Jovan Cicmil's Blog - Leadership

Why I Chose Not To Start a Web Development Agency

February 22, 2023

Is freelancing the end goal? Or is it an intermediary step on the path to something else? To me, the answer is: both. I’ve been a freelancer for 11 years and I’ve never found it boring. I have, however, leveraged it to do other things: write a book, start a couple of companies (and sell one), and write this blog. What I haven’t done is incidentally the most popular way to scale a ...

How To Hire the Best Freelancers

September 3, 2022

Hiring is an art form. Large corporations often implement complex processes with the sole aim of weeding out candidates. If you’re a small business or startup, things are even trickier. You don’t have a massive infrastructure to guide your hiring decisions. You don’t get to delegate that responsibility to an internal team of experts. And, most ominously, you have much less room for ...

The Main Reasons Not To Hire Freelancers

August 25, 2022

In over a decade of freelancing, I’ve had clients tell me a lot of stories about their businesses. Some of these stories were about the bad experiences they had previously had with freelancers. They weren’t discouraged by those setbacks, but many others are dissuaded from hiring freelancers when they hear the horror stories. My aim today is twofold: To explain why the most common ...

5 Ways To Transform Your Freelance Work Into a Scalable Business

October 27, 2021

One of the most common questions up-and-coming freelancers ask is: where can I take my career once I’m a successful freelancer ? In the corporate world, career-building is a predictable pursuit. Do great at your job, climb up the ladder, do great at that job, climb further up the ladder, and so on. For freelancers, it’s a ...

Community-as-a-Service: A Business Model for the 21st Century

May 13, 2021

It’s 2021 and it seems like every software developer in the world is building their own SaaS (software-as-a-service) products. There’s a revolution of bootstrapping your products and building in public. And that’s great. But, in the background, there’s a different paradigm developing, one not so easily defined and ...

7 Excuses Software Developers Make

May 3, 2021

Fear of responsibility is part of human nature as much as fear of the dark. We software developers are no different. I have made many excuses in my career, especially early on. Later on, I have heard many excuses from the standpoints of a colleague, team leader, and client. Here are some of the most common programmer excuses along with a translation from dev-speak into human English and ...

5 Unexpected Indicators of a Great Team Member

April 16, 2021

There’s a never-ending debate around selecting and interviewing candidates. Hire based on experience. Hire based on knowledge. Hire based on education. Hire based on a technical interview. All these criteria have merits, but have you considered hiring based on whether a person plays chess, or based on how they take a joke? Here are 5 unexpected ways to identify potential great team ...

Six Ways Emotions Can Make You Fail as an Entrepreneur

March 19, 2021

Entrepreneurs talk a lot about common problems: building a product, reaching customers, getting funding, and hiring the right people. On the other hand, there is little talk about the things going on within the entrepreneur’s own mind that can make or break their plans. Here are some ways psychology can stand in the way of success. Being prepared for potential problems is half the cure. ...

How To Be an Effective Leader in Remote Teams

February 6, 2021

The year 2020 brought about a remote revolution of sorts — whether they wanted to or not, many companies decentralized their operations. This decentralization exposed some challenges of remote work to the wider public. As someone who has worked in several distributed teams over the course of a decade, I’ve watched even the most competent companies struggle to grasp the new ...

How a Single Freelancer Outperforms a Whole Team

December 7, 2020

Companies that want to hire you will often use an argument consisting of two logical fallacies, wrapped in a veneer of condescension. Specifically, they will tell you that you have to choose between security and freedom (false dichotomy fallacy). They will base their pitch on the presupposition that working in a team is more productive and more secure, and then proceed to ask you whether ...

How To Adopt Radical Open-Mindedness

October 21, 2020

I recently read Ray Dalio’s book, Principles. Dalio is one of the most successful investors in history, and a person of remarkable breadth and vision. In this book, he outlines the principles that he built over a long and rich career, and that we can use to guide our life and work. Out of all the concepts in the book, possibly the most important (and certainly the most widely applicable) is ...

Applying Lessons From Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” to Your Business

June 17, 2020

One doesn’t need to be a literary expert to understand one thing — if a literary work survives for millennia, there is value in it that is intrinsic and timeless. There are messages within that have found application to the lives of people across centuries and continents. Thus, such works must not be ignored by anyone seeking to educate themselves. The Art of War isn’t merely a ...

Price’s Law Is Going to Kill Your Company

February 20, 2020

Have you noticed how, in every group, team or organization, a small number of people seem to be dragging everyone else forward? Whether you’re in a group chat organizing a trip or in an office building a startup, do you sometimes feel that a few people are pulling more than their fair share of the weight? Well, there’s a name for that. Physicist and historian of science Derek John de Solla ...