I wanted to use this Friday to give a shout-out to all the freelancers out there. I know it’s tough and dirty sometimes. Freedom is worth it! Freedom to chose the gigs you sign up for. Freedom to chose the projects you want to work on. Freedom to learn and grow towards what you think is interesting in this  incredible industry of the Internet.

I have been doing freelance tech work exclusively for the past three years. I have been doing it on the side for the past ten, and did it exclusively for a year at the end of high school into college.

Being a Freelance Tech Consultant is not so glamorous as some people may think. Doing the dirt work is exactly that–dirty! After a few years experience, some people find the more desirable jobs like c-panel management, content curation and distribution, web development, consulting, etc. The good tech work is out there, but most freelancers spend a few years at the bottom and know what I’m talking about.

Here is a List of My 8 Favorite Things about being a Freelance Tech Guy

1. Crawling under dirty desks and through the dirty cable nests behind PC towers.
2. Smokey, dingy home offices filled with pet hair, dust, ancient technology, and stacks of useless papers.
3. Working in the dirty basements, attics, and crawlspaces where the network cabling is.
4. The endless, mindless clicking and captchas of Amazon Mechanical Turk to make rent.
5. Virtual Windows XP environments that run legacy software managing ancient databases.
6. Graveyard and swing shift to bring down systems and servers after hours.
7. Opening and sorting hundreds of computer boxes before running initial setup and software configuration.
8. Running initial setup and software configuration on hundreds of computers. (One or two or more always fail right near the end so you have to restart the process and wait after everything else is already finished!)

There are also platforms like www.elance.com and www.fiverr.com to add extra revenue sources, but I don’t have any experience with those sites yet.

Happy Friday! Keep up the good work and remember–It’s all about the user!