in New York in three days was never going to happen,” Rubin says. “Every talented engineer I know has a job.”
Read the full story at Why an Ex-Google Coder Makes Twice as Much Freelancing
