Web developer, feel like a jack of all ...

[Sheppard Digital]

I've been a freelance developer for the last 12 years, and now I'm a couple of years off 40, I'm starting to think about the future. I'm starting to feel that in my work I've become a jack of all trades, being good at many different aspects of web development but not really specialising in any individual aspect.

For example, the work I've been doing varies;
- Static sites (HTML to PSD)
- My own bespoke CMS that I developed a number of years ago that one of my agency clients likes and continues to ask for their sites to be built in
- PHP and Laravel building PHP applications and web services
- MySQL Databases
- Java and the Spring Boot framework for intranets and web services

On top of this, one of my agency clients has been approach by one of their clients and they want to move all of their sites over to Drupal (it's a large UK organisation) so I've agreed to brush up my skills on that in order to get the work as it's going to involve continued maintenance and future work.

Then, I'm also smack bang in the middle of working my way towards a Masters in Computing via the software engineers routes, with the aim of one day moving away from development and more into system design maybe requirement gathering/business analysis.

The problem I'm having is that although I've gathered a huge amount of knowledge and skill over the years, it feels like a scatter gun approach. While I earn a decent wage, I can't afford to be selective in the work that I do, and I've found myself specialising in whatever is bringing the money in that month. I had a quiet few months towards the end of 2017, so as a result I've taken on some Drupal projects because they're being well paid, not because I actually want to work with Drupal, which in fact I don't. I've always seen myself as a backend developer and never in all the years have I worked with the likes of Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla etc, I feel like I'm going backwards because I have to pay the bills.

I'm wondering, has anyone else been in a similar situation? How did you get out of it?

While I'm committed to some projects for the next 4 month or so now, I'm looking for ways to start applying changes afterwards, but don't know where to start.

 

[Socio South West]

Welcome to middle age where you start thinking about what you have done.... where you are going.... who you are.....

The raging fires of youth in your belly have tempered to a steady settled level - you still have energy.... but you need some direction to work towards.

Your words describe where you are at currently.... but don't look at where you are going, and what you have in the world outside the workplace.... family, mortgage, lifestyle etc. Have you got anything you need to secure or maintain through your income?

You might find it a benefit to take a month completely out.... go hike some mountains, sit on a beach, sail a boat in stormy seas... and take the chance to re-evaluate your career aspirations and make a good decision rather than a hasty one. Look in at yourself from the outside for a while - and don't ignore the possibility that web development may be near the end as a phase in your life.

Life as a hack (not in the computer sense!) developer may be where you end up... at the end of the day there is more to life than just work. Good luck with finding the direction.

 

[fisicx]

As I got older I focussed more on a narrow range of products. It became easier and more lucrative than trying to do everything. And because have automated everything g as far as possible it means I can earn money without actually doing anything. This leaves me free time to develop more lucrative products.

Wordpress themes and plugins can make you a shed load of money for very little effort.

Not saying this will work for you but the old less is more adage often applies when it comes to development and coding.

 

[Alan]

Although life coaches / career coaches are much derided, perhaps this point of reflection might be the rime to splash a few hundred quid and get structured perspective based on the detail of your personal values and goals.

Without knowing your personal goals and objectives or even location,I'd take a pure guess that you want to maximise income for at least the next 10 years so that post 50/55 you have cleared mortgages, kids have left home and you can kick back a bit.

with the aim of one day moving away from development and more into system design maybe requirement gathering/business analysis.

Why? are these areas you enjoy of do you feel you will earn more? In my experience, these are not easy things to come by as a true freelancer ( i.e. you win and service multiple small clients ) but more aligned to permanent jobs or longer contractor roles ( the last contract role I did similar to that was 22 months for one company )

I'm wondering, has anyone else been in a similar situation? How did you get out of it?

Changing course requires having an idea where you want to go to, then takes a bit of guts to push the tiller over, knowing they may be some hidden rocks on the new heading. i.e. work out what you want to be doing 3 years / 5 years time and go for it, knowing you may have some financial hits initially.

 

[Sheppard Digital]

Thanks for the responses so far.

I have a mortgage, wife and a five your old to maintain. So yes I need an element of security.

I enjoy backend development the most, I certainly have no desire to work with the likes of Wordpress, and if possible would like to move as far away as possible from any frontend related work as I can, I just don't like, I see myself as a programmer, and rightly or wrongly I don't see frontend development as programming (certainly not HTML/CSS anyway, but I know Javascript is making waves in frontend and backend now, but I think Javascript is a horrible language work with).

Most of my experience is based on PHP, but over the last three or fours years I have starting working with Java (for web services anyway), and going forward I'd prefer to move more towards Java and away from frontend development. I don't mind working with PHP, it has its faults but it suites certain projects. I just feel at the minute I've chopping and changing between skills on each project that I'm not devoting enough time to any particular language/skill to really build upon it.

Up until fairly recently, I wanted to specialise in web services and API's, as for the last three or four years or so I've spent a lot of time building REST(ish) web services for a mobile app development agency. However, they've started to bring a lot of their work in-house so I'm not getting as much work from that client as I used to, so I'm not working with API's much now. Another client of mine has kind of taken their place in terms of workload, but the work I'm seeing now is more frontend related stuff, which pays the bills, but it's just not my thing.

I'd like to see myself at some point as a software engineer, designing the system and potentially helping to develop or, or passing the system designs onto freelancers who I trust to build the project on my behalf. But I'm just so unsure whether this will even be an option. Through the University course I'm doing, I'm learning a lot about software development and engineering which includes gathering requirements, project management and system design, and while these are improving me in my current role, I think I need to do something different to really apply this skills to their maximum and differentiate myself from other developers (which there are many of).

Going forward I don't particularly think I would mind contracting too much, but I've worked from my own office more or less on my own (other than the odd time I've employed someone) for around 12 years now, I'm not sure how well I would adapt to having to travel to site almost every day, but wouldn't instantly rule it out.

 

[Alan]

As a back end developer, you need to have a look at what technologies are in demand. PHP is a strange one, as there are so many amateurs that have taught themselves PHP because of the platforms built in PHP ( e.g. WordPress, Joomla, Opencart etc etc ) and call themselves developers that pushes the market rate down.

Ruby, NodeJS and my personal favourite GoLang are a few languages worth looking at that have a demand and command decent rates. You will find active communities is all of them.

As a back end developer, you in theory shouldn't need to work on site.

A PHP remote contractor ( take a look on CW Jobs) can be as low as £200 per day and typically £300 per day.

A GoLang back end engineer £600 per day

If you are doing nothing special - I urge you to at least get to writing 'Hello World' https://golang.org/doc/code.html at least you might see why I like Go.

If it wasn't for the fact that I totally focus on WordPress ( as a business strategy similar to @fisicx strategy, as I love getting paid while sitting here doing nothing when another plugin sells ) so stuck with PHP I'd be writing everything in GoLang. As a software engineer you should love the fact it is compiled language rather than a scripting language to start with.

 

[tony84]

Not quite the same, but when I started out (5 years or so ago), like you I took whatever came in and paid the bills. I still do "vanilla" Mortgages but I prefer to do more complicated Mortgages (bad credit for example).

I started to gear my advertising and website towards those things.

I would say around 60% of new customers are those with complicated situations, the remaining 40% are clean cases which I dont mind with the split I have as it is a nice split between higher earning harder cases and lower earning easy cases.

So after that ramble, I suppose what I am saying is that it is probably not a bad idea to start promoting yourself as a specialist in whatever it is you want to do. It wont happen overnight, but in time you should start to see more of what you want.

 

[ffox]

While I'm committed to some projects for the next 4 month or so now, I'm looking for ways to start applying changes afterwards, but don't know where to start.

Take it right back to basics. Have a read -
https://www.inc.com/betsy-mikel/mar...sought-after-job-skill.html?cid=cp01002fastco

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Mark Cuban is 100% right, but I'm now picking up a significant amount of work developing small systems end-to-end using Powerapps and MS Flow. The skills needed are more related to understanding business process flow and how people approach tasks than knowledge of computer language or languages.
My background is C# and while I have the tools to go back to that at any point I'm finding that a demonstration of control over the entire chain from data source to user form and any automated event trigger in between goes a long way to convince a client of the soundness of the method.

Through the University course I'm doing, I'm learning a lot about software development and engineering which includes gathering requirements, project management and system design, and while these are improving me in my current role, I think I need to do something different to really apply this skills to their maximum and differentiate myself from other developers (which there are many of).

I've met and worked with many developers in my time, but not many ever master the ability to listen to the customer and the potential users then build a process design which works really well. The great thing about code free app development is that the models are quick to build. You can demonstrate your understanding of the issue to the potential client in hours, not weeks.

 

[Sheppard Digital]

Whilst I appreciate the suggestion of looking at other languages, I don’t think that investing more of my time into something new is really the best use of time for me, but rather I feel it could be better used to further improve my skills and knowledge in something I already have a sound knowledge of, with a view to specialising in that particular language/skill.

Ffox, I do like the idea of sitting down with a business, looking at their current processes, listening to what they need and why they need it, and using various methods help to create a solution that solves the needs of the organisation with a Return of investment, whether it be money or savings of time. Then design the system and use freelancers to build the solution and manage the project, but, I don’t know if that’s too much for one person to handle.

I like being a developer, but see as I get older younger people may be better suited to doing it given they’ll learn more quickly and have a keen interest in new technologies. Plus you never know when AI is going to take our jobs!!

 

[Alan]

investing more of my time into something new is really the best use of time for m

Major fail ... if you can't spend 1 hour investigating different technologies, then eventually you will be as extinct as the dinosaurs.

never know when AI is going to take our jobs!!

And why are you not leading that charge? Look forward, don't trust the status quo.

Adapt and survive. But harness and excel!

 

[ffox]

I like being a developer, but see as I get older younger people may be better suited to doing it given they’ll learn more quickly and have a keen interest in new technologies.

The developers I know fall into two categories -
1. Those who are fast, keen and capable, but need a full, detailed specification. These are generally younger operatives.
2. Those who have solid development background and lots of experience, but have the experience to interpret the business requirements for an application without all of the tee's being crossed and the eye's being dotted. These are general older.

Build on your experience and knowledge of process, not on your knowledge of any particular language.

 

[Sheppard Digital]

Major fail ... if you can't spend 1 hour investigating different technologies, then eventually you will be as extinct as the dinosaurs.



And why are you not leading that charge? Look forward, don't trust the status quo.

Adapt and survive. But harness and excel!

I agree with what you are saying, I do always keep an eye on new technologies and if there was something that I really thought was going to improve what I do or be the next big thing, then I’d of course invest in it. What I’m saying is that I feel my skills in existing languages could be improved and expanded on first as a priority. Only recently I’ve invested time and effort into Docker and continuous integration as it provides a benefit to my existing processes and quality.

Currently I invest around 10-15 hours per week in improving my skills and knowledge, I’m certainly not standing still.

 

[soundengineeruk]

Not being away from 40 myself, I do often consider what I want or will be doing in the next 5 years or so. Everyone has different aspirations of what and where they want to be in their personal and professional career.

However, I want the opposite way and come away from contracting/freelance arena. Over last few years before changing I found that clients:

• Found cheaper alternatives/being undercut
• Demanding lower price for work/expect more for nothing
• Spend more time chasing (mainly payments) than actually working

Now, I'm now back working in an office building cloud infrastructures in (AWS & Azure) and currently enjoying the work, on decent pay that is Mon to Fri only.

My weekends are free as usually would be doing admin, plus returning to the office was no real big change and in fact it was nice to be within office banter again.

I invest quite a lot of my personal time developing my skills and keeping up with technology. It is a must for any one working in IT industry. As an example, an friend of mine was just made redundant from his job couple of weeks ago. He spent 7 years working for his last employer, but he did not keep his skills up to date and is now struggling to get work; even at lower level positions.

So for me, I'm staying where I am for the time being as I have no aspiration of becoming/returning to the roles of an architect, consultant, contractor or manager as it is more paperwork and meetings that bore me majority of the time, plus I enjoy coding too much.

I wish you luck with whatever path you decide to choose.

 

[Sheppard Digital]

One thing I do know is that, I'd like to remain working from home in my own office, over the years I've enjoyed the flexibility and I'm not sure I could go back to being employed and working in an office. Obviously if I 'had' to then I would, but I much prefer working from home.

I've had a good think over the last couple of days, and I think what I need to do it narrow down the services I offer, potentially dropping anything that's more 'website' related, and improve my knowledge of Java (specifically Java EE) so that I know the ins and outs of it. Continue to build on my 12 years worth of PHP experience, and combine those with the skills I've gathered from University (requirement gathering, system design, project management), and aim to build solutions for small to medium sizes businesses. Potentially moving away from my existing agency model which has served me well for all these years.

The agency model has worked well, I've barely had to source new work or clients, the money has always been fairly decent, I've worked with the same people for years now, and I've worked with some really big organisations. However there's always a risk that a big agency client will hire in-house, and as a result you lose a huge percentage of your income which I've found is difficult to replace. I've certainly picked up an element of luck along my journey that's for sure.

Moving away from the agency model is a risk in itself, it means sourcing work myself, and my marketing skills are lacking. Most of the time agency work provides consistent cashflow too, especially when I've been on retainer with some clients.

It's a tough decision to make, but I heard someone say recently that if you don't change something, don't be surprised if you continue to get the same results.

 

[Alan]

and aim to build solutions for small to medium sizes businesses.

To me this only makes sense if you are building total products for SMEs, which means front & back end and full product lifecycle including marketing etc. i.e. full service agency or SASS products I don't gather that is actually what you want to do.

Prove me wrong with your market research, but SMEs just don't employ freelance Java EE developers, you need to be looking at FTSE250 companies. Smaller companies employ agencies for 'total solutions' and agencies outsource for skills gaps ( your current model ).

Ironically my advice to any freelancer that wants to expand their business is to reach out and make connections with agencies....

 

[Sheppard Digital]

Thanks Alan,

I certainly see what you mean. The products I'd be looking to develop wouldn't require marketing as such, but would be more internal products to improve existing business processes. For example, a client of mine a few years ago who acted as an ISP for their business clients, wanted a tool which could communicate with the radius servers of their own ISP's so they could quickly and easily determine how much bandwidth each of their clients were using each month. I built them a tool to do this, and it saved them thousands per year in bandwidth costs as they could now charge their clients for over usage. This wasn't the type of solution that I think they would have approached an agency for, but that's just me guessing.

Another project I'm still involved with, was for a recruitment agency that wanted an internal intranet that integrated with their existing recruitment software, to create custom reports and display live information on 60" TV's spread throughout the building. It's saved them a huge amount of time and money. Reports which took days to complete now only take a couple of hours. It's these types of projects I enjoy working on.

However I do see what you're saying, and it's certainly giving me food for thought.

Ideally, I'd like to narrow down what I do, feel like I have more security going forward and if possible have potential to earn more money. At the minute I'm just unsure how to achieve these.

 

[Scott@KarmaContent]

office banter

*Shudders*

 

[Alan]

The products I'd be looking to develop wouldn't require marketing as such, but would be more internal products to improve existing business processes.

How will the potential customer find you?

 

[fisicx]

Ideally, I'd like to narrow down what I do, feel like I have more security going forward and if possible have potential to earn more money. At the minute I'm just unsure how to achieve these.

And the problem is you are selling skills not services. Like Alan said, people are't looking for a PHP developer, they are looking for an app that operated a widget in the warehouse. So they will Google for 'widget remote control' and see what's available.

This is why working for an agency or being emplyed by a full stack company can work to your advantage. They go looking for work and all you have to do is code.

Working for yourself means 2/3 of your time will be spent on marketing and chasing jobs.

Which is why I suggested wordpress (or any other popular platform). You create a product that solves a common problem and people pay you money. As an example, GDPR is going to be big business. If you created a database cleansing tool that cleared out old DB records for those people who no longer want to be remembered and you could make a bucket load of money.

 

[Scott@KarmaContent]

Working for yourself means 2/3 of your time will be spent on marketing and chasing jobs.

Can't agree with that one @fisicx . If anyone's spending two-thirds of their time marketing and chasing jobs then they've got their marketing strategy wrong.

 

[AllUpHere]

Can't agree with that one @fisicx . If anyone's spending two-thirds of their time marketing and chasing jobs then they've got their marketing strategy wrong.

I can't remember how many times I've said exactly that on this forum. If any self employed person, freelancer or small business is spending a chunk of their time finding work, their underlying marketing strategy is wrong.

 

[fisicx]

OK so maybe not 2/3 actually marketing but as a freelancer you spend more time talking to clients than you actually do coding. All good if you are getting paid to talk but not so good if a lot of your time is spent sorting out the spec for the job. In this case Mr Sheppard has got to go find people who need his skills rather than having a product that people are looking for.

So maybe his underlying marketing strategy could be for doing a very narrow and precise thing that people need rather than (as this thread started out) a jack of all things. That way your marketing time reduces. Ideally you already have a product which you can then market.

 

[AllUpHere]

Sod that, time is chargeable, end of. If a client wants to discuss possible work, charge them. If a client wants to spend all day talking over options, that's billable too.

 

[fisicx]

I do agree with you but @Sheppard Digital has got to go looking for work (because people will be looking for solutions not services). You can't normally charge for this time. Or can you?

 

[Sheppard Digital]

And the problem is you are selling skills not services. Like Alan said, people are't looking for a PHP developer, they are looking for an app that operated a widget in the warehouse. So they will Google for 'widget remote control' and see what's available.

This is why working for an agency or being emplyed by a full stack company can work to your advantage. They go looking for work and all you have to do is code.

Working for yourself means 2/3 of your time will be spent on marketing and chasing jobs.

Which is why I suggested wordpress (or any other popular platform). You create a product that solves a common problem and people pay you money. As an example, GDPR is going to be big business. If you created a database cleansing tool that cleared out old DB records for those people who no longer want to be remembered and you could make a bucket load of money.

There's one thing for certain, I don't want to be working with Wordpress or any other solutions such as that. I would like to be as far away from 'building websites' as I possible, there's so much competition in that respect and I have zero interest in it. I've spent the last 21 years or so working with HTML/CSS, I don't like it, it's not what I'd define as 'proper' programming, neither is a big % of Wordpress work. I'm putting down anyone who does it, it's just not for me.

When I signed up for the university course, I had in my mind that at some point I'd be contracted for company X, to go in and consult on a new software project and help design the system. Another time I'd be contracted to company Y or I'd be contracted to both at the same time. However, from what I've read within this thread it doesn't look like that's possible without either being employed or contracting for longer periods. Truth is, I just don't know.

The trouble is, I had such a varied amount of skill and knowledge, that I have a number of different paths in front of me, and I have no idea which path I want to take.

I could concentrate on being a PHP developer and picking a framework to work with, and push for freelance work around that (web applications / web services).

I could concentrate on Java, again picking a framework such as Spring, and push for freelance work around that (web applications / web services).

With the two above routes, I'd like to have the ability to be able to sit down and design robust, secure and maintainable applications and services, then apply those to build the system or if it's a large project outsource part of the development myself to someone else.

In fact, one of the jobs I've enjoyed the most is building web services for mobile apps, it's literally all backend related work, and with one of my clients I've had the freedom to completely design the web service and related backends. So again, that's another route, using PHP and Java I could really push myself to be a specialist in web services. Whilst I've had good results with this so far, I'm not sure what market exists for just web service development.

As you can tell in my replies, I'm going through a total state of confusion and mis-direction.

 

[fisicx]

And I can understand the confusion. I know some developers who move from contract to contract working for big companies. But they are specialists. One of them does HVAC programming and another works on building security system software. They get the work because they are well known in their niche.

You don't have that luxury (yet). I know you don't want to work with Wordpress or PHP or websites, but there is lots of work out there for integration specialists. For example, integrating Magento with Logistics and tracking software. It's all backend database work and I know a developer who was paid £1000/day because he was one of the few people in the county who understood a particular package.

Sometimes you just have to suck it up and do the work that's in front of you if you want to pay the bills.

 

[Sheppard Digital]

And I can understand the confusion. I know some developers who move from contract to contract working for big companies. But they are specialists. One of them does HVAC programming and another works on building security system software. They get the work because they are well known in their niche.

You don't have that luxury (yet). I know you don't want to work with Wordpress or PHP or websites, but there is lots of work out there for integration specialists. For example, integrating Magento with Logistics and tracking software. It's all backend database work and I know a developer who was paid £1000/day because he was one of the few people in the county who understood a particular package.

Sometimes you just have to suck it up and do the work that's in front of you if you want to pay the bills.

I do understand what you're saying, it's finding that niche that's part of the problem.

As for PHP, I don't mind working it at all, it's a good language and suites certain projects, it's just when they get to a particular size they start to be cumbersome to maintain, unit testing helps, but you can't beat a proper compiled language that warns you at compile time that a property doesn't exist, rather than waiting until run-time and it's a customer/client that finds the problem.

The more I sit and think about it, the more I think that for the time being I should continue what I'm doing (for now), with a long term outlook of gradually shifting what I do over to more web service related work, specifically designing and building web services (maybe integrating them too). I already have a fairly good amount of skill and knowledge in this area, and I know through existing clients I have work of this nature in the pipeline. I'd need to spend some time researching the market, and figuring out what work is out there.

 

[Alan]

I'd also advise you to reach out to a freelance developer community, maybe there is an active Slack group for Java EE - I don't know - get get a different perspective.