The Freelancers' Show

Panel

Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Evan Light (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code)

Discussion
01:28 - What do you do when prospective clients only want to hire you full-time?

Employees vs Contractors

On-site work

08:35 - How to get clients from a different country or timezone

Enforcing contracts Marketing

13:49 - Do people hire you because you’re specifically a “Ruby” freelancer?

21:02 - What types of jobs do you accept and what types do you refuse?

Will the project be successful?

30:35 - What types of jobs are you getting from Ruby on Rails?

33:35 - How do you deal with uncertainty or risk when writing a Statement of work?

Identify risky areas Be as specific as possible

39:25 - Building LinkedIn recommendations

Testemonials

43:32 - Working on a retainer

Support Agreements/On Call work

Picks

Audio-Technica ATR2100-USB Cardioid Dynamic USB/XLR Microphone (Eric) Nexus 7 (Evan) SCOTTEVEST Fleece 7.0 Jacket (Evan) Twitter Bootstrap (Chuck) Downton Abbey (Chuck) Rails Ramp Up (Chuck)

Transcript
CHUCK: Yes, I put my microphone right on my face. So you get all of the good noises that come out of my mouth.

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CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 40 of the Ruby Freelancers Show! This week on our panel, we have Eric Davis.

ERIC: Hello!

CHUCK: We also have Evan Light.

EVAN: Hello

CHUCK: And I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv. This week we're going to kind of work through some of the questions that have been put on our user voice panel. There are a handful of them that we don't think necessarily merit a full show. Meaning that, we don't know if we could talk about them for a full hour so we'll just ask some of the questions and then work our way through them. So the first question that I see that I want to go over is "what do you do when prospects only want you as a full time employee?" And there's a bit more to this, Bryan Ray put it up and it says "I'm pretty new to freelancing. I moonlight in pretty much all of my prospects in the past couple of months, seemed interested after a couple of conversations, but eventually they are only looking for full time employees right now. Either full time or 30-40 hours a contract work, which at that point you're basically an employee working for one client's stricter hours indefinite work as opposed to distinct projects, etc. I'm pretty sure it's due to the fact that I can't dedicate many hours per week right now. Do you guys run into this problem? Or did you when you first started out?"

EVAN: For me, I tend to work for one big client to one smaller client at a time so I'm not quite fulltime with a client, but I tend to dedicate a lot of time to one client, but not fulltime. And I've gotten some people who want me to work fulltime and I generally try to avoid those period. If they said that's what they want, usually they're inflexible on it, then I just move on find someone else. At least that's been my experience.

ERIC: It's been a bit different. I did, I think it was 2 up to maybe 4 or 5 clients at a time for a while there.