Freelancing

How many of you work as programmers? And how many of you freelance?

I was thinking about doing freelance programming, but i dont know the requirements and if it is worth it.

Also those who WORK as programmers, pleas tell something about your work.
Do you like it or does it suck, and if it does, is the money you get worth it?
And most of all how did you get the job, or how you got into professional programming.

As for me, i never worked a day in my life and dont know where to get a job, how to make or spend money. Heck i know nothing about RL, but i would need to find a way to make cash but the thing at which i suck the least is programming.

You need 1) proper education, 2) work referencies, 3) be able to deal with alot of bullshit, 4) have a laywer-friend.

Not freelance.

I do C++ development on windows [ :-( ]   - IIS plugins, credential providers, ISA plugins. I enjoy it because I'm the only guy doing C++ so I have a nice little library I've knocked up to do lots of common stuff, and also I'm free to do lots of C-style code and not be too ENTERPRISE OO DESIGN PATTERN etc

I studied CS at Uni (BSc) and went from there. That's the standard route I think these days.

>>2
/prog/
have a laywer-friend
What?

I work for a small company that does a lot of contract work. So it's kind of the best/worst of both worlds.  I get a salary, so I don't have to worry about getting paid quite as much as a freelancer, but when it comes down to it, if we don't bill, we don't have jobs.

I started out with zero RL programming experience. Just messing around with setting up linux boxes, futzing around in PHP, etc. I had some unrelated work experience and an internship though. If you want to get started on something, start small/non-critical. Maybe write a script to migrate some small non-profit's data to a new system. A lot of contract jobs are not very glamourous, and you probably won't get the cooler/juicier ones without a lot of experience. At my firm we kind of pool our experience, so we occasionally get some fun work (plus we have our little internal toys).

The "have a lawyer-friend" is true, and why I'm willing to work at a fraction of our bill rate. A good contract can help a lot, and I'm glad I don't have to worry about writing them. A lot of clients will try and fuck you. They will try and get away with not paying you and squeezing additional stuff in that's completely out of scope. Your good clients know they're good and will thus try and get you to work cheaper (and you will, because it's worth having work that doesn't cause daily migraines).

I could probably make more money if I went solo, but it's nice to be able to switch off on the weekends. I'd rather take the extra time I have to work on my own pet projects. I'm not quite experienced enough to be able to turn down work either...I'd rather not spend my evenings and weekends working on some idiot's Wordpress plugin that they think is going to make a million dollars.