So for a couple of weeks I am looking for freelance front-end gigs, but it has been extremely frustrating so far. Unfortunately there are not a lot of freelance-based job forums/job boards here in the Netherlands.
There are only a handful and the majority of them work with subscription models requiring you to pay every month just to reply to jobs. Almost all of the freelance positions I have found require 3 to 5 years of experience and a butt-ton of frameworks. Now I know from experience that most companies donât actually care whether you know all these or not, but for most of these I can imagine that the experience is a hard must. I have rarely found any freelance jobs that donât require at least 2 to 3 years of hard working experience, but in order to get better I need work experience.
At the moment I have a full-time job but I cannot fully switch to taking a full-time junior coding job because of various obligations, so I decided to keep my full time job and to do at least freelancing for a year to gain some valuable experience, start off realistic and build a decent portfolio before I look at full-time employment.
Can people give me some advice on how to get freelance gigs for front-end development, as in international job boards that hire people and/or remote based jobs? I donât mind the timezone difference, I would love to get this show on the road at any cost. Iâve tried LinkedIn jobs, but that didnât work out really well. Personally, with all due respect to platforms like Upwork and Fiverr, they also do not work for me. I have spent months to get my profile ready, applied to numerous openings and never got a single gig, except for two people who tried to scam me with the classic âcontact me on whatsapp and make some free samples for meâ scam.
Hello, what you are experiencing is not out of the ordinary. Getting into tech and freelancing is rough and a grind for everyone, but it can be done.
You can ignore the classic junior with 3 to 5 years experience fallacy, when you have some convincing work in your potfolio.
Find 2 or 3 small businesses, artists or charity organization and build or improve their website. It doesnât have to be a big project, a professional, decent looking single page for a local artist that users can scroll through is enough and should fit into your working schedule.
I redsigned the portfolio for a photographer in the US whose work I liked on unsplash.com for example.
Once you have 2 to 3 real life projects out there, you can point hiring staff or clients to them. Not to mention the valuable experience you gain from those projects.
Concerning Fiverr and Upwork: A small percentage is making a decent living on there, but for the most part these are digital sweat shops for cheap clients and should be avoided.
Tldr: Make or improve 2 to 3 websites for happy charities, artists or small business, present them in a decent looking portfolio. Then start applying to freelance agencies or get paying clients. Avoid the digital sweat shops. Itâs a grind, but thatâs for almost everyone, even for CS master degrees.
There is a distinction between a freelancing gig and a full-time job.
A full-time job is usually hard to get, but once you get it your golden, as that means a company accepts the high costs of onboarding you to the company, and expects it to pay off after you work for a while (say 2 years)
A freelance gig has minimal onboarding, and thus expects near immediate returns on the job, hence why getting a freelance gig is usually difficult in the first place, as thereâs little room for âlearningâ the job. Obviously a you could pitch your job low, or even offer to it for free, but the company still âpaysâ with their time an energy to help you accomplish whatever project youâve been assigned, so there is no such thing as âfree experienceâ someone always is paying.
Furthermore freelancing is as much as âworking for yourselfâ as it is doing the development work. It is its own game. Doing it just to gain experience might not actually be worth it compared to alternatives.
If your goal is to gain experience for a full-time job, maybe taking alternate paths to gain experience might be a better use of your time and focus?
As mentioned above, local charity work might be a good target, as it means you bypass a lot of the âfreelancingâ process and get to jump into the âgetting experienceâ part.
Another alternative is open source of time kind, or just building fancy something yourself to pad your portfolio.
Ultimately if your goal is a career switch, freelancing might be more pain than its worth.
Thanks for the help guys! A dramatic shift occurred at work which basically means I will be obsolete soon (video), so fulltime frontend in employment form is probably the way to go.
At the moment Iâm invited for a interview and coding assessment for the first company Iâve applied for, so far so good! Fingers crossed.