Why it pays some coders to freelance
James Knight recently made an unorthodox career move for a 27-year-old coder: quitting a well-paid job writing software for Google to go freelance. No more catered lunches, goldplated benefits or million-dollar views from the search giant's Manhattan office.
Knight is willing to sacrifice those perks because, he said, as an independent he's pulling down about twice as much as he did at Google, with more freedom. In March, Knight and his wife plan to hopscotch across Europe while writing code for a dating app and a self-portrait app, among others.
"I'd rather control my own destiny and take on the risk and forgo the benefits of nap pods and food," Knight says.
Amid an accelerating war for tech talent, big companies and startups alike are paying top dollar for freelancers with the right combination of skills. While companies still recruit many of the best minds, they're turning to independent software developers to get a stalled project moving or to gain a competitive edge. Sometimes, the right person can be the difference between a failed and successful product.
Last spring, Aaron Rubin hired a freelance coder through recruiter Toptal for about four weeks to help get ShipHero, his cloud-based logistics startup, off the ground. "To find someone that talented in New York in three days was never going to happen," Rubin says. "Every talented engineer I know has a job."
Independent software developers like Knight represent an elite echelon of the socalled gig economy-a 53-million-strong army of freelancers who now account for one in three workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The need for coders mushroomed when the iPhone's arrival in 2007 set off an explosion of mobile apps, with software seeping into fridges, watches and apparel, requiring ever more people to write the underlying code. Demand for software developers is expected to grow 17 percent between 2014 and 2024, or more than twice the average, according to the bureau, which estimates that the the U.S. will have 1 million more information technology jobs by 2020 than computer science students.