Your Skills Don’t Matter Your Solution Does

The Freelance Mindset #1

I’ve been a software engineer all my career. I thought writing code was magical. It is. But, something shifted became a Freelancer in 2021. If you’re a software engineer like me, you’d relate to the following narrative

You started coding, somehow you liked it, somehow these cryptic languages became your favorite. Voila! Now you’re coding away for hours and trading these hours for good cash. You switch jobs for better pay and keep improving your skillset, accumulate more tools, and “progress in your career” 

Over time, it’s common to bias yourself into thinking your skills are what’s making you the big bucks. 

Sad news! It’s not 🙁

Now that might offend a lot of you, my fellow Software-ians, Yes, mastering that Programming language was hard and rewarding, but that’s not what’s making you the money.

Hear me out.

Your skills are making you money because 
someone has figured out how to make money with your skills. 

Let that sink in for a moment. 

I’m not trying to make a capitalistic reformation here. Nor asking you to quit your job to take matters into your own hands but a gentle nudge to look at the system you’re operating on.

If you feel this is common knowledge, you’re an engineer with an eye for business. But I have been meeting engineers at conference after conference who walk around with a sense of entitlement. We also see cases of engineers crumbling through their layoffs again and again since they don’t know how to make money off their skills.

Here is how a software system operates.

Someone watches the market for the needs, problems, and niches, converts that into a product spec, you write the code push it and someone figures out a way to sell it. All of this has to happen for you to make money out of your code. No sale means your code has no value.

Although you might think your superpower to understand cryptic language alone is valuable, convincing another human being that your service/solution/product is worth their hard-earned money is wizardry.

I came to this knowledge when I started freelancing in 2021. I was burned out, quit my job, took a long break, wanted to experiment with freelancing, and created accounts on all freelancing websites, Fivver, Upwork, and Arc. You name it, I got it. It took me 8 months to land a decent profile that lured in clients. 

Retrospectively it all boils down to this

Your Skills Don’t Matter Your Solution Does

You can stand at the top of the mountain and scream out all the skills you have. But no one will care. Not because they’re not valuable, but because it’s hard for business people to see the value yet.

One of the 1st mistakes I made as a Freelancer was casting a wider net. You might have seen these in resumes all the time. Listing 30 different skills. We need to drop that mindset.

Let’s say you’re looking to hire a personal chef who can cook South Indian food, you see two chefs applying for the role,

• Chef 1: I can cook you yummy delicious food. I have a decade of culinary experience.

• Chef 2: I have been cooking crispy dosas, yummy sambhars, biriyanis, and curries. Don’t let another day go by without smelling the South Indian flavors at home.

Who will you hire?

I could already smell every tadka as I wrote it. 

I’d hire the 2nd one for sure. They seem to cater to my needs precisely. That’s exactly what I did your my freelancing profile too.

I packaged my skill into a solution based on the problems I knew existed in the Industry.

• Cooking = Coding = Skill

• South Indian food = Airflow on Kubernetes = Service/Solution

The chef might easily know baking and North Indian and European but none of that matters here. Be the wizard, and have multiple spells in your power, but when you present them to the world nicely box them around problem statements

• Generalization is having enough tools in your bag, 

• Specialization is knowing when to use what

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All of this makes sense, but how do I implement it? How do I know what problems exist in the Industry? I’ll cover this in detail in the next edition of The Freelance Mindset