Why an Ex­Google Coder Makes Twice asMuch FreelancingWith a talent war raging, companies from Airbnb to Pfizer are paying top dollar for the services ofindependent programmers

James Knight recently made an unorthodox career move for a 27­year­old coder: quitting a well­paid gigwriting software for Google to go freelance. No more catered lunches, gold­plated benefits or million­dollarviews from the search giant’s Manhattan office.

Knight is willing to sacrifice those perks because as an independent he’s pulling down about twice as muchas he did at Google. Plus, he has more freedom. In March, Knight and his wife plan to travel to Spain andhopscotch across Europe—all the while writing code for a dating app and a self­portrait app, among others.

"I’d rather control my own destiny and take on the risk and forgo the benefits of nap pods and food,"Knight says.

James Knight in Brooklyn.

Photographer: Chris Goodney/Bloomberg

January 19, 2016 — 7:00 AM EST

Selina WangSelina_y_wang

Amid an accelerating war for tech talent, big companies and startups alike are paying top dollar—as muchas $1,000 a hour, according to a person who gets coders gigs—for freelancers with the right combination ofskills. While companies still recruit many of the best minds, they're turning to independent softwaredevelopers to get a stalled project moving or to gain a competitive edge. In some cases, the right person canbe the difference between a failed and successful product.

Last spring, Aaron Rubin hired a freelance coder through recruiter Toptal for about four weeks to help getShipHero, his cloud­based logistics startup, off the ground. "To find someone that talented in New York inthree days was never going to happen," Rubin says. "Every talented engineer I know has a job."

Independent software developers like Knight represent an elite echelon of the so­called Gig Economy—a53­million­strong army of freelancers who now account for one in three workers, according to the U.S.Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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, apparel, you name it—requiring ever morepeople to write the underlying code. Demand for software developers is expected to grow 17 percentbetween 2014 and 2024, or more than twice the average, according to the BLS, which estimates that theU.S. will have 1 million more information technology jobs by 2020 than computer science students.

Big companies have resorted to buying out entire firms just for their engineers, a practice known as acqui­hiring. Most have dedicated engineering recruiters, but finding the right people can be pricey and time­consuming. So companies have turned to a host of freelance agencies that specialize in finding top­notchcoders.

Five years ago, Toptal, a self­described freelance network, had 25 programmers on its rolls and about thesame number of clients. Today it represents thousands of coders (the company won't say exactly how many)and has more than 2,000 clients including Airbnb, Pfizer and J.P Morgan. Rival agency 10x Managementsays the average budget for software­writing contracts have doubled in the past three years as the companybecomes the go­to place for bigger and broader projects.

Despite accelerating demand for coders, Toptal prides itself on almost Ivy League­level vetting. A virtualcompany with no home base, it received 15,000 applications in the past two months and accepted fewerthan 3 percent of them, according to Taso Du Val, co­founder and chief executive officer. The vettingprocess has four parts: an interview to screen for personality, technical exam, live coding test and finally atest project that evaluates the candidate in a real­world scenario.

Helder Silva, a software engineer from Portugal who has worked at Deloitte and other companies, made itpast the first two rounds and failed during the live coding exam because he took too much time to solve oneproblem, even though he was on the right track. "You miss something and you get kicked," Silva says. "Iget where they are coming from; they charge a large amount to their customers and they expect you to be asproficient as you can get."

With the tagline "genius on demand," 10x Management typically represents about 100 software developers,though the New York­based agency receives thousands of applications every year. Co­founder (and formerentertainment manager) Rishon Blumberg likens his clients to movie stars: "The demand for Tom Cruise isvery large," he says, "but the supply is very small."

Martin Langhoff, 39, typifies the elite freelance coder. Having taught himself programming at the age ofnine, Langhoff went on to become chief technology officer at the non­profit One Laptop Per Childprogram, where he managed a software and hardware team, industrial design, manufacturing andprototypes. Burned out and wanting to spend more time with his son, he joined 10x, which he says is akinto qualifying for the Olympics.

Langhoff sometimes can be found writing code aboard "Persuasion," a 41­foot timeshare sailboat;he bartered access to the Jeanneau 409 by writing the timeshare booking software. Most recentlyLanghoff helped build a security product for a "major U.S. corporation," a project that typically would takethree years to complete, he says. The 10x team took three months.

"We get called to do mission­critical things that will make or lose the company a lot of money," saysLanghoff, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and makes 50 percent more money than he did working

Martin Langhoff in Biscayne Bay, Florida.

Source: Martin Langhoof, Andy Weiss

full­time. "It's like you get a seat at the New York Philharmonic. Now every performer is performing attheir top level, and when it's your turn, you feel the heat."

Langhoff and other independent software developers say they're free to program and avoid the bureaucracyand endless meetings endemic to big companies. Anne Adams, 30, left a programming job at Bank ofAmerica Merrill Lynch in 2013 and began freelancing through TopTal. Currently she's writing carinsurance software for a large U.S. insurer.

"At a company like Merrill Lynch you have to be seen by the right people doing the right thing rather thanjust getting on with the job you've been given," she says. "You have some people contributing more thanothers and people are operating at different levels, while at Toptal, everyone is kind of up there. So thatway, you get a lot more productive."

Knight, who left Google to work with 10x, agrees: "At Google you could probably get away with notworking for six to nine months—just showing up and making it look like you’re working," he says."There’s definitely a level of stress that comes with being independent that’s absent at Google, but I likethat. I have motivation issues if I don’t think my paycheck is on the line."

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