What distinguishes a freelance programmer from a corporate one?

Question

Programming

Very often I hear from hr that they are looking for programmers (let's say backend), but they need developers with 2-3 years of experience in companies, and they categorically do not consider former freelance developers. It is said that freelancers do not know the larger technology stack that is needed specifically for teamwork.
Tell me, what is this technology stack?

Answer 1

Tell me, what is this technology stack?

Based on the experience of my colleagues:
To spend 4 hours a day with each other, drink tea / coffee for an hour, swear at customers for another hour and write a couple of lines of code for the last hour.

Answer 2

Here is a difficult moment. I won’t risk speaking for everyone, but I’ll tell you about my personal experience and the experience of my friend.
I am currently 33 and have worked in an office all my life, never freelancing for a single day. Although I understand that there is more money in freelancing. But. Being in the office you are in interaction with colleagues, which means face-to- faceexchange of experience, which, whatever one may say, is more intense and more significant than correspondence communication on forums. Simply because face-to-face communication is easier and more productive. In addition, strong self-discipline is important for freelancing: there are too many distractions at home and, personally, it is difficult for me to focus on work while at home; further, I share the habitat: at work I work, and at home I rest. In view of this psychological attitude, it is difficult for me to switch to work mode at home. Well, plus to this, I can only dream of an income of half a million wooden ones, but I am not interested in money as such, and therefore the motivation is not money, but doing something useful and bigproduct, i.e. relatively small projects (with a limited development and support period) do not interest me. That's why I've always worked in IT Internet companies on big projects, but never considered the possibility of employment in a studio.
More about a friend. He has been freelancing for over 10 years. And, when I started, I trolled a little on the topic "but I don't work for my uncle." After 5 years, he realized that it still works. But only for many different uncles.
Further, there is a moment in the complexity of self-education: when he does not interact with a large team of equally smart people, then the exchange of experience is much weaker (he wrote above), and therefore knowledge must be independently scooped up from various sources (habr, English-language articles, books, blogs of smart people). developers, etc.), but the question is: when to read all this? So, if there is no thirst for knowledge, then professional stagnation begins, stewing in a fixed stack of technologies. What a friend began to complain to me 3 years ago: he realized that he didn’t know a lot, that a lot of new and interesting things had appeared, but because he “just solved applied problems of a specific order” he missed it all. It was interesting to watch him when I told him about Git, DIC, unit testing, etc. --- those were the surprised eyes of a child.
By the way, about children. I mentioned above that freelancing requires strong self-discipline. He also had this: when he started freelancing, he already lived with a girl (now his wife) and she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t be distracted: well, here he is!, what is it to help do something around the house quickly (for example, wash the dishes or take out the trash): work won’t run away ?, but what’s it like to come up and ask what he wants for dinner? In the end, the problem was solved by agreeing with her that in the period from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., she doesn’t even come close to him, doesn’t ask, doesn’t distract, and generally tries not to make noise. It seems that everything became fine ... until the child was born, but there it is no longer possible to explain to the child that dad is working and there is no need to interfere. So he ended up renting a room in the office and now every day,
Actually what I'm all about. And there and there there are pluses and minuses. And everyone finds and does what he is interested in, what the soul lies more in.
But personally, I am very wary of hiring freelancers in the staff of the company for only one reason: if the lack of knowledge can always be filled with communication and training, then there are (in my experience) significant problems with communication: unwillingness (and sometimes sabotage) in part accepting the code style used; unwillingness to correct the comments left during the code review; dragging third-party shit libraries unnecessarily; reluctance to write unit tests; and in some cases, even selfishness. However, let me clarify that this does not apply to everyone! Not for everyone! In all my practice, this happened only twice, and those were youngfreelancers. I also note that experienced freelancers (due to more life experience) are much calmer and easier to join the team (these also came and I had experience working with them).

Answer 3

Teamwork disciplines. In the team, if necessary, they will poke your nose into your jambs (in the code).
The team will not allow you to write anyhow.
Freelancing is mostly ancillary services, not a serious enterprise-level development.

Answer 4

Teamwork is a slightly different set of skills, partly the opposite of freelancing freedom.
But in this particular case, it is more likely that the vast majority of freelancers do not have the necessary qualifications.
And those who have qualifications will simply not go to full-time permanent work.
Since the earnings of a qualified freelance specialist are on average 3-5 times (according to my 15 years of experience) higher than the earnings of someone who works permanently.

Answer 5

An experienced specialist earns on freelance not 10-20% more, but 2-3 times more.
He simply does not need to go to a regular job.
Those who go to regular work after freelancing are specialists from the lower price segment, others are of the lowest professional qualifications.
And here comes the cognitive dissonance:
A person measures his qualifications by earnings.
After freelancing, he wants the same amount of money - that is, novice specialists measure themselves with the same amount of money in a regular job.
Here is the surprise - in a permanent job, such money is paid only to experienced specialists.
So it turns out - a person from freelancing with obviously lower qualifications comes to get a job. That's what HR is talking about.

Answer 6

Thinking, way of life, specifics of work. In fact, with frequent communication with freelancers, it becomes noticeable that they are not like everyone else. And they don’t want to contact them because they are not used to working in a team, communicating.

Answer 7

It's not about the technology stack at all. Working in a company means following corporate rules, which can be for everything, depending on the size of the company. For a dress code. On the rules for making a commit. on coding style. The fact that the office sings corporate anthems in the morning :-) The fact that if the senior said that the parameters will be passed by value, the junior should do just that, and not try to "optimize" the code by passing by reference. Freelancers, especially those who have worked there for a long time and have already built up a hefty portfolio, usually do not want to understand this. This is not surprising - a freelancer is a project manager, senior, middle and junior in one person, and he considers any action not so much as a programmer, but as a project manager.

Answer 8

Freelancers are not hired by organizations due to their lack of such a concept as labor discipline, which they do not have as a category in principle. Say that you were outsourcing - it can work. Freelancing has already dirty itself, as well as contract work.