Free lancing on weekends for Excel VBA projects? Possible? Reality? Legal? (1 Viewer)

[SachAccess]

Hi Experts,

Hope you are doing good. I need your help about free lancing. I have never done it. I know nothing about it.
Just a random thought clicked to my mind about Excel VBA free lancing on weekends. Could you please help me in below.

01) I am from India. Are there really free lancing Excel VBA gigs available?
02) What type of clients are there in free lancing world?
03) What sort of payment is associated with Excel VBA gigs? And what parameters define the projects?
04) Are there any fake clients too? How to identify fake clients?
05) Is it legal to work on free lancing if I have another regular job?
06) What kind of projects are there in free lancing? Why would the client prefer a free lancer than hiring a person?
07) What are the platforms for free lancing?
08) How do I present myself on Free lancing platform?
09) Do I need to share exact details of my current job?
10) I don't want to mix my current job and free lancing (don't want to cross-share the details), would be possible?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

The forum's membership is from many places, but free-lance gigs usually are very localized. You will have to do the local searches for your area because we won't have a clue about availability, clientele, projects, etc. Here are SOME answers.

1. I am from south Louisiana. Gigs are available in many places but I have no visibility to know what the market looks like in India.
2. Clients? Mostly small businesses, probably a few one-person shops. The bigger the business, the more likely a regular employee would be sought. Fortune 500 companies don't do spot gigs and free-lancing. Journalism and photography have free-lancing even for the big players, but big companies in other fields rarely take on spot gigs except as trial runs to see if they want to hire the person.
3. No clue about payment in your area, but for localized spot gigs, you'll probably be lucky to initially have a clue as to the project. Expect to spend some time fact-finding and be prepared to charge for that time as well.
4. Fakers exist everywhere. You would use the same general rules as you would use if YOU were hiring a contractor. Is the person working on his/her own? If a small business, how long has it been incorporated? Are they willing to offer contracts?
5. Read the employment rules for the regular job to see if they have exclusionary or non-disclosure agreements. Free-lance gigs are unlikely to have either of those.
6. Clients use free-lancers rather than a regular hire because regular employees have higher overhead most of the time; they get various benefits that a free-lancer won't get. Free-lancers can be hired under fixed-price contract that becomes an incidental rather than a regular expense. (Has tax implications.)
7. Platforms? Every kind in existence that supports Excel VBA - which is to say archaic laptops to new, small servers. Find out BEFORE you sign up.
8. The same as if you were applying for a regular job. State your credentials, present a generally neat appearance, answer their questions.
9 & 10: Depends on the current job and local labor laws.

 

[Isaac]

Hi Experts,

Hope you are doing good. I need your help about free lancing. I have never done it. I know nothing about it.
Just a random thought clicked to my mind about Excel VBA free lancing on weekends. Could you please help me in below.

01) I am from India. Are there really free lancing Excel VBA gigs available?
02) What type of clients are there in free lancing world?
03) What sort of payment is associated with Excel VBA gigs? And what parameters define the projects?
04) Are there any fake clients too? How to identify fake clients?
05) Is it legal to work on free lancing if I have another regular job?
06) What kind of projects are there in free lancing? Why would the client prefer a free lancer than hiring a person?
07) What are the platforms for free lancing?
08) How do I present myself on Free lancing platform?
09) Do I need to share exact details of my current job?
10) I don't want to mix my current job and free lancing (don't want to cross-share the details), would be possible?

I have seen a lot of Excel VBA gigs on sites that cater to this type of gig environments. People will post a project and workers will bid on it. I can't remember the name of them right now (easily find on Google), but I remember seeing a lot of people from India on the site bidding on jobs. Some paid by the hour and some by the gig. (I would prefer by the hour) . I left the site quite fast, after seeing
1) most people were not from the USA and were bidding much lower than I would be willing to
2) Too much of a commitment required on too little information given
3) the whole bidding structure annoyed me, as the buyers had no way to know who was really best

I'd personally, if I were you, try to find India's version of Craigslist and use it to get clients. Something local like Doc said, for sure.

Impress the person during a brief phone call where you mention all the types of things you can well do. Impress them by listening and giving intelligent answers about how you would handle the situations they describe.

I miss doing these jobs because the extent of what can be done with Excel vba from one simple workbook is mind-boggling. I once set up an entire Scheduler that ran automatically running hundreds of jobs downloading and uploading stuff to FTP sites using PSFTP.EXE, the end product? One single workbook, a few vbs files and a few windows tasks. What fun it was, I should have used Access to do it but was so deep into Excel it was my only focus at the time.

I fear I've not been of much help to you, but that's what I can offer. I stopped doing gig work a couple years ago to focus on maximizing the impact of my corporate job. Best of luck to you - it can be quite an adventure to do small contract jobs! And quite a learning experience. It also gives you Professional References. do a few good gigs that turn out well, now all of a sudden you have 5 more people who are willing to be a Professional Reference for you - excellent stuff for the resume/CV !

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Oddly enough, I remember doing gig work of a different kind. When I was working my way through college I was a gig worker - as a musician. I played organ for church weddings and the little band I was with played several dances. The problem? New Orleans is a literal HOTBED of musical talent because we had so many great teachers and so many artists. The competition was stiff on a good day and horrendous during lean times. It was a contributing reason for me to enter graduate school because to make any decent money, I would have had to change markets - and change schools in the middle of a graduate degree program.

I had an odd chance to verify this lesson when I was on a vacation with my parents. We drove across the great plains and by chance, went through Topeka, Kansas. Surrounded by miles and miles of more miles and miles - of corn, wheat, and a few other farm large-area crops. We stopped in at a music store to get out of a sudden rain shower and I saw a music book I wanted, so I bought it. To kill some time, I asked if I could try to play from this new book on one of the organs there, and I quick-arranged a pops song as an organ solo in about five minutes. The store owner tried to hire me on the spot, saying he could guarantee me 3-5 gigs a week playing weddings and funerals, and he knew at least three bands in Topeka who would have loved to have had me join them. Topeka WASN'T a hotbed of music - they had demand but no supply. But I was legally a minor at the time and besides, living in the midst of the Great American Grain Belt wasn't my idea of fun. So I passed up that chance.

 

[BlueSpruce]

So what made you choose data processing?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

So what made you choose data processing?

My choice was ALWAYS on the fringes of data processing, but more scientifically oriented.

My degrees are in chemistry. I learned how to do real-time data acquisition using computers on a PDP-11/15 in "LAB" configuration. In the early 1970s I had code that could take a microsecond-cycle machine to do sampling at 5 KHz, which was very good for my topic. My dissertation research was done on that machine monitoring experiments in chemical kinetics. (For the uninitiated, watching the progress of chemical reactions as a way to derive or infer the molecular mechanism of the reaction.)

My first "real" job was as device-driver writer and material properties advisor because the company's oil & gas pipelines carried various products and we had to monitor their positions at various key points along the 800-1500 mile pipelines we serviced. Our proprietary sensors and software didn't involve a lot of wet lab work but DID involve watching for changes in density/viscosity and a few other properties at stations along the pipelines. We had over 60 pipelines in at least a dozen countries and 15 states in the USA and they ran reliably for many years.

In 1984, though, the oil-& gas industry moved their headquarters from Louisiana to Texas. The company I worked for got bought out. My mother was in a nursing home by that time, in the start of her Alzheimer's ordeal and not really moveable. I was her sole caregiver (Dad had passed two years earlier.) A few jobs were still available and I was pretty much an expert at PDP-11 Assembly language coding, so I moved over to a job with a navigation company associated with seismic/acoustic surveys looking for oil domes on the gulf floor. I became a systems analyst and device driver writer for the new company.

During that time, my nearly ideal job popped up - a company needed a PhD in analytic chemistry to run an agricultural research lab with VAXen and PDP-11 machines all over the place and lots of sensor telemetry plus network-based data sharing. The headhunter who called me thought I was about a 95% fit for the job. But Mom was well into stage 3 Alzheirmer's Disease and I had to turn that down. Later found out it was with Monsanto near St. Louis. But it was not to be.

When Mom finally passed, I had a free choice of going anywhere and answered a blind ad looking for an OpenVMS admin - which I was able to do because both of my prior employers had VAXen. Turned out to be the Navy job in New Orleans and I never looked back. A few years later I met my sweetie and married her. Since she had kids from her first marriage still living in the area, that ended the idea of me moving anywhere and I bowed to the inevitable. But I was able to do the job needed by the Navy and kept at it comfortably for 28 1/2 years before finally retiring.

 

[BlueSpruce]

Impressive journey! My best grades in high school were in Chemistry. Some of us used a timesharing system to write basic programs for homework assignments and research. Our teacher was a Chemical Enginneer MIT graduate. In 1974 we switched to another timesharing system named SECOS and wrote APL/360 programs on IBM terminals that looked just like a Selectric II typewriter. However, in college I pursued a Computer Science degree and my first job was with a major telecom that created UNIX that was only used internally until the monopoly ended. Then I became a charter team member of UNIX Product Management. We licensed UNIX to Microsoft and they marketed XENIX to OEM's before Windows existed.

 

[SachAccess]

The forum's membership is from many places, but free-lance gigs usually are very localized. You will have to do the local searches for your area because we won't have a clue about availability, clientele, projects, etc. Here are SOME answers.

Thanks a lot for the detailed help. You are awesome, as always.

 

[SachAccess]

I fear I've not been of much help to you, but that's what I can offer. I stopped doing gig work a couple years ago to focus on maximizing the impact of my corporate job. Best of luck to you - it can be quite an adventure to do small contract jobs! And quite a learning experience. It also gives you Professional References. do a few good gigs that turn out well, now all of a sudden you have 5 more people who are willing to be a Professional Reference for you - excellent stuff for the resume/CV !

Thanks a lot for the help Isaac. Have a nice day ahead.

 

[SachAccess]

But I was able to do the job needed by the Navy and kept at it comfortably for 28 1/2 years before finally retiring.

Fascinating journey dear Doc!

 

[The_Doc_Man]

on IBM terminals that looked just like a Selectric II typewriter.

Odd you should mention that. At UNO, we had a DEC-System 10 a.k.a. PDP-10 and KA-10, and our computer center head was an electrical engineer. He hooked up a Selectric (which we called "Ol' Ball Head") to the KA-10 through a serial port and we were able to use the DEC "RUNOFF" program to drive it. That is essentially a typesetting program but was also a primitive word processing program. I can't prove it but I might have been the first person at UNO to submit a dissertation primarily generated by word processing.

 

[BlueSpruce]

Odd you should mention that. At UNO, we had a DEC-System 10 a.k.a. PDP-10 and KA-10, and our computer center head was an electrical engineer. He hooked up a Selectric (which we called "Ol' Ball Head") to the KA-10 through a serial port and we were able to use the DEC "RUNOFF" program to drive it. That is essentially a typesetting program but was also a primitive word processing program. I can't prove it but I might have been the first person at UNO to submit a dissertation primarily generated by word processing.

Yes, Selectric typewriters used interchangeable "golf ball" heads with different character sets. Our's had one for APL that had greek mathematical characters on it.

UNIX was first created in 1969 on a PDP-7, then it was ported to PDP-11 and further developed. I used nroff on unix for typesetting documents. nroff was derived from RUNOFF, and so where many other unix utility programs. I remember using the tedious dot formatting codes to change font types, sizes, bold, etc. I later bought a MacIntosh SE and never used nroff again. I worked on several VAX/COBOL and Oracle/Rdb projects. From 1989 to 1992, I owned a DEC MicroVAX 2000, (TeamMate), running MicroVMS. We wrote lots of DCL scripts and used Mailboxes for inter-process communications in our programs.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I have to admit I miss working on VAXen. They were kickin' machines.

 

[BlueSpruce]

I have to admit I miss working on VAXen. They were kickin' machines.

Me too. DoD and many of their suppliers were primarily VAX shops. I had endless fun working on those projects, including Martin Marrietta Data Systems, Hercules Aerospace, and others here in Florida.