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I wrote this article based on my last 3 years as a contractor with increasingly interesting clients (I'm currently doing open source Rust work for ISRG, the makers of Let's Encrypt). I've found lots of inspiration here on HN throughout my journey, so I'm hoping my article continues the chain and inspires some more people! I'll be hanging around here for the coming hours in case anyone has questions ;) (btw free to write to me directly if you prefer; contact details are in my profile)
Super interesting to find out that you're a fellow Catholic! It's sometimes hard to bring up faith in IT spaces, I feel like most of my colleagues are athiest or agnostic. I always feel good when I see people mention God, as it reminds me that being God fearing and in IT is not mutually exclusive.

Aside from that, awesome article and it was great to read your story. I am, like you, uncomfortable with unemployment, but I'm happy to see it can be done!

Yeah, I'm making an effort to avoid being preachy, but since God does play a genuine role in the story, people might as well hear about it (otherwise I'd be hiding crucial information to understand my decisions!)
I am a Sr. Dev at FAANG in America, but I yearn to go back to my home country in Europe. However doing so would result in a massive paycut, even with prospective high paging jobs. One possibility is to transfer internally with my current employer, but in this economic setting it's unlikely they will approve my request, much less allow me to work full remote, which is a deal breaker.

I have been contemplating freelancing for a while as a way to work remotely from home with a competitive salary (not US level, but better than EU market rate). I have decent experience as a Big Tech Sr. Dev. on ML/MLOps (e.g. I designed and implemented a real time inference service serving millions of RPS with single digit millisecond latency), so I believe my skills should be in demand.

Do you believe this is attainable or I am deluding myself?

You can always try this out first by searching for contract work as if you were in your home country. Just set up a website (perhaps not using your real name, in case your employer gets suspicious) and see if you can actually seek out the work. You can even try to purchase advertising on Google to see if you get any clicks / contacts. Overall it's a pretty cheap way to check.

I get that this may not be possible, but these sorts of trial balloons are much easier to float first to get an idea instead of taking a leap of faith.

Have you factored in the possibility you can go bankrupt in America anytime out of healthcare bills?
Thank you for the write up! Very enlightening to see how things went for you. I was on the fence recently whether to go for contractor work but ended up just switching companies in the end. In part because I didn’t know what to expect. Articles like these hwould have helped!
If you want to explore what consulting looks like without the risk of going it alone, consider joining a company that does consulting. It's a good opportunity to learn about the sales cycle as well as get a taste for what sort of challenges consulting provides while still being a FTE with benefits.
I'm happy you liked it!
Just wanted to give props for volunteer work.

It's been my raison d'etre for decades.

For the Americans coming into this thread later today (or up very late), it bears repeating that "contracting" arrangements in the US vs. EU/UK are very different beasts. Historically in the UK, contracting was/is a higher-risk venture (medium term sole-client freelancing) which carried concomitantly higher salaries, and in some verticals (government, for instance), it has been very difficult to find good developers who aren't contractors.

My understanding of the US is that typically "contractor" over there implies "consultancy worker" which is the staffing equivalent of shovelware.

Please correct me if wrong!

You're not wrong, but you're also getting the full story. "Contractor" often is the title used for bodyshops. However, there's also tons of freelancers and Consultants, and "Consultant" can be a much less negative thing than you're implying.

Many of the higher-end software engineers negotiate their own contracts, and in doing so act as "Consultants", because corporate standard contracts don't work for them. It's not usually about pay - FAANG has pay ranges that go up - But in the before times, it included things like WFH and additional allowances for time off.

We moved to the US and my wife is doing freelancing, and the market rates here are ridiculous considering the cost of living and FTE rates.

For example recently I got an offer for a 4 months contract role at Microsoft, hybrid (so partly on site), as a Machine Learning Engineer for $65 an hour. I would consider that rate insulting even for low CoL EU countries.

In the US, when used alone, the term contractor generally means someone who works on construction sites: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_contractor

Indeed, that's what I thought the article was about, reading the title.

In the US, what you describe is often referred to as being an "independent contractor".
What is a vertical?
I just started a 5-hour a week gig and I am addicted. Imagine being paid for the hours you put in. Imagine not being yelled at or ridiculed or told to figure it out if what you're asked to do is ambiguous or makes no sense. Imagine being able to bill time adding questions to tickets to train ticket writers to write better tasks. And the kicker for me: imagine all the time you'd spend working on your craft in your own free time to better yourself and learn new skills now imagine using that time to do all those things and learn all those things but being able to get paid for it while working on jobs/tasks for a client.

Contracting is amazing.

> Imagine not being yelled at or ridiculed or told to figure it out if what you're asked to do is ambiguous or makes no sense.

I think maybe you just worked at a terrible business. You experience contacting sounds more like my experience at my current job.

> imagine all the time you'd spend working on your craft in your own free time to better yourself and learn new skills now imagine using that time to do all those things and learn all those things but being able to get paid for it while working on jobs/tasks for a client.

CAn you explain this more? Maybe your work doesn't align a lot with your interests but when i'm working I feel like i'm learning and when i'm not working, setting aside learning as a hobby, that studying eventually gets rolled back into my work (which I get paid for)?

May I ask how you found this role?

I find networking confusing

I’ve been sending connection requests to people on LinkedIn to no avail

So he spent all of a very long term article describing how he became a “successful” contractor and refused to mention the one metric of success that most people care about - how much he got paid?

This article was a waste of time without talking about was it worth the time over just being a salaried developer with benefits.

I am a contractor of sorts...at least, I don't have a regular job as a salaried employee. Compared to working 9-5, my hours are closer to part time hours and I get paid about a third of what I used to as a programmer....

Seems like I get paid less but...if you factor in all the additional time I USED to need getting ready for work, recovering from the 9-5 grind, commuting, I get paid about twice as much per hour as I used to.

Plus, the ability to work whenever I want, chill at home in bed if I want, do whatever the hell I want because the ONLY thing that matters is the final product, is worth its weight in gold. Besides, I stopped caring about making tons of money, and would rather use my young years for fun stuff.

I don't mind answering that question, but I'm not sure it has a place in the article (maybe I'll modify it later if I change my mind). My expectation is that in The Netherlands you could at most aim at 80k / year as a FTE (depending on lots of factors). Right now my workload is equivalent to 4 days / week and I'm earning about double what I'd get as an employee. Sounds like a good deal to me.
When I lived in Oxford I left a job paying £44k for a job paying $150k as a contractor for a Bay Area startup. I’ve actually 10X’d my starting salary in 9 years of working (helped both by contracting and by starting with a small salary at 19).
I'm a consultant in Denmark and I charge approximately €100/hour. When I used to be an FTE, my salary would be around €33/hour. And I use an agency for finding clients, they add approximately 20% on top of the bill, before they send it to the client.
In my experience, short-term pay for contracting is great. Long-term you start to run into problems because clients come and go, you always need to be on your feet looking for a new set of leads. Sometimes you have a bad project which sets you back. Being a salaried developer definitely shields you more from unpredictability.
I found it pretty useful, since it’s easy to just search online or ask a few people what the going rate is. Not everything is about money
I would expect that the hourly rates for run-of-the-mill contracting in the Netherlands via a broker would be 80-160 euros - more for short jobs (less than a month).
It is interesting hearing different perspectives going into this kind of work.

My experience has been a bit different. I've never had a famine cycle in the last 12 years of doing front end development and product design.

Part of the reason I'm sure is I've always said yes to challenging and desirable projects and risen to the occasion. The fear of failing helps me adapt quickly I'm sure as well to new technology.

My clients often end up being long term clients I work years with.

Income wise things vary year to year but I'm often in the $150k to $250k range in a medium cost area where my money goes a bit farther than the west coast.

In order to push higher I know I'll need to put more effort into fine tuning my target market and value propositions. Also building more clout, becoming an authority in a specialized field, or investing more back into the business with marketing and sales would go a long ways. If I were to push into consultancy I feel confident I could push into the 250k to 350k range more but I am quite happy still slinging code rather than advising.

I'm happy people find success in this arena. It's important that people have a good mix of choices that works for them so congrats to OP for finding your desirable path.

This is a very Dutch thing, where as a contractor you lose a lot of benefits like 25 holidays, paid sick days, pension, unemployment insurance. But overall you normally get more money, though also more stress.

Compared to USA, Dutch freelancing is more like normal employment. If you get hired by an USA startup, you normally get a much bigger compensation and they often prefer you to be contractor as it fits better with overall HR/contract structure. Though there are in-between firms that would hire you like a normal employee with Dutch benefits, but you lose some money.

You loose the same benefits in Austria as well if you go contracting, and on top of that you need to have more than one customer per year, otherwise the tax authorities will consider you're contracting just to avoid full time employment and committing tax fraud.
Imho if you compensate for those benefits the 'more money' part isn't really that much more money. Most freelancers just end up with 'more money in hand' because they (sometimes unknowingly) simply take on a lot more risk (e.g. way less or no insurance for certain risks) and/or they don't consider that a nice chunk of pension savings are part of a regular job's benefits.

I'm going this route at the moment and while it's true my gross profit will probably end up close to 2x my previous gross salary... after properly compensating for all the other benefits I'd probably end up with 1.2x instead (but to be fair, I'm willing to accept certain risks so I won't insure against them and I'll probably end up with ~1.5x my previous salary.)

Imho in The Netherlands the biggest advantage is the flexibility it offers compared to being an employee.

> Dutch freelancing is more like normal employment

More like normal employment in what country?

I am in my fifth year of being an independent software consultant/contractor. I live in Germany. I've had multiple gigs almost right from the start of being self employed. Almost always through one of the many recruiting firms. Reading his story, I do wonder though if my path is or has been somewhat special until now as I've heard many times now that being an independent software contractor (in the EU) is somewhat hard. I always had quite the opposite experience so I genuinely do wonder if I was simply lucky (until now that is. No one knows what the future holds).

I did specialize in Computer Vision, Image Processing, C++, Python and lately more and more DevOps if this is of any interest and my previously described luck depends on this specific field.

My case was made difficult by the fact that I was only open to 3 days / week contracts. And maybe also because I'm trying to find something outside of full stack development, while at the same time being decently paid.
One thing worth mentioning for EU’s IT industry is that there are large sectors like government which need IT services but can only work with contractors as hiring is not legally possible or extremely tedious. This means contractors get access to a larger market.
This also results in a relatively large number of IT consulting companies, many of which specialize in public sector service bidding. Certain large consultancies winning most of the bids and then under-delivering has pretty much become a meme at this point.
That only causes Accenture etc. body shops to thrive in EU market. EU as a market is very government policy driven. Government contracts are lucrative but typical body shop pays 1:10 as compared to what they are paid. And then the "employee" also pays high taxes on the income. Not sure what can change it. May be more US companies should get contractor friendly in EU markets?
Am I the only one confused by why anyone would want to go with Toptal considering what is written in the article?
I'm fairly certain that Toptal's "long selection process" is designed to weed out anyone who has other options, because they're harder to bully into putting their rates down.

That turned me off, but at the same time, they do do the hardest part of the contracting/freelancing world - finding clients. If you're willing to jump through their hoops and accept a lower rate than you'd get on the open market, then it's a decent arrangement.

I've been both a Toptal contractor and a client. While they're an arguably high fee, they provide valuable services for the contractor, first and foremost access to high paying markets and clients. For a high skilled dev in developing countries this means rates that are still much higher than local rates, thus they tend to attract good talent. Also they handle all burocracy and ensure you get paid, very important when working overseas.

For clients they provide very good corporate customer service, and generally do a good job of screening people. My rate of "bad" contractors coming from Toptal is low and replacing them is quick. And every now and then you find some amazing devs.

There is no effort outside of the elimination interview that you have to put in to find a client. You don’t have to spend a minute to find work.

Despite them pressuring you to put your rate as low as possible they still have a lot of room to negotiate with the client.

Probably the pressure to find a project to work on. There are many platforms like toptal. Some screen their people others don't. They are all similar in that respect. Same goes for recruiters. Are there good recruiters? very positive but they are so rare that it's impossible to find them.
Toptal: Give us your personal details, we'll hook you up with clients.

Me: OK, here.

Toptal: We're not taking on any more contractors right now, thanks for the data though.

I'm currently looking for contract work around Python/Elixir web-based projects (hire me anyone?), so I thought I will give TopTal a try after reading the article.

I put good effort into the application process - e.g. by ensuring my answers are exactly what they're looking for (the questions weren't technical so far). I then uploaded my up-to-date CV among other things they asked, and I selected my availability to "full time".... only to learn that I was put on some sort of waitlist - "[..] we encourage you to reapply after March 2, 2024."

I think I'll pass on TopTal. The could tell me way before I applied their network has reached its capacity (if?). Or is that he "long selection process" the OP refers to in the article?

Same experience here. And IIRC (it was a while ago), after happily hoovering up my CV and personal data, the rejection message was worded as if they were at capacity, not even that they didn't want me specifically. Could have said that up front, but of course they didn't.
How would you say your income compares to total comp in your area according to levels.fyi. How do you compare to a salaried job at a FAANG type company that has benefits such as paid leave, paternity leave, retirement contributions(not sure if Europe has something similar to 401k), etc

How many hours per week do you spend devoted to your venture: coding, marketing, finding clients.

Based on your domain I’m assuming you have socialized healthcare, so that’s one less risk to consider.

I don't know about levels.fyi (they want me to register / upgrade to see what salaries are like in Amsterdam), but I gave some more details in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359237

In short: I'm working 4 days / week (3 billable days, 1 overhead) and earning about double of what I'd otherwise get. Though obviously I'm taking additional risk. You are right that the healthcare side of things is covered.