Freelance or company?

Some of my friends work as freelancers, and I work in a software engineering company for many years. We had a discussion about the pros/cons of each approach and I can tell you my list of pros:

• Company has its internal quality standards, and all employees follow these standards. Company regularly provides education and control of what is being done on projects.
• Company gives you free access to all professionals who work there: if I have a question about DevOps I just go and ask our DevOps guys any questions (I recently asked them about Kubernetes), if I need consultation of solution architect — just go and ask him, if you feel that you need an advice of project manager, HR professional, interface designer — here they are.
• Somehow, a company hires people who are interested in long-term collaboration. It’s very disappointing when you get a new team member but they leave a project in 6 months because … they decided to change something in their life or got a better job offer somewhere. Company [I don’t know how] chooses people who are long-term-oriented.
• Company gives its employees regular feedback and advice on what to improve. It’s done by making 360 reviews. After review, you get a recommendation on how to improve some soft or hard skills.

And here are the pros of freelancers:

• Creative, proactive, extra-smart people are weighed down by company rules and policies and they tend to work as independent contractors.
• You can probably hire freelancers at a lower rate.

But remember that:

• If you’re not a technical person, it’s difficult to check if the freelancer is really as good as they claim. I’ve personally seen impressive CVs of candidates who actually weren’t so impressive, alas.
• If you‘ve hired 5 freelancers who never worked together before, be ready to do the work of project manager and HR manager yourself.
• Good news: my friend who is working for many years as an independent contractor, says that a team of contractors works very well if all team members are highly skilled and self-motivated.

In the end, I think, the best way to choose a company or a contractor is to get some recommendations from their previous customers.

I stopped trusting websites, portfolios, success stories, and empty promises after I’ve got a very bad haircut from a hairdresser who had astonishing pictures of haircuts in their Instagram :D:D:D