Jovan Cicmil's Blog - Wfh

I’ve written a lot about finding freelance clients, writing great proposals, and scaling freelance businesses. Somehow, I don’t think I’ve ever answered the fundamental question: should you go down this road in the first place? Leaving 9-to-5 employment to become a freelancer is a major decision that can change your life trajectory forever. It’s important to know exactly what ...

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 ...

How do you imagine the freelance lifestyle? If you’re like most people, you think it’s a frantic life full of project-hopping, pitching, meeting deadlines, and oversleeping team meetings because you got drunk on a beach in Bali the previous night. The stereotypical freelancer is chaotic and makes up for his ...

Most of my clients over the last decade have been wonderful and easy to work with. I attribute this partly to luck and partly to my ever-growing standards. However, I’ve had my share of difficult clients, particularly in the first couple of years of my freelance career. Here are five types of freelance clients that are difficult to work with and how to handle each one. How to handle ...

Many people go into freelancing with great expectations. They envision themselves sitting on a tropical beach, laptop and all, with an exotic cocktail in one hand and a coconut in the other, while an endless stream of money flows relentlessly into their bank account. Half of their laptop screen is devoted to the job, and the other half to an itinerary for their upcoming trip to Machu ...

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 ...

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 ...

What is meaningful work? The answer to this question changes from age to age and from society to society, but only on the surface. The essence remains the same because it comes from the very core of our humanity. “Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky Philosophy is no match for evolution For ...