Freelancing as an Engineer

Sean Moran 03/12/2019

517 3 minutes read

Freelancing as an Engineer — A food delivery cycle courier for Deliveroo. Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg

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I've been working as a freelance for twenty-odd years now. It’s not something which has been imposed upon me. I only worked “staff” for about five years at the start of my career: exactly as long as it took me to get chartered, and learn the basics of what engineering was about.

I've been a director of one micro-consultancy or another since then. The first one had four full-time staff, (which was, it turned out, enough people for there to be for company politics), and when I sold my share in that, I started Expertise Limited, which has only ever had two fulltime staff.

The other things I do, such as writing books, are pretty much all done on a sole trader, one contract at a time basis, though I did have a staff job in a university alongside all of this for a while too.

Sometimes I work through agencies, though this is uncommon, because so many of their clients want someone who wants to be more like an employee.

What's an employee? It means different things in employment and tax law in the UK, but what it means to me is someone who wants “job security”, with guaranteed work Monday to Friday 9-5 every week, with paid holidays, sick leave, and so on.

When I work through agencies, I sometimes find myself in workplaces where they pride themselves on treating staff and agency workers the same.

These are not my kinds of places. I'm an aim-oriented guy. I like to get a job done and go home. The idea of spending the next twenty years doing the same job in the same place with the same people does not appeal to me.

There used to be quite a lot of people like me, but the trend towards bigger organisations in engineering has made us a poor fit with modern purchasing policies.

We tend not to carry £10M of PI cover, or to be able to meet “financial stability” requirements drafted with plc’s in mind. I have survived this trend, but many of my former freelancer competitors have not.

They have retired, got staff or agency jobs. This might seem odd, considering the wider trend towards the gig economy, but gig workers aren't really freelancers. They have very limited autonomy, and their poor pay tells you all you need to know about how much negotiating power they have.

Many fairly recent graduates have asked me how they could go about starting up as a freelance, and to be honest I have no idea how they might go about this now.

The world has changed since I started up, and I had some lucky breaks early on. I know that those people who write books about how to succeed in business tell the story of their own success being the result of skill, but none of us really know how big a part luck played.

We would however usually prefer to believe that we are responsible for our own successes (though few of us are as willing to own our failures).

But I digress. I seem to be observing the demise of the freelance, independent engineer, but no-one seems too concerned. I wrote an article on LinkedIn a couple of weeks back about some of the issues surrounding this which drew surprisingly little interest.

Maybe I and those other fiercely independent freelancers are dinosaurs. Maybe most engineers want to be employees. But how can they be? Engineering doesn't work like that.

Certainly EPC company engineering doesn't. The nature of engineering contracts is task oriented. Businesses employ other businesses to design and build something for them.

The businesses that design and build things need to be able to vary the numbers of engineers of various disciplines rapidly, in order to ‘staff up’ for contracts once they have won them.

Then, whether these temporary workers are genuine freelancers or agency workers, they will be retained for precisely as long as the contract against which they are billing hours. No amount of giving them a cake on their birthdays can hide this fact.

So they are different from the people who have a contract of employment, (although employers can certainly be pretty brutal with those people too, if there is any kind of extended downturn).

I have some sympathy with the UK tax authorities who consider many agency workers to be employees, in all but having a formal contract of employment.

Maybe all that is happening is that engineering is becoming part of the gig economy. The combination of the loss of autonomy, and the depression of hourly rates would seem to suggest that that is where we are heading.

Was this what those promoting the oversupply of engineering graduates were after – making engineers as commonplace, replaceable, powerless and cheap as Deliveroo riders?