I know, I know… you’re not the freelancer this article is about, but I’m sure you can enjoy it vicariously if you hold on to that self-righteous indignation for another few minutes.
I’ve been working with freelancers for a long time and also been one on-and-off for about ten years, and what I’ve encountered leads me to believe that sucking at freelancing is, in fact, the norm.
Freelancing is tough… or easy, depending on about a zillion things – but one of the things that definitely makes it tougher are the people out there who call themselves freelancers but are actually annoying wastes of money. There are five principal offenders that give everyone else a bad name. Having set the tone by irritating 95% of the potential readership; I’ll dive right in.
N.B. I’m assuming all the culprits are men to make this easier to write, but you can go ahead and assume this is universal
The Non-committal Freelancer
I suspect this freelancer is always stoned. Either that, or his natural endorphin level could anaesthetise an entire X-Factor audience. A common exchange may pan out thusly:
Me: Did you get that page ready for going live?
Them: …
Me: The new webpage… ?
Them: …
Me: You know… we spec’d it out last week…?
Them: …
Me: We finalised the deadline in a meeting yesterday…?
Them: …
Me: I sent you an email about it an hour ago…?
Them: …ummmmmm…
Me: The one with stars on?
Them: OH, yeah dude I remember… with the stars.
Me: *phew* so how are you getting on, nearly ready?
Them: …sorry dude, what are we talking about?
Me: …
I don’t care if you freelance on crack with a live, mange-riddled, monkey stapled to your face IF you can do your job and keep me up to date on the progress. I don’t even care if it slips a bit, sometimes things do. However please try to look like you give a damn about what I’m saying to you. I don’t want to be gazing into your bloodshot, capuchin-covered eyes for more than the time it takes for you to tell me that you’ve got everything all tied up.
The “Special Methods” freelancer
We all have a unique way of approaching problems. I personally know a lady who is sure that the efficacy of her work is linked to her toffee intake (hello, Helena!) and I’m pretty sure if you disconnected the Freelance Advisor Editor from Twitter he’d only live for a few painfully awkward minutes.
But even if you are bound to a tin of Quality Street whenever you are working, do please remember that the office you’re working in is not actually your home / garage / Dad’s study and contains other, more normal, people who do not want to smell, hear or touch your weirdness.
That said, bad hygiene and disastrous social skills are not the only hallmark of Mr Special Methods, oh my no. Mr Special Methods has a special method for bloody everything. Do not offer this guy a cup of tea or you’ll be hand-straining Rooibos through an albino penguin diaphragm for most of the afternoon.
The sheer volume of special methods is staggering. Sharpening a pencil? Not like that you’re not! You’ve got to hold it at 18° in a room with a southerly aspect whilst rotating at 16 rpm. At home this is not a problem, you can spend 4 hours putting a post-it note on the kettle… as long as you ALSO spend the 7 hours I paid for, doing work related to the aforementioned payment.
In the office this is a nightmare, Mr Special Methods seems to only get a fifth of the planned work done when he is within view, but is often fine when out of the picture. There is literally nothing you can do to speed this guy up; threats, entreatment, cajoling, aggression, crying, sexual favours, asexual favours… by the time you realise you’re wasting your time you could probably have done the work yourself.
Mr Special Methods is also known as Mr Procrastinator and Mr Has-A-Horrible-Case-Of-OCD.
The Lurker
During the heyday of Internet forums there was a special class of forumite who would never post, but spent an unusual amount of time logged in… lurking. In FPS gaming these people are always snipers or commandos and usually referred to as “campers.” In Strategy games this tactic is called “turtling”, in real life it is called “being an overly reclusive moron.”
Look, you’re the expert, and I’m paying you for your input; please, please hand it out. Don’t cower in a corner only talking when forced to by dint of people standing over you to elicit a response.
Sure, some people are not that social, and you may not be sure you’re best placed to contribute, that is fine. It’s when you only bring up a massive (and I mean Mae West style, unabashedly freaking enormous) error in something, that you have known was there for weeks / months, but just didn’t say anything. Remember this – I’ve got no idea what you’re doing most of the time, so if you don’t speak up, you will just end up being blamed. I can’t stop the CEO leaping to the wrong conclusion, it’s what they do.
Basically, if you can see an issue of any kind, then at least check that it is “as it’s supposed to be” with someone else. Honestly, your employer will just think you’re thorough rather than pedantic, you can’t know their entire strategy after all!
King Grunts-a-lot
There is a special type of (usually code-centric) freelancer who has totally eschewed the use of regular communication, instead preferring to use a combination of grunts and terse emails to let the world know what he’s thinking.
Whilst this is wonderful for the time you spend on Stack Overflow, it’s hardly a holistic communications strategy. I’m a developer of sorts (admittedly a soft-core one) but if you want to know whether GO needs an exhaustive knowledge of semi-colons when working within a Ruby framework, then I’m not going to embarrass you by asking what a semi-colon is.
However, I’m also OK at calling people (who are paying me) on the phone. This is because I want their money, and they want to talk to me to make sure I’m not drunk (I guess there may be other reasons too).
If you want to check quickly if you might be edging into this particular freelance royal family then take your left hand and reach up to your ear. Is there a headphone in the way? Yeah, you’re in trouble there already, but it’s OK – things may not be that bad, headphones are used by normal people at work too, right?
Temporarily remove the headphone; are people actually talking to you now? Like, right now? Perhaps asking why you’re reading an article on a non-work related website and ignoring them? If you’ve answered “yes” to the above, you may just be King Grunts-a-lot.
Freelancer developers are in particular need of excellent communication. Development is fiendishly impenetrable to “lay” people and requires a creative use of metaphor and simile to explain properly. If you can’t adequately explain what you are doing, how can your employer rate your performance?
Mr Right
Holy moly, this guy is all too common in the freelancing world. Basically, freelancers are potted experts. They can only make money by being an expert in a particular field. If you suck mightily at plumbing you are not going to be snapping up those lucrative new build contracts, you are going to be chugging down the slow pipe to bankruptcy This, I think you’ll agree, is obvious. What appears to be less obvious to freelancers is that they are not that expert and absolutely not unique.
Hands up who has ever been wrong about something that they were pretty sure was going to work? Everyone that has their hand up: congratulations, you are the kind of person I want to employ. You have humility and you are willing to admit both error and culpability.
Anyone sniggering about “incompetents” under their breath: you are Mr or Mrs Right. And yes, I mean that in an sarcastic sense. Very sarcastic. You’re basically wrong, a lot of the time, about everything. Also you’re often too much of a prick to realise it.
Let me give you a scenario. You’re a web designer, I’m a business owner. I want a new site. You give me a design, I hate it. You tell me I don’t understand about websites and refuse to do what I want. You head off to Twitter to tell people about “this idiot” who now won’t pay you for your “awesome design.” Sound familiar?
Sure, an employer will value the fact that you have experience and skills… but they don’t give a tap-dancing badger turd about what you want. They care about what they’re paying for, which is a site… that they like. If the client hates Twitter bootstrap; then DON’T USE TWITTER BOOTSTRAP, cross it off your list and come up with something else! Stating over and over again that it’s the “best solution” is counter productive and annoying.
Mr Right is often the epitome of the expression “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” They are the freelancer that thinks they know everything about their subject but actually they are just partisan arseholes with no flexibility.
Photo by TipsTimes
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