Where can I find dev contract jobs?
I am working on my own idea at https://autenti.ca and I need to generate some income to keep working on it.
Most of the offers I found are for full-time jobs. It feels unethical to join a company just to leave it after a couple of months. So where do you find short-term contractor jobs?
My main skill is taking mockups/wireframes and making a working product out of it in a timely manner developing, testing, and deploying all front-end (react, redux, bootstrap) and back-end (aws: lambda, dynamo, ecs, emr, sqs, kinesis, and many more)
See my résumé and some recent projects at https://goo.gl/kDAiYP
Thank you all for your suggestions
As a (now inactive) Toptaler, I would highly suggest Toptal. The clients are curated, the party is regular, if you're good and pass the interviews, you'll always* have work to do.
Thanks for sharing topta Tris, I just signed in.
How was your experience with them? How many projects did you work on?
Oh, many projects, boot sure exactly. Excellent experience, made about 100ish thousand in the span of three or four years (mostly because I've had a lot of other projects, outside toptal).
They're not your typical freelance site.
First, to even get in, you go through several interviews and skill tests, just like for a permanent job. They really pay attention to your communication skills and your professionalism. The starting salary is probably not less than 30$/hour (i've not heard of anything lower than that, at least), but depending on how well you do - and how good you sell yourself to them and a possible client, it can be even more. And you can only grow from there.
Now, the projects. It works not directly, but through toptal middlemen. They handle the client's needs, find a few matching available devs (e.g. those which set enough available hours or those which saw the client's request and contacted the recruiter about it), then the client interviews some or all of them and picks you.
Contracts are mostly half time or full time, but you can also find hourly contracts. The clients are almost all very professional and you don't deal with finances at all. That's a great thing. With client, you only talk about work and deliver. Then you send your timesheets to toptal and toptal pays you on the due date, even if the client is late. So absolutely no worries about this part at all.
All in all, you can't do much better if you wanna do remote freelance work, oh my experience.
I opened an account at toptal and already scheduled a call with them. Let's see how it goes. Thanks for the suggestion and for sharing your experience of working with them Tris.
That's a question i've been asked a lot too.
Aren't there any marketplaces for this kind of gig?
I know upwork.com and the like, but they are mostly flooded with pricecutting indians and for some reasons it feels like a lot of the projects are "fluff", meaning i am not sure how real some of the projects are.
I agree Arne, the budget for the projects is very low when you check the tasks you need to do.
You say that you know upwork but have you worked in a project from there? How was youe experience?
Thanks for your comments
I guess I can barge into this thread as well. :)
Before toptal that I've mentioned above, I've worked via elance or whatever was it called before merger with odesk. My experience there was mixed. On one hand, if you read the"guides" online on how to make it big, you'll see that you have to collect about 10 5-star reviews before you get to win really good projects.
And how do you do that? You simply offer superb service, something you work for a week on, for the minimum price, e.g. 30$.
Cool if you have a main job and only wma'm wanna start freelancing. And further more, be explicit about it. "I'm applying to your project with minimum bid because my profile is new and I'm only in it for the five star review."
Now, when you do collect those 10ish reviews, you can start bidding on projects for some decent money, things like 3000$ for two, three weeks of work (as a side job, so after hours work). That's what I did, at least.
But their complaints system is a total bummer. The client complains and you get no money. There's no process, no nothing. Simply no money, project deleted, no way to contact them about it.
Granted, this was years ago, they probably fixed this, but I just don't like those places any more.
Nice tips Tris. Thank you for sharing them. I think I will try other platforms for now as I can't really afford the time it takes to get the 10 5-stars reviews right now.
The best thing to do is to register on one of the many freelancer websites or check in your network if they might need one atm
I would say that the network might be a better option compared to freelancer websites. It seems to me that the budget they allocate to the projects is quite low.
Have you worked on any of these sites? How was your experience Ford?
Thank you for your comments
I am web designer and do front-end sometimes, but more design related stuff. I've got freelance jobs from ppl that saw my work on Dribbble and though we could work together. Prices where negotiable. But freelancer sites seems to be better for devs but might be limited budget.