Of course, your ability to do this will be somewhat dependent on your stomach for communicating with strangers who come your way.

To be honest, the distinction between full time employee vs. contractor is less important (i.e. affects your work less) than other factors like your capacity and willingness to engage with people, industry, tech stack, and willingness to learn new stacks.

Would chat privately if you prefer but no contact details in your bio.

My advice: join a small, local tech oriented community, contribute regularly, and don't discount the value of F2F. Happy to go into more detail here, or contact me at kmoser.com.

No one's fault but my own, but I should have realized a lot sooner that real success would require a lot more proactive "sales" effort; and that if I wasn't willing to do that, I needed to go work for someone else a lot sooner than I finally did.

If you’re selling a specific service then no, kinda like how you pick a doctor.

But if it’s to apply for a regular coding job except you’re not on the payroll but « independent » then yes it’s exactly like a regular job interview. It just pays 2x but the process is just as shitty.

And, even if you get referred, you still need to seal the deal.

And even within a larger company, unless someone like your manager more or less does it for you, "advertising" your accomplishments is pretty essential if you want anyone to reward your accomplishments.

Race to the bottom, here we come!

Maybe, but I think many (most?) people doing it don't like having to do it, and for many people, it's probably not that natural. It's practice, learned and trained skills.

> I'd probably die of embarrassment if I ever had to do it.

If it's because a lack of self-confidence, work on this, being reasonably self-confident makes life so much more enjoyable.

Otherwise, I believe this embarrassment would be ill-placed, and therefore I would suggest, if you haven't done it already, that you think hard on why. And if you've already done that, I'm quite interested in the deep reasons why you think you'd be so embarrassed :-)

> This is probably one of those "Thanks, I hate it!" moments

Yep, can't agree more xD

As far as slimy, I mean, yeah, don't break ethical boundaries; don't lie, don't take credit for other people's work; and it'll be fine. The ick feeling comes when we see others do amoral things like that and get ahead, but all you have to do to avoid that slimy feeling is to not lump all self-promotion together, and then just don't do the unethical bits.

I don't think selling oneself is something that reflects on one's character given what's at stake. The important people who know who you really are will also treat that mask of yours as fake. But they could also play up your appeals in the LinkedIn comments section to ultimately improve your chances of... getting a job. Which is all that really matters at the end of the day.

But I do think that some people are better at lying to themselves that the choices are going broke or make independent contractor work by selling yourself like that.

There's the obvious route which is to just not be an independent contractor and get a 'normal' job where you still have to do some of this nauseating selling yourself but at only a few critical times and way less public.

No shame for those who want to be an independent contractor at the cost of selling yourself like that but just sharing that I can't seem to trick myself into thinking it's a go broke or make it work situation.

I think some value the independent nature of it and say it's worth the embarrassment that gp talks about. Was just sharing how it's not a go broke or make it work because well it's a bit of a luxury (because normal job is always there)

Of course children are explicitly given everything they need. Adults need to get it for themselves.

If you are in business you need to advertise. If you are in the contract business you need to advertise you. If you can't do that, then that's OK, go get a job.

Advertising is not slimy or shameful. It's part of the job. It can be done well or badly. But the world doesn't "owe" you anything, nor will it seek you out. If you want to be independent then you need to work harder than the dependent who has an employer.

That's a skill I'm trying to learn, and not sure where to turn. If anyone has any advice.