I'm self employed for around 10 years now. Before that I was employed as frontend developer for around 7 years.
I started self employment as software consultant, which worked pretty well despite not having any connections from my previous employment. I only needed one or two projects a year to sustain my lifestyle. Getting two companies a year to accept your application isn't hard. If you write at least 5 applications a month, you need a success rate of less than 5%.
I changed to technical writing later, because text is less of a struggle than code, and educational articles that explain how to use software (e.g., services, tools, SDKs, frameworks, etc.) are paid pretty well, especially compared to the non-technical writing tasks. Regular software consulting projects take months and can haunt you for years. An article takes a few days and after that you can do other things you find interesting.
Via technical writing, I got into other kinds of text related jobs the software industry offers, like social media management (e.g., Twitter/X, newsletters, blogs) for companies with developer audiences.
Usually I work less than 20h a week and I can do it from everywhere, which allows me to travel often and having enough time off to enjoy it.
How do you get clients for tech writing, if I may ask? Are you maintaining a stable pool of companies and doing work as they need it, or do you always have to fish for new opportunities?
I've been authoring sw dev books that target a niche audience, and I've done some writing for the company that develops the sw itself. I'm wondering whether to expand to other areas, too—I've got the feeling that 2024 is going to be a rather challenging year, financially speaking.
As all articles I wrote under my own name (some are ghost writing) are implicit advertisement, most clients approached me after they read some of my pieces.
Over the years I got a hand full of stable clients. Some want content every month, some every quarter, etc.
Then there is word of mouth. The people I work with at my client companies are usually in the content business, so they need constant influx of quality content and know many other people who need it too.
I also work with a tech content agency, they always have a few articles a month I can work on, if business is slow.
- I have a Business Analyst/Product Mgr background. I've never been a developer, but I can read code well enough and get a good idea of what's going on. Do I have a chance of breaking into this? How would I go about doing so (other than the obvious like trying to do it as part of my day job)?
- Do you worry LLMs are going to put you out of business?
- Very broadly speaking, could I make $150k doing this?
In my experience, the success stands and falls with how well you can grasp technical topics and explain them to people who have less time than you to learn them.
I know a bunch of good writers, who never got far, because their technical understanding wasn't enough to write guides/tutorials/explainers.
"Do you worry LLMs are going to put you out of business?"
Not yet. I use LLM every quarter to write an article, and they've always been bad.
"Very broadly speaking, could I make $150k doing this"
Probably.
An article makes you between $500 and $1000, depending on the length and quality. If you could write 200 a year, that could work.
Curious about this. How did you manage to build up a consulting business without prior contacts? You say you wrote applications, but normally companies aren't soliciting consultants in a public fashion (other than fiver/upwork which seem to be a race to the bottom).
I started self employment as software consultant, which worked pretty well despite not having any connections from my previous employment. I only needed one or two projects a year to sustain my lifestyle. Getting two companies a year to accept your application isn't hard. If you write at least 5 applications a month, you need a success rate of less than 5%.
I changed to technical writing later, because text is less of a struggle than code, and educational articles that explain how to use software (e.g., services, tools, SDKs, frameworks, etc.) are paid pretty well, especially compared to the non-technical writing tasks. Regular software consulting projects take months and can haunt you for years. An article takes a few days and after that you can do other things you find interesting.
Via technical writing, I got into other kinds of text related jobs the software industry offers, like social media management (e.g., Twitter/X, newsletters, blogs) for companies with developer audiences.
Usually I work less than 20h a week and I can do it from everywhere, which allows me to travel often and having enough time off to enjoy it.