The kind of money we coders demand for quality means we can attract companies that make lot of money. Today if I generate billing for a project, small Indian companies run away. They ask an estimate, and they disappear once I give it to them. The result is people like me who value quality of code are stuck with big corps who like to pay us regular salary.

Recently I was working on a ticket, it was a complex one, and I didn’t have an idea how the business worked. All simple assumptions I made became false, my pull requests were rejected. Stumbling and fumbling I thought I would finish my code a day ago when disaster struck. I fell ill. I was forced to take 36 hours or so off.

In corporate environments we have to show progress in every scrum call. We have to speak something. You will be paid no matter what, you will be terminated if the business don’t like you. You will be compared relatively with other people. Maybe you might come under a stare of a manager who had bad time with his family today, and your name will be struck off. You never know when the lightning bolt will strike. It’s capitalism to the max.

If I were a pure freelancer, I could have had many clients, so loosing one may be a hit, but it would be cushioned by similar paying people. It would be like loosing 20% of your revenue rather than loosing 50%. Plus I can tell to my client to delay my payments till my work is done, or reduce my pay or increase my pay, the billing is what I generate. This justification of self evaluation and lightness of being honest and frank is absent in corporate world.

Trust is very important in doing business. Entire economics is trust. In corporate world, you have no clue how the upper management trusts you, and they don’t connect with people who do the actual work. In freelancing this is opposite, you can gain trust of people and feedback very easily. That adds lightness to life.

Or may be this is corporate work, maybe I have to be okay with drawing money when I am inefficient, and should be content when I am efficient and the corporate does not want to hike pay for me for what ever reasons that comes to their mind.