When I moved back from Germany to my country I continued working for my employee charging them hourly rate. I didn't considered myself a freelancer then, but after I quit that company 2 years later I continued with B2B for companies outside of my county.

Now I try to find freelance jobs using Linkedin mainly.

how do you find “people with a problem needing solving” on linkedin? you can find normal jobs on linkedin but those are not going to be open to corp to corp.

I don't search for "people with a problem needing solving" on Linkedin. I look for companies that allow remote work on a B2B contract. Usually, you can filter for remote work

I had the unfortunate timing of starting my career in 2001-2003. There were no jobs available and I had dropped out of University due to lack of money (it was more complex than that, but off topic).

I started the rough way doing basic computer repairs until I came across someone that needed actual programming help. That turned into a 6 month contract, and from there a 1 year contract with a competitor. After that I got a full-time job.

In 2018 I decided to go and be a digital nomad. Getting contract work was now easy falling back on an extremely rich network from years of regular employment. I'm easy to work with and I go out of my way to mentor and help build teams up.

This is mostly done with personal messages on LinkedIn.

Contacted a few brokers and had a 6 month assignment within a week. They took 10% of all my invoicing

Where and how did you find these brokers?

In other countries they'd just be called recruiting agencies (they can do either permanent or contract jobs).

He's referring to contracting, where you work for one client at a time, almost identical to like an employee would but for the duration limit (and likely a company in between you and them to solidly the facade).

In contrast to what most people would call freelance, where you work for multiple clients at the same time, i.e. a dev agency of one.

Yeah, sorry. I got contractor and freelancer mixed up. It doesn't help that in Sweden freelancer/contractor/consultant are used interchangably for someone who invoices for their time instead of getting a salary.

The contracting agencies don't do any permanent position, they only do medium-to-long term contracts (3-24 months). The biggest is Northern Europe is probably https://www.verama.com/ (ex E-Work)

Goes other way too, contractor is a super vague term.

Even gets used for fixed term employees.

But you can make friends with the client and later work directly for them.

never heard of such a small markup

computer futures in europe years ago wanted to double my rate

I did that a number of years ago ~2009 in Australia. If I recall the markup was ~8-10%. It was pretty much a big recruitment company (Hays) that also helped clients find short term contracts.

Worked until I found something better.

Get linkedin sales navigator

what does that give you compared to a normal subscription?

You can find, and message, anyone.

You can search and filter people by their position in the company, linkedin habits, industry, profession, career history, etc.

You can decide what your ideal client looks like, search for that, and then find and message them

Contracted with former employers. Word of mouth.

Agreed, that is how I did it.

My previous employer at that time was a startup with about 100 people. Unfortunately the startup imploded (that was why I left) so I suddenly know about 100 people who were all working at different companies, mostly startups who needed to ramp up quickly. Working at some of those startups I got to know other people who liked my work, who eventually left for other companies, etc. (Admittedly "work for a startup which implodes" probably isn't reproducible advice.)

Who you know is king. Networking and showing up to meetups is the best way to get a job in this industry.

Years ago, an underpaid long-term gig on odesk (now upwork).