Slightly off-topic questions, because I've been thinking about freelancing lately:
- Where/how do you (as a freelancer) find your clients? (Do you focus on clients from the financial industry?)
- Where are those clients from (location-wise)?
- Do you work remotely? If yes, does your timezone need to match your client's timezone? Put differently: How flexible are you when it comes to working hours?
In Toronto, Canada, freelancing or contracting is a way to pay senior engineers more than the company's standard fixed pay bands. The FTE pay brackets aren't great and we have a great public health care system so there's not much advantage to benefits packages.
Contractors are paid from the project budget (capex) and often don't have to go through the central HR department which allows projects to pay what they need to in order to attract the right people. We typically work alongside FTEs but we get "rolled off" projects as they ramp down at the end whereas the FTEs either stay on or get reassigned within the company.
For me, contracts typically last 1-3 years.
- I find my clients through my network of people I've worked with in the past
- My clients are usually based in Toronto like me
- I've been 100% remote since March 2020.
With respect to remote, my current client is trying to get people back to the office in a hybrid model. If they force it then I'll probably look elsewhere.
It's a bit embarrassing perhaps, but I don't actually look much for clients. Recruitment agencies find me on LinkedIn and contact me about projects they're trying to fill. Doing my own acquisition would be a lot of extra work, and I'm not convinced I could do it better than these recruiters, so I just sit here and let them contact me.
My projects tend to be 1-2 years where I'm part of a team working on the same thing. A single client at a time.
My clients are mostly from Amsterdam, where I live. I want to be able to bike to work. Well, normally; these days I work from home, but we're in the same timezone and I work normal working hours.
- Where/how do you (as a freelancer) find your clients? (Do you focus on clients from the financial industry?)
- Where are those clients from (location-wise)?
- Do you work remotely? If yes, does your timezone need to match your client's timezone? Put differently: How flexible are you when it comes to working hours?