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Why an ex-Google coder earns twice as much freelancing

NEW YORK — Mr James Knight recently made an unorthodox career move for a 27-year-old coder: Quitting a well-paid gig writing software for Google to go freelance. He gave up catered lunches, gold-plated benefits, and million-dollar views from the search giant’s Manhattan office.

Mr James Knight gave up Google benefits such as free food and nap pods to go freelance. PHOTO: Bloomberg

Mr James Knight gave up Google benefits such as free food and nap pods to go freelance. PHOTO: Bloomberg

NEW YORK — Mr James Knight recently made an unorthodox career move for a 27-year-old coder: Quitting a well-paid gig writing software for Google to go freelance. He gave up catered lunches, gold-plated benefits, and million-dollar views from the search giant’s Manhattan office.

Mr Knight is willing to sacrifice those perks because, as an independent, he is pulling down about twice as much as he did at Google. And he has more freedom.

In March, Mr Knight and his wife plan to travel to Spain and Europe while writing code for a dating app and a self-portrait app, among others. “I’d rather control my own destiny and take on the risk and forgo the benefits of nap pods and food,” said Mr Knight.

Amid an accelerating war for tech talent, big companies and startups alike are paying top dollar — as much as US$1,000 (S$1,440) an hour, according to a person who gets coders’ work — for freelancers with the right combination of skills. While companies still recruit many of the best minds, they are turning to independent software developers to get a stalled project going or to gain a competitive edge. In some cases, the right person can be the difference between a failed and a successful product.

Last spring, Mr Aaron Rubin hired a freelance coder through recruiter Toptal for about four weeks, to help get his cloud-based logistics startup ShipHero off the ground. “To find someone that talented in New York in three days was never going to happen,” said Mr Rubin. “Every talented engineer I know has a job.”

Independent software developers such as Mr Knight represent an elite echelon of the so-called Gig Economy — a 53-million-strong army of freelancers who now account for one in three workers, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The need for coders mushroomed when the iPhone’s arrival in 2007 set off an explosion of mobile apps. Since then, software has been seeping into fridges, watches and even apparel, requiring ever more people to write the underlying code.

Demand for software developers is expected to grow 17 per cent between 2014 and 2024, or more than twice the average, according to the BLS, which estimates that the US will have 1 million more IT jobs by 2020 than computer science students.

Big companies have resorted to buying out entire firms just for their engineers, a practice known as acqui-hiring. Most have dedicated engineering recruiters, but finding the right people can be pricey and time-consuming, so companies have turned to a host of freelance agencies that specialise in finding top-notch coders.

Five years ago, Toptal, a self-described freelance network, had 25 programmers on its books and about the same number of clients. Today it represents thousands of coders (the company will not reveal exact figures) and has more than 2,000 clients, including Airbnb, Pfizer and JP Morgan. Rival agency 10x Management said the average budget for software-writing contracts has doubled in the past three years, as the company becomes the go-to for big projects.

Despite accelerating demand for coders, Toptal prides itself on almost Ivy League-level vetting. A virtual company with no home base, it received 15,000 applications in the past two months and accepted fewer than 3 per cent of them, according to Mr Taso Du Val, co-founder and CEO. The vetting process has four parts: An interview to screen for personality, a technical exam, a live coding test and, finally, a test project that evaluates the candidate in a real-world scenario.

With the tagline “genius on demand”, 10x Management typically represents about 100 software developers, although the New York-based agency receives thousands of applications every year.

Independent software developers say they are free to programme and avoid the bureaucracy and endless meetings endemic to big companies.

Ms Anne Adams, 30, left a programming job at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in 2013 and began freelancing through Toptal. “At a company like Merrill Lynch you have to be seen by the right people doing the right thing, rather than just getting on with the job,” she said. “You have some people contributing more than others and people are operating at different levels, while at Toptal, everyone is kind of up there. (So) you get a lot more productive.”

Mr Knight, who works through 10x, agreed: “There’s definitely a level of stress that comes with being independent that’s absent at Google, but I like that.” BLOOMBERG

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