This last week has not been a good one. The only good thing that happened was on Friday, when Nicole played her gig, which went down exceedingly well thankfully.
It was announced to us at Questions on Tuesday, that the company was having money troubles and the expected promise of cash from a Venture Capitalist never materialised. However, seeing as we are down to a skeleton staff after the last round of redundacies, any further losses are likely to destroy the company. So they've proposed we take 50/50 split of pay/holiday or pay/shares. I opted for the pay/holiday split, in the hope that I might find the odd quick website to do to keep the money rolling in. Little did I realise how desperate people were.
Over the weekend I put forward 5 proposals to projects advertised on a freelance site. Until today no-one had replied. The reply I did get was both a disappointment and an eye opener. One of the jobs I had pitched for was a fictious job, posted by a designer who was beginning to wonder if anybody was using the site. He'd been pitching for jobs for 3 months and heard nothing. Was he pitching right, too much money, not enough, were his sites too bad or too good? So as an experiment he posted a job to see what kind of response he got. Within the space of a few hours the pitches started rolling in. After 250 in 24 hours he stopped counting, but he did send a report out to everyone, apologising for time wasting, but also giving a valuable guide as to what everyone was pitching for a basic 5-8 page site.
Many are students or have read a book and think they can do it for ã50 or even free. I pitched quite high, but certainly not the highest, based on about half my current rate. If that's the state of the market then perhaps I should start thinking about going back to embedded C, where I can earn stupid money without too much effort!
Here's an idea: If you want steady freelance work, find a local design shop that doesn't know how to do programming, and volunteer your services. I had it slightly easier in that they came to me.
