Freelance or Full-time?

Are you freelance or full-time? Care to share any reasons or preferences?

Freelance FTW ;)

I am a surgeon and freelance web developer at the same time :)

That’s amazing—I can barely keep up with clients, I couldn’t imagine being a surgeon at the same time!

I’m currently freelance, working from home, but I used to work inhouse as an Art Director. Although I miss human interaction (“Hello, wall.”), I do get to work when I want and with whatever music I like playing in the background. Plus, and this was a biggie, if I take on a project that I don’t like, I know that I was the one responsible for taking it on. When I worked inhouse, there was no way of saying ‘no’ to a project. I hated that.

I’m just getting started, really, and freelance work seems to be the best way to establish myself as a designer. I’ve been doing a lot of “friend” and academic work, but the professional relationships are starting to develop now, too. I work a part time office job at the university I attended to cover health insurance (and retirement! and a bunch of other stuff! thank you, state job!), but my design work will (hopefully) be paying the rent from here on out.

I am back to freelancing again at the moment, but looking for a full-time gig; interviewing all over the country in search of that job I can see myself finally settling down at for years to come.

Working on film sites always keeps things interesting on the freelance front, and as someone else said, you get to turn things down which is always kind of nice. Passion leads to the best creativity around; especially for a stubborn Irish kid from Boston.

I’ve been freelancing for twenty 23 years and am now utterly unemployable… thank God.
It’s a roller coaster sometimes, and even after this much time I still freak out when it goes quiet, and then freak out when a week later it’s manic and I wished I’d never freaked out the first time.

Advantages are manifold, certainly there are lots of tax breaks, and you’ll pay a lot less to the revenue than you would on the same earnings with a ‘job’. The commitments are more profound, there’s no where else for the buck to stop, so if you want to succeed you HAVE to do the best job ever, every time, or they won’t come back. But that is good, because you get better faster that way. You always need to feel nervous; complacency is suicide. Unless you are a bit stressed about doing a great job, you won’t have the energy to get it. People do get a better deal out of you, but your pride carries this, -you want to be successful and have repeat business so you work hard to attain that.

Another upside; when you eventually recognise the pattern of your quiet times (mine are a few weeks leading up to Christmas and the traditional vacation season when the clients and agency folk are away) you can then take huge amounts of time off for personal work or just plain indolence!

I think it takes three years to fully establish yourself as a bona fide, self reliant freelance. Once there it’s pretty hard to kill your business.

In a nutshell? Everyone gains.

John
www.netgoose.co.uk