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"In summer of 2005, I started experimenting with online outsourcing. I tried eLance, Guru, and Rent-A-Coder. I tentatively started posting there programming projects that were not interesting conceptually (e.g., "crawl this website and store the data in a CSV file", "grab the CSV data from that website and put them in a database", "create a demo website that does that", etc) Quickly, I realized that this was a win-win situation: the code was completed quickly, the quality of the websites was much better than what I could prepare myself, and I was free to focus on my research. Once I started getting PhD students, outsourcing non-research coding requirements became a key part of my research approach: PhD time was too valuable to waste on writing crawlers and dealing with HTML parsing peculiarities."

Thinking about skipping out on your 9-to-5 in favor of becoming a freelancer? There are a few key factors to weigh out before making the decision. Our friends at JESS3 teamed up with 24 Seven to create this infographic that rounds up the opinions of freelancers who participated in their 2012 Salary Survey & Job Market Report. Overall, freelancers seem pretty happy with the career move.