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Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?

224 points shinypenguin | 1 comments | 13 Mar 25 15:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.226s | source

Hello HN

In a short form question: If you do, where do you look for a short time projects?

I'd like to put my skill set to use and work on a project, I'm available for 6-9 months. The problem seems to be for me, that I cannot find any way of finding such project.

I'm quite skilled, I have 15 years of experience, first 3 as a system administrator, then I went full on developer - have been full stack for 2 of those years, then switched my focus fully on the backend - and ended up as platform data engineer - optimizing the heck out of systems to be able to process data fast and reliably at larger scale.

I already went through UpWork, Toptal and such and to my disappointment, there was no success to be found.

Do you know of any project boards, or feature bounty platforms, that I could use to find a short time project?

Thank you for your wisdom :)

1. mhitza ◴[13 Mar 25 15:37 UTC] No.43354401[source]▶
I find contracts through my network and Upwork, the later became slower last x months, as general investments did.

Play the numbers game. If you have a specific speciality you can use platforms like LinkedIn to reach out to companies that might need your service (through decision makers).

You can also connect directly with digital agencies and let them know you are available if they need to offload some work.

The LinkedIn jobs platform itself feels useless for contract work (at least in the EU) as most contract jobs are employee-like contracts disguised as contract work (full-time availability, no subcontracting/delegation).