Stefan Schick's personal Blog

Over on HackerNews was a question about “Best practices for hiring software contractors. As I have been a contractor for about 10 years now, I will give you some insights in my approach when it comes to clients and getting hired for a job. I am living in Germany, not everything I write might apply to the situation in your country. Context There are many contractors out there with varying skill levels. Some are good, some are bad, others are good in their niche, but suck at everything else. I consider myself a good one. At the core I am a generalist and have done a lot from embedded to web and frontend to backend. But I have my preferred niches in manufacturing systems engineering and I love Software Architecture. By principle, I do not offer my services on fiverr or upwork, as they are budget driven and are for the most part not in my price and project size class. Instead, I prefer direct customer acquisition as it offers the highest rates or recruiting agencies if I am lazy on the marketing front but want a customer with a big name. The Projects I am involved in have usually a length of one to three years.