Career in IT
 

A couple of months ago I quit my old job as an engineer (for 'engineer' read 'trumped up repair man') to work on a self employed basis with a friend on a project of his. My work with him has largely involved working with vb and access, as well as some html php and javascript. I also have some experience of PASCAL and various versions of C. I did a Physics degree so I'm fairly numerate and I've designed some algorithms in my work as well.

Things have changed with his project and I've decided to go my own way, business-wise. I've already landed my next job through networking and could cite several good references from the work I've been doing over the last couple of months.

I'm now thinking about going into freelance application development/website design/whatever else for small businesses.

I figure there are a lot of people in this industry on this board and I was hoping I might get some insight into what it's like, best way to go about getting contracts, pros and cons etc.

Done that, I wasn't any good at it.
 

I did that for a while, and it didn't work out very well for me. Primarialy because I'm not a salesperson, so getting work was really hard. Luckily I had a pretty good network of people that I could get jobs through, but without them, I would probably have been washing windows on streetcorners and jingling my change cup.

So my advice for you is threefold.
One, don't do sales. Get somebody else to do sales for you, split the profits 60/40 or so in the salesperson's directon. When they make a lot of money, you make a lot of money.
Two, Build something reusable, and milk it for all she's got. It's the only way to make money on the small contracts that small businesses have.
Three, Get a spec. I worked on and off on a project for around three months, getting three approvals along the way for what I was doing, at the final hand-off phase I was expecting to make some changes. Instead, the project got handed off to someone else for signing off, and they determined that it didn't do what they wanted, so they sent me off empty-handed.

My advice: It's trouble. Be sure you have a lot in the bank if you want to try it. Remember, working your own hours means that you are working all of the time.

That's useful advice, cheers. I think I'll steer clear. Better off going for the conventional employment route, I suppose.