The Great Resignation, Developer Edition

Everyone is quitting. The news calls it the Great Resignation: record numbers of people leaving their jobs, month after month. In tech, it feels even more extreme. Every senior developer I know is either interviewing, has just switched jobs, or is being contacted by five recruiters a day (usually all three).

A lot of them are asking me the same question: should I go independent?

I’ve spent a good part of my career as a freelancer and consultant, building software for many companies of every size. Here’s my honest take.

Why now is a good time

Remote is normal now. Two years ago, a client in another city (or country) was an exception you had to justify. Today nobody blinks. Your market is no longer “companies within commuting distance”. It’s everyone.

Companies are desperate. Hiring a senior full-time engineer currently takes months, if it works at all. Meanwhile the roadmap doesn’t wait. A senior independent who can start next week and own a feature end to end is extremely attractive - often more attractive than another full-time hire who’ll need three months to ramp up.

There’s money around. Funding rounds are huge and frequent. That won’t last forever (it never does), but right now a lot of companies have more budget than people.

Why it’s not for everyone

Freelancing is a different job from engineering. You’re now also in sales, finance, legal and customer success. Some uncomfortable truths:

You only get paid for the hours you sell. Vacation, sick days, the week between projects, the time spent on proposals - all unpaid. Your hourly rate needs to cover that, which means it needs to be a lot higher than your salary divided by 2,000.
Finding clients is the real job. The first few usually come from your network. After that, it’s reputation and referrals. If you hate talking to people, this will be hard.
There’s no one to hide behind. No manager to escalate to, no team to share the blame. When something breaks at 2am, it’s yours. (Personally I like this. It’s not for everyone.)

What works, in my experience

Be senior, and charge like it. Clients don’t hire independents to be cheap; they hire them to be fast and right. If you’ve built this exact kind of system before, say so, and price the outcome rather than the hours. Senior developers are expensive per hour and cheap per feature.

Own outcomes, not tickets. The best freelance engagements are “build this, end to end”, not “join our standup and pick up Jira tickets”. The second one is just a job without benefits.

Write things down. Scope, price, timeline, what’s included, what isn’t. In an email is fine. Most freelance horror stories are just unclear expectations that went bad slowly.

Keep your stack boring. You’ll be handing this code to someone else eventually. Choose things they can maintain without you. Nothing destroys a reputation like leaving behind a clever system nobody else can run.

Find your people. This is the part I underestimated for years. Independent work is lonely, and a lot of it depends on referrals. Other independent developers are not your competition; they are your best source of work, advice, sanity, and the occasional partner for a project too big to do alone. Build that network deliberately.

The bigger picture

I think this moment is a preview of how a lot of senior engineering work will be done: smaller, more flexible, remote, organized around projects rather than org charts. Not everyone will want that, and full-time jobs aren’t going anywhere. But for experienced developers who like ownership and variety, the door is wide open right now.

If you’re thinking about walking through it, don’t quit tomorrow. Take one small side project first. See if you like the selling as much as the building. Then decide.

The best time to go independent is when you have options. You have options.