Do you get Freelance projects while you have a job ?

Question

The title is obvious, do you get freelance projects while you have a job ?

• How do you plan your schedule ? I mean when I get freelance work sometimes I feel very overloaded. How do you overcome this ?
• Which scale projects do you prefer ?
• Do you prefer new technologies to improve your skills ?

EDIT : Working on freelance projects in your day job is not acceptable, not ethical (unless specifically permitted by your employer). I am just asking how you schedule your free time after your day job for a freelance project ?

Answer 1

I do not. The last two places I have worked consider it a conflict of interest.

Answer 2

Yes.

I do Freelance projects that meet the following criteria:

• Are less than 6 months in duration
• Don't interfere with my day job (Contractual obligations, IP issues, no compete, etc)
• Are interesting

More importantly, I generally stick to the following criteria as well (though not always!):

• Are for a non-profit, school, church, etc.
• Are put as 'volunteer work' on my resume
• I'll only pick a new technology if I feel like it'll have some usefulness in my career; otherwise I'll stick with what I know.

Scheduling Time to Work on Freelance Projects:

My schedule is usually planned to where I'll spend 2 hours on it in the evening time, 3-5 days a week.

Since my time is limited (24 hours in a day is not enough for anyone, I don't care what God says) and I have a good idea of what my schedule looks like months in advance, I'll schedule the project with the 'worst-case scenario' in mind. I like to call it the Scotty effect.

In many of the books (and indeed, the movies), Captain Scott regularly multiplies his time estimates by a factor of four, that way he always looks like a miracle worker when he does it in the original estimated time.

Answer 3

Yes I do. My main job comes first. However I want to keep expanding my skill set and the best way to do that is to work on projects. I do not let my current employer know about my side work, because what I do with my time is my own business. I would not work for a competitor.

I typically find a small local business that needs coding help or a solution of some kind.

I try to work an extra 15 hour a week.

Answer 4

I've taken a few, but only on the condition that it never interfere with my day job or my family. It's just not worth the extra money to bite the hand that feeds me.

Answer 5

if is not too hard (time consuming), i do. I don't want to enter in the loop sleep-eat-work-slee too.

Answer 6

I do pro bono work when I think the cause is worthy and of interest to me.

Answer 7

I will do freelance work in addition to my normal day job. The one I am currently doing is being worked on by myself and someone else. We are both doing this in our spare time, this makes it easy as while he is the lead on this project, he is aware that both family and our day jobs take precedence.

Using freelance work as a chance to learn some new skills is a win IMHO; however, you need to temper that with your ability to deliver to your customers. Since your doing work part time you need to ensure you can hit your deliverables without impacting your day job.

As for scale, I have done a couple tiny single purpose web applications and controls which were scoped and very controlled, my most recent project is much larger and is a complete line of business application.

As for schedule, yes you can feel overwhelmed, and for starters I only do one side project at a time. I also set aside time on the weekend and evenings to work. And I give my wife a big chunk of the earnings for her to go shopping since this impacts her a lot.

You can also look into doing work with odesk or one of the other freelancing / consulting matchmaking service sites.

My final words of wisdom are: Scope your project, detail out your costs and sign a contract. Times & Materials are the best way to go, as you can charge hourly. Fixed terms contracts require much more scrutiny on your part, to ensure you don't get killed with scope creep.

Answer 8

I do but I am careful about reviewing the job to ensure that it isn't a conflict of interest with my current employer.

Schedule -- I only work on the freelance projects in the evening or when I take a day off from work and I make sure the customer knows this (and knows that delays could happen if I am needed longer at the office).

Scale -- Because of the schedule, I try to limit the work I take on to very small projects or small, working increments of a bigger project. This way I can provide better turnaround time and not feel too pressured outside of my day job.

Technologies -- I've been sticking with what I know because it easily solves their problems. The critical part is not using the tools from my day job to profit from my freelance work, which I consider unethical, so I've been working with what's free and cheap.

Answer 9

Yes. But never, ever, related to my work day job. Some companies that I work for had some rules about this, so I made it my own rule also, to avoid problems. The schedule. Well I worked night shifts, and weekends, as much as possible. The kind or work I did has what I could find, when there has nothing else, or if I have too much to do, I choose those where I could learn new skills.

Answer 10

No. I love my job and the challenges it provides. I leave everything "on the field" and as such after 8-12 with my fellow teamates I am pretty much done with regards to energy and focus. I want to get home and do the things the day job enables such as being with my wife and family.

I am also fortunate enough that my employer encourages professional development time in terms of learning new technologies, continuing education and having a skunk works project on the side if we want - 3 years ago I learned ruby, last year it was Silverlight.

Answer 11

No.

First, I already try to push all of my working energy into my day job. When I'm not at work or actively working on my job, I want to be at home, having fun, being a Dad, etc. Second, I want to avoid even a hint of an appearance of the possibility of a conflict of interest.

A follow-up quite a long time later: the conflict of interest issue is particularly important for me. If moonlighting were to get me into a commercial relationship with a company, its subsidiary or even a close partner, I would almost certainly be prevented from working on whole classes of technical projects with any of those entities during my day job.

This is when it's important to have honesty-time: whatever little ramshackle boutique project I might manage to cargo-cult together is just not going to be worth missing out on the substantial (and very cool) projects that I get to work on during my day job.

Answer 12

What are your goals? Some valid reasons to freelance in your off-time:

• Money
• Learn a new language/skill
• Volunteer hours
• Keep busy

Things to balance

• Family
• 'having a life'
• Getting burned out

Bottom line: I would only do it if you really really want to. If you want it bad enough, you will make time for it.

Answer 13

No, but it is good to develop projects that help your learning and blogging. Commercial projects will conflict of interest with your day job.

Answer 14

The side project, as I'm used to call them, on which I might be at a particular time has to comply with the following criteria:

1. It can only absorve in between 10 to 15 hours a week. Usually weekends aren't workdays unless I'm too motivated to work in the project at hand.
2. Analisis and requirement definition had been made and risks evaluated, and these show me that if I apply a 25% of overhead in every aspect I'll be O.K.
3. Not to work alone.
4. A short life span.

The hardest part is not planning to work 2 or 3 hours a day after your daily work hours, is just to be able to work those 2 or 3 hours overtime in another project. So the best I can tell you to do is what I usually do: Try to keep motivated all the time. If working with knew technologies work for you, go ahead. If working at home or at a bar is motivation enough go for it. This is the principle I use to avoid felling overloaded.

After I have a time estimation I increase it 25% in order to pre absorbe any unexpected impact. But this might not work for any other person. My opinion on this matter is that time estimation is particularly tricky, and not every body work at a rhythm.

At least work with a mate, it makes things easier. You can exchange opinions on whether ceratin things should be done or not, or how to work around a problem. It also helps you keep on working on a daily bases.

The project's life span should be 3 or 4 months, therefore I can get at least a month to relax before taking on another project. Avoid at all costs a full year of after work projects, that indicates that you will become overloaded, workholic or that you should open your own business.

Answer 15

Before getting into a free-lancing position, consider the following:

• Employer rules - Different employers have different policies about external connections (and they may or may not match your own "common-sense" ideas).

• Conflict of interest - Don't.

• Burnout - No matter how good or motivated you are, you need at least some down time.

• Support obligations - Will the side job call for more of your time, or make unpredictable demands? ("I know I'm not supposed to call you at work or after midnight, but this problem just came up...")

• Goals - Are you doing this to earn some extra income, to benefit a worthy cause, to learn new skills, for variety, ... ? Be clear with yourself about what you really expect to get out of it, and be ruthless about rejecting options that don't match.

• People - How much time will this take away from time you spend with the people who are important to you? What kind of people with this force you to spend more time with? (There are pros and cons; just be brutally honest with yourself.)

Answer 16

I have been doing this for 10 years now. I do my freelancing development at home in the evening and at weekends. 4 hours per day is not a problem - of course I don't have orders throughout the year.

Phone and email support I do also during working day, but these are just couple of calls per day or less.

I quit from my previous job, because comapny started to make a policy to not allow their workers to freelance. (Maybe I was little bit too obvious, as I have my own software company with e-shop and all, and I even drived to work with car that had my company logos on :)

To my current employer I told in advance that I have my own business and that it does not influence my daytime productivity. Luckily he didn't object.

Answer 17

Yeah, I do freelance work alongside my day job and managing the time effectively is something I struggle with on a daily basis. I began freelancing for two reasons: 1) to supplement my income and 2) to learn things that I would never have a chance to learn in my day job. With those two things in mind, here's my answer:

Accepted Projects

I only accept projects that involve technologies that I a) have an interest in or b) have knowledge of. The former is because it satisfies my "learn things" requirement and the latter because it satisfies my "supplement income" requirement. But I do not accept a project just so I can try a technology I'm interested if it's not a good fit for the project. That would be unfair to the client, I think.

I also turn down projects where the client requires me to be available during the day by phone. Although I can take a phone call here and there during the day, my day job comes first so I cannot at all guarantee that I will be available. Unfortunately, this wipes out a significant portion of potential clientelle but that's the price I pay for not diving in to freelance work headlong and making this my full time job.

As far as project scale goes, I don't have any strict requirements. It has more to do with the scale vs. the time allotted. The project can be create a dynamic website with widget a through z. If that has to be done in a year, I'll probably take it (assuming it meets my other requirements). If it has to be done in 3 months, I won't. I will either have to work my ass off not ever seeing my family or I would do a bad job on it. In each case, someone suffers.

Time Management

On top of my work, I also have three kids. A lot of the reason I do this extra work is to help support my family and our chosen lifestyle. The idea of working so much that I can't ever see them really kind of defeats the purpose so I have to keep that in mind as well. When things are really busy and I've got a project that requires all my available time, I structure it this way:

Weekdays: 2 hours/day
Weekends: 8 hours/day (when a deadline is coming up)
Weekends: 2-4 hours/day (when I can take my time)

I will answer simple to answer emails immediately during the day (lunch time, for example) but never spend more than 5 minutes on a reply during that time. Any email responses that require more time than that become part of those hours listed above.

I will take phone calls during the day as long as they are scheduled ahead of time. I do not take impromptu calls - especially when they can just as easily be handled by email (some people have this addiction to phone calls I will never understand).

There are some cases where a freelance job turns out to be tougher than I had predicted. In these rare cases, I will take a day off from work to focus on that. But that's very rare.

Feeling Overloaded

Again, I sympathize. The biggest problem I have here is letting the amount of things I have to do get jumbled around in my head at which point I lose all perspective. At this point, it seems like I have way more work than I actually have or it actually is a lot of work but because it's so jumbled it seems completely unapproachable. Two months ago, I started keeping a daily development diary for each project. I use evernote because I work on multiple computers and it syncs well. This is a free form medium that allows me to track what I've just done and what I've got left to do as I think of it. When I move from project to project, I have a tendency to forget where I left off. It helps with that and it helps me to remember what the hell I was thinking when I decided to do thing A instead of thing B. I actually started to use this for my day job as well and I've found it to be incredibly helpful. But I imagine there are those who can keep this stuff organized in their head just fine thank you very much and don't need anything like that to help them along. I'm a simple man.

Answer 18

I sure do.

Scheduling my time is the hardest part. I have a day job and a family and I try to dedicate a maximum of three evenings per week on these projects, which makes them slow-paced. If that is not acceptable to the customer, then I do not even bid on the project.

In the analysis phase I work very hard with getting the customer to narrow the scope of the project. If the scope gets small enough I am usually happy to sign an agreement with the customer. If not I might skip the project altogether and let someone else bid on it. The excercise of narrowing the scope is usually very appreciated by the customer, who then get's a chance to define, to himself and to me, which features are crucial and critical, and which are nice to have but aren't really adding any business value.

The projects I take on are usually web projects, but I avoid, at any cost, tasks related to web design, as they are hard to estimate in time. As a basic rule I try to avoid any tasks that are not well defined and easy to estimate.

The projects I involve myself in on my spare time are all small in scale, for two reasons: (1) I have a limited amount of time and (2) I do not want to be in conflict with my employer agreement. I will not take on projects in my spare time that are big enough for my employer to consider bidding on.

I find it highly motiviating and quite interesting to see what one can accomplish as a one man army, in terms of meeting customer requirements and delivering systems with a high degree of maintainability. My primary motivation for doing these small scale projects, though, is not primarily to improve my skills, but to make some extra dough (there, I said it).

Answer 19

Blockquote

* How do you plan your schedule ? I mean when I get freelance works sometimes I feel very overloaded. How do you overcome this ?
* Which scale projects do you prefer ?
* Do you prefer new technologies to improve your skills ?

I freelance when I can. Lately my schedule is a little too busy.

• I am working on a product I wrote a few years ago and want to rewrite to be cross-platform. I also have to field support calls/emails every so often.

• I also am starting a company with a friend. He is working on the startup full-time.

• I am hoping to help out a friend with setting up some open source software for his business (and modifying it for his needs) project.

• I contracted to work part-time for a software company as well as time permits, and have not been able to devote much time to it at all.

I feel overwhelmed whenever I have more than one freelance project at a time. I have not been able to figure out a solution for that other than to set priorities and to set expectations (mine and client). I am always clear about these with the clients. (Since two of the projects are "my own" and I don't have to answer to anyone about them they can always be shelved.

I prefer small projects - ones that can be done in a few months. My own personal projects (like the startup) tend to be longer term.

For paid freelance I will generally only take on work I know I can do well. This generally means technologies or languages I already know. For my own projects or favors or long-term ones, I do like to mix-in/investigate/pursue things that are new to me.

Answer 20

I don't ... but that's because my employer frowns upon it. Ask your employer first. Even if they allow freelancing, it doesn't hurt to ask. You wouldn't want to get fired for a side job.

Answer 21

I have a full-time job, but find side projects more interesting usually. My travel time (about 2 hours a day) is spent reading and studying (taking courses at an open uni.). Once I get home I devote as much as 2 hours to freelance projects, and on the weekends a bit more, depending on the amount of work needed for uni. courses.

Knowing the amount of hours I can devote makes me a bit critical as to which projects I accept, but it's worth it.

I usually try to balance projects that will make me learn new stuff with those that won't require too-much time to pull off. The usual interest-vs-easy-money trade-off I guess.

Answer 22

Yes. While working, I still do the occasional project on Scriptlance or Get A Freelancer. I also get at least three quote requests per month via the contact form on my personal blog.

I can do this because:

• My contract with my company specifically says that code I produce in 'off time' is mine.
• I take very small projects and avoid the phenomenon known as 'scope creep'
• I make my situation very obvious when bidding. If the scope of the project extends, there's a good chance that I won't be able to finish it.

99.9% of the projects that I do are Linux related... apply or write some patches to make something behave differently, plan a roll out, etc. I make on average an extra $1000 monthly doing odds and ends in otherwise idle time.

I do it because, even when not working, I'm still tinkering with stuff .. so I may as well be paid to enjoy my off time :)

The only time I allow scope creep is when I decide to do work for non-profits, who typically have no idea what they want / need when initially contacting a consultant. Most of that work is free anyway.

When I took a 'regular' job, I made sure that I could still work on various open source projects and monetize my spare time.

So, if you want to freelance:

• Make sure your company doesn't own every line of code you write (on off hours)
• Don't take jobs from those who might compete with your company
• Tell your boss your doing some freelance work, don't hide it.
• Manage your bandwidth.

If, at your job you are productive and manage your time well, there's no reason for your boss to object. They benefit from your talents 8 hours a day, the other 16 are your's to relax, sleep, or beef up your kid's college fund.

Answer 23

I would never work for a company that told me they owned every piece of code I write. I also agree that what I do on my own time is my business. I would never take work that might even remotely be a conflict of interest or for a company that would be considered a developer. I also have a family and it is hard to balance everything. I would say that if money isn't an issue, than not to bother. Spend the time developing an open source project (I have a few in mind that I would love to start) or seek out a niche market and develop something that can be used there. Who knows, you might hit on something that will than become your full time job and pay more.