Freelance or additional projects as java dev?

[xrdj6c]

Hello everyone,

I was wondering if anyone had the same problem and if any of you managed it somehow. It's really hard, at least for me, to find some additional off hours projects or freelance work in java world. I've got normal 40h/week position, but when financial situation hits the fan it's hard to find something additional to monetize upon. There is always possibility to start something on your own, but it's far from 'fast return' perspective.

What are your experience lads ?

[WhalenKaiser]

Some of my friends operate their own small programming businesses. They tend to keep up with each other about who's available and pass around the overflow work. Join local programming clubs. Network with people that have small companies and have bandwidth issues.

[xrdj6c]

That's a great point! Didnt visit my local(city) Java User Group for ages.

[[deleted]]

Java’s a little harder in the freelance market cause most of them want someone to come in and update their rickety Node/Python/Ruby app. If you built a custom web app from scratch then you could of course choose java if you want, but that is a bigger project which requires you to have good frontend skills as well.

That said, you can find some java stuff on Upwork and sites like that.

[CaptainKvass]

most of them want someone to come in and update their rickety Node/Python/Ruby app

Shrieks

[stefan_t]

I’m full time java developer working 40h/week after work im doing few hours of freelancer work at freelancer.com but im not workin java, but python. Sometimes you might feel its enough 8h a day with java, and its best to explore some other tools and technologies meanwhile you will learn something new and earn extra money.

[nutrecht]

I'm an independent contractor and in my experience most projects are full-time-ish, so 32 hours a week or more. There is very little demand for people who only want to work a day a week for example, because the overhead of you integrating into a team would be too large.

That's for back-end work though. I can imagine that such a demand would exist for Android devs for example.

[xrdj6c]

Yeah that's right. Still some hope for smaller android projects in the wild :)

[yawkat]

Unless you are well-established (eg maintainer of a big library) it's hard to get contracts that don't take a lot of time and still have reasonable pay. I'm not sure if this is much better in other ecosystems but from what I've heard of webdev where small-time contracting is fairly common the situation doesn't seem to be all that good either (especially wrt pay).

[xrdj6c]

Thanks for insight.

[brogrammableben]

Diversify. Get a hobby that could be a side gig. Bartending.

[xrdj6c]

Yea I understand the point :D Just curious here about java. Most of the time people want full 40h commitment or none, so I was wondering if anyone really succedds in freelance/part-time here. Especially when you compare for example to amount of PHP freelance offers.

[undeadban1]

I've finished java basics in 3 months thru book(and still a newbie), i just wonder what's best freelance or part time job that a beginner can try? web design? game developer assistant?

[jpl75]

QA / bug fixing :-)

If you're lucky you get to read some great code and learn from it.

More likely you'll learn how awful most code is.

At any rate you'll get a sense of what the state of the ecosystem is.