> Can someone explain what the appeal of solo freelancing is in the age of bountiful remote work?

Income multipliers, flexibility and being treated like an adult are a few reasons that come to mind.

For example, with salaried work your income is mostly fixed (minus a pre-defined'ish bonus or options, etc.). With contract work you might land a $30,000 contract that takes 2 weeks to do because the focus is on providing value that allows your client to 5x that in a few months so it's a no brainer. This is different than salaried work where you're expected to be available for 40-45 hours a week.

You may decide to spend a year traveling the world while maintaining existing work and working whenever you feel like it. As a salaried worker I don't think you'll be able to work a few hours a week for 6-12 months in a row and still be employed unless you had an exceptional situation.

With a number of salaried positions, especially with companies that receive funding or are growing a bit past early startup stages you often lose all freedom to make decisions that you're qualified to make. Such as having to ask permission from multiple people to store $0.01 / month worth of files in an S3 bucket where the discussion to get this approval literally costs 10,000x to 20,000x more in engineering time.

I’m still not sold.

How often are you getting $30k contracts that can be done in two weeks? Remote workers can still travel the world and work remotely if they can tolerate the timezone differences. I just got done with a rental in Costa Rica where I lived by the beach for 40 days this summer while working remote.

I don’t particularly care if I have to ask permission to get stuff done in a company. This is actually one of the reasons I spend a lot of time doing nothing: I’m blocked by other people and am waiting for them to resolve something or get their specs straightened out. By the time there is work for me to do, I’ve spent a lot of time idling. The actual work is done quickly, efficiently and I’m back to waiting for more work. The bottleneck is always other people, it’s not engineering taking too long.

I’m not going to push those people to hurry up either. They are under other pressures and it’s none of my business how long they take. As a remote worker, they are out of sight and out of mind until they have something useful for me.

Sometimes when we finish a big project, there’s a period of 2 or 3 months afterwards where we basically do very little except maintenance of the new deployment. Conveniently this year, we planned for those months to coincide with the summer.

Everything I’ve heard about freelancing has told me it’s not going to be this easy. It’s going to be a pain in the ass talking with clients all the time and stressing about keeping money coming in.

We get it. You do 2 hours work a day from where you want and are paid a sizeable salary (possibly even overpaid).

There’s not much that is going to persuade you that freelance is ‘better’.

It's a tradeoff. You lower stability and increase earning potential (and stress).

> How often are you getting $30k contracts that can be done in two weeks?

Often enough, but it's not always exactly 30k for 2 weeks. It's opportunities that lend itself well to making a client really happy while being able to maximize my skills in a way that makes sense for both parties. For example if I spend 20 years honing in on a surrounding skill set and can deliver something quickly then everyone wins. The client gets a high quality product delivered quickly and I get to work less "butt in chair" hours since I've built up the tools and skills to perform the work in less time.

The above is also guilt free because the deliverable is the outcome, not a working agreement that you'll be working 40-45 hours a week.

> Remote workers can still travel the world and work remotely if they can tolerate the timezone differences.

Oftentimes it's not up to you. Your role may require you to be in a specific timezone or overlap with X timezone for N hours. More importantly a business may disallow you from operating out of different countries for an extended period of time because they're not set up to file taxes in those countries. You may also end up getting a big pay cut from wanting to move a few states over. Even if you could move to a different country, if your company subscribes to adjusting your pay for cost of living you may end up getting 20-30% of your salary if you occupied a low cost country.

> I don’t particularly care if I have to ask permission to get stuff done in a company. This is actually one of the reasons I spend a lot of time doing nothing: I’m blocked by other people and am waiting for them to resolve something or get their specs straightened out

Fair enough. I'm the complete opposite in the sense that I really value having full autonomy or at least enough to make decisions without needing to ask for every detail. Being blocked for me is bad, especially if you're blocked on 6 different things and you're forced to break up your time as if you were a CPU getting sliced for execution time.

Everyone says multi-tasking produces poor results but so many businesses create environments where the only option is to multi-task because otherwise nothing would ever get done.

I want to work because the work itself is what motivates me. I really like learning new things, tinkering, seeing it all come together, shipping it to production and watching it positively impact the teams and customers I work with. Being paid to able to do that is a true gift of the world.

Not being able to do that efficiently because of non-changeable unreasonable policies made by someone who isn't doing the work is pretty much the only thing that causes me burnout.

> Everything I’ve heard about freelancing has told me it’s not going to be this easy. It’s going to be a pain in the ass talking with clients all the time and stressing about keeping money coming in.

It's all about trade offs. I don't find talking to clients a pain in the ass, it's one of my favorite parts of the job. Money is a stressor for full time positions too. You can be laid-off at any moment or fired and that's that. It's fully out of your control and your eggs are all in 1 basket. You may also be placed into a non-favorable position if your working agreement or environment changes but you can't do anything about it since if you quit then you have nothing. In my opinion that's not going to create a good working environment.

Biggest difference is that you get to 100% chose exactly what you want to work on, and all the profits generated by the work goes to you. You're not beholden to anyone but yourself.

> Is chasing down new clients all the time and working on multiple projects really that desirable to people?

Chasing down new clients is probably a thing mostly affecting new freelancers without much experience. When I've done freelancing in the past, I've never had to look for any clients besides posting "I'm available to help out people on a freelance-basis" on various social media, and then I get more work available to me than I could realistically do.

I think most established freelancers "suffer" from the same. Once you're available for work, it fills up quickly.

Unless you’re ridiculously well paid I think you’re considerably underestimating what many independent contractors end up earning.

I can only speak about my anecdotal network but everyone that I know who went the independent contractor road is making around a million or more a year. They didn’t start out like that, and I’m not sure how easy the road would be in the current economy, but the people who started out 10-15 years ago have it made for them. They did work a lot more than us who went into the corporate mill, but they are frankly going to “win” anyway considering some of them are basically set for retirement at age 40-45.

What industry is this where all of the ICs you know are making a million or more?

They started consulting and eventually build products that they sell to the organizations they consulted for. One did consulting for public sector authorization management and eventually build a ReBAC API to put on top of the myrirad of API's that the public sector in Denmark operates, so that IDM became much, much easier. Another started as a RPA (robot process automation) trainer who worked together with the business side of the whole concept and was their go-to for technical training whenever they sold a "package" to organizations. Now owns a 50+ person company that is full of consultants that did what he once did.

I guess the latter isn't really an IC anymore, but I know he didn't plan for things to happen this way. It started with him just being an IC and then eventually when he had too much work he had one of his friends join him, and so on.

Likely niche consulting and implementation on unique or domain-specialized knowledge. While I've made a few hundred k off React and Node work, the people I know who make the big bucks are experts in a particular field.

This is similar to the FAANG salary phenomenon: for every individual contractor pulling $1MM in annual revenue, there are thousands who might barely be making minimum wage when expenses are factored in. Very few independent contractors end up earning enough to equal full-time employment doing similar work.

For me it is mostly freedom. Employment contracts usually go into "all your code belongs to us", "we own every piece of thought you ever had", "if you want to make PR to a project you like first write an email to your manager with approval, then you have to forward approval to owner of project".

If I want to make a side project I don't have to worry there will be any issue with copyright or god knows what. Because I am my own company and single customer cannot include in contract that I cannot do any other work.

> Can someone explain what the appeal of solo freelancing is in the age of bountiful remote work?

For start, remote work is not so bountiful.

At least it is pretty hard to find companies paying around UK/USA salary to people employed in Poland.

In my solo freelancing I charge a bit less than UK/USA salary, depending on who is hiring. So far all companies refused such salary and wanted to pay at most 200% of typical local salary.

Also

> I work for a couple of hours and then make lunch. Depending on my workload, I may go back to my office and keep working for another couple of hours in the afternoon, or take the afternoon off.

can be done without deception/lying/swindling.

You're more easily replaceable as a remote worker, you're also dependent on the whims of your employer. It's easier and more beneficial to develop the skill of chasing down clients vs chasing down jobs in a remote work environment. You also don't have any options for residuals and your working largely to pad someone else's pocket and not your own.

Nbr of digits in the hourly rate? Remote work is usually two digits number while freelancing on short term projects would be at least three digits.

We can all admit that here anonymously, but how would your employer feel if they knew this?