Full-time Employment or Freelancing – What's The Best Fit for You?

It wasn’t my lifelong dream to become a freelancer.

Even with a simple lifestyle – no expensive gadgets, clothes, or travel – in 2015, I only made enough money to cover our living expenses.

Shifting to freelancing turned my life upside down with great financial benefits, but it also put me on a track I wouldn’t have otherwise considered.

⭐ In this post, you’ll learn

• What was the most significant advantage of working full-time compared to freelancing or being a contractor?

• How does running your own business make you speedrun other jobs like management and sales?

Here’s how it all began.

🌳 Intro

After graduating in 2012, I picked a software engineer job at a local company and became a Java Developer.

We were outsourcing and building a SaaS but struggled to sell our solution, and a pay raise wasn’t on the horizon.

My wife and I wanted to escape living from month to month, but our dream was a home.

I experimented with Node.js and Angular in my free time and built full-stack apps.

I decided I’d give freelancing a shot.

Soon, I found out I could write proposals and find clients. By the end of my first year as a freelancer, In 4 months, I made more than my previous full-time job earned me in a year.

Since then, I have switched between “proper” freelancing – when you find your clients, and working as a contractor, having another company look for work or teams with whom I can work.

And for the last 2 years, I’ve been building my 100% remote company with more or less success.

That’s a lot to do in 10 years and a lot to learn.

But more than enough to see some differences between full-time employment and freelancing.

Although I admit, they weren’t as apparent until I started devoting more time to building my own company while also experimenting with writing on the side and building a personal brand.

So here’s my take on all this.

👔 Full-time employment

An environment where growth goals are already figured out and other people take care of new users or clients coming in leaves you with more time.

If done right, this is the most side-hustle-friendly setup you can have.

Do your best work during working hours, and you’ll have a ton of time to do something on the side–this is exactly how I got into freelancing, road bicycle racing, and mountain biking!

You can spend this time learning and increasing your market value, exercising regularly, or living a better and happier life.

These things might sound trivial, but sometimes they are privileges when running a business or freelancing.

Who do you work for, what’s expected from you to reach the next level, and whether it will look good on your CV are mostly figured out during full-time employment.

The Cons

The downside is, of course, it’s not your job.

It’s a position you’re filling that someone else can fill tomorrow.

Clients can change freelancers or companies too, but it’s usually more expensive than replacing people. If a team is involved in a software solution from the beginning, it’s an extra cost to have another team ramp up from 0 and take over everything.

Takeaways:

• Full-time employment leaves more room for side hustles.

• The growth goals, or at least what you should aim for, are already figured out in your company's leveling guide.

👨‍💻 Freelancing

Freelancing, consulting, building your own business, essentially any activity where you’re directly working for a client, usually means more money.

If you’re good, more work will come, and you can delegate simply by hiring more people (this is what I did).

Delegation immediately puts you into a position where you must learn new skills to keep the company intact, make the client happy, and make the software work.

It’s a lot, but learning opportunities are everywhere: experience with management, communicating with clients, managing remote work across different time zones, managing expectations, and working with people from different cultures and countries.

You learn to find leads, pitch, and sell your services to clients. Because if you don’t learn these, you’ll have to close your business. It’s a pretty simple yet effective “natural selection”.

But if you learn to sell your services, you build confidence and virtually can sell anything–including yourself, maybe at your next position.

The Cons

You write case studies, company blogs, sales pitches, testimonials, and job descriptions. Do interviews, hire, and fire people. Give feedback on their code, build the product, and build relationships with your client.

All this while coding and doing your best as a business owner and an engineer.

This is a lot of time and energy.

Takeaways:

• Freelancing can virtually take up all your time. Work and outside of work.

• Goals are all over the place. Should you help construction companies still using Google Sheets to deliver their million-dollar projects? Target Fintech companies in the Bay Area? It can be anything. Good but also challenging.

• No bosses or managers in the regular sense–but I’d argue that every client is a little bit your boss. Much more freedom in technologies and workflows. You can create opportunities for yourself to learn.

🎯 Conclusion

I was exposed to all these different choices during my career by necessity.

Full-time employment provides a straightforward career path, goals to attain, and a way to build credibility. You have more time and energy for side hustles and to figure out what’s next.

On the other hand, freelancing or consulting shortly after selling your services the first time will result in a significant pay raise. If this is your jam, go for it. If you can sell your service to one client, you can sell it to 2, then 5 or 10.

Now it’s your turn!

Are you team FTE or Freelance? Did you try both? I’m curious to hear your perspective!

📰 Weekly shoutout

1. Competently Handling Competency Based Interviews by

   John Crickett
   –methods I have never heard about, but they offer a systematic framework to nail job interviews or client calls. I also see how I could use this framework in my writing. Pretty versatile!

2. How to get 💩 done as a software engineer by

   Jordan Cutler
   – a short guide from Jordan on managing your life as a software engineer, but practically applies to freelancers and contractors of any kind.

3. 🔄 This year create a strategy using your 360 feedback (it saved me a year in my promotion) by

   Fran Soto
   No matter whether you are a regular employee, a contractor or a freelancer, feedback is essential. But it’s difficult to improve immediately on all fronts. Fran gives you some tips on how to use feedback this year!

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