Joel: don't listen to that post. Your blog is golden advice.
Re:Lessons from Freelancing
by josephjrobison on Thursday July 02, 2015 @12:37PM
(#9819994)
Love the piece Joel - keep publishing more like it!
Interesting how you said money was the goal but then when you get the success there's always someone doing better...even though you might have a fat bank account.
Thanks, article is great! :-)
Re:Lessons from Freelancing
by pauljarvis on Thursday July 02, 2015 @11:45AM
(#9819635)
Welcome to HN - where the trolls are loud and proud...
I don't necessarily think this is accurate. I've observed a strong and useful pattern here where posts are deconstructed in the comments in a logical fashion which I believe is, and should be seen as constructive.
Even if you come down strongly on one side or the other of a topic, it's a good discipline to look for logical weaknesses, edge cases and other potential holes in any given argument.
HN is great for this because for any given post you can typically find well thought out rebuttals which may or may not sway your opinion, but will in many cases be instructive in the very least.
Of course, the other option is to simply attack the commenter directly and fail to learn anything at all.
You are absolutely right in that your freelance experience might differ from mine - and I did try to say at the end of the piece that money is just one factor. If you can operate well on a job and work in your underwear (and not feel like a sub-human after 3 days), power to you - DO IT!
There's room for disagreement and I'm not trying to run anyone else's freelance life - just share what's worked for me.
These are MY lessons. They're not meant to be absolutes for anybody. I couldn't have dreamed this would wind up on Hacker News - I wrote it for my (small) community and I'm thrilled to see it get traction, but I didn't try to game any system and get on here.