Freelancer profile : Claire Bellivier

Becoming a freelancer: a proven choice

'' After several years in large groups in Paris such as La Française Des Jeux, Vinci Construction Grands Projets or Saint Gobain, the thirst to serve a greater purpose was felt, and the DevOps market exploded at its beginning in France! Many companies were looking for support in their "move to the cloud" project, such as start-ups, SMEs and VSEs: everywhere where building a solid and reliable infrastructure has had and still has a direct impact on the company. 

After working for an IT services company, the liquidation of this service company was the opportunity to start something else: freelancing. I did not wait for unemployment to open the company in EURL, which automatically prevented me from obtaining the numerous state aids for the construction of companies. Certainly a lack of research added to some rather rough advice: I did not create a micro-entreprise to start with. Which, in retrospect, would have been a rather interesting intermediate step because, opening a business alone, in tech, as a woman, was far from being a foregone conclusion. But this only made the adventure more challenging with the mindset of refusing plan B: "burn the bridges" as the American saying goes. It is the energy of despair that drives like a powerful engine and makes us achieve the impossible, well, what seems impossible! ''

The taste for the (free)lance lifestyle

“ The diversity of people and projects encountered is fascinating, both from a technical and human point of view. Running your own ship is clearly not easy, but you learn a lot, including financial management, decision making, very useful skills in your personal life. And perhaps the most important point: the relationship to time. It is fundamentally different from that of an employee.

As a freelancer, you are paid by the day, and most of the time according to deliverables, which totally changes the perspective, with all the notion of productivity that it can imply. And finally, of course, the flexibility of work, but that is now almost as true for employees. In the end, from my point of view, being a freelance employee is just an administrative difference. "

A reality not always obvious

“ Staying up to date, keeping the company afloat, continuing projects without inter-contract days are already quite a challenge on a daily basis. On the other hand, anticipating the end of the Cloud Platform Engineer position, from a DevOps/SRE point of view, is also a great professional challenge, as we automate our work on a daily basis. It's a bit like fossil fuels, we know that there is a time when they will no longer exist. So a DataOps and/or SecOps orientation and/or specialized in a specific domain like the network, seem to me good candidates for the future. But who knows what the future will bring! "

The secret in the face of fierce competition  

“ Huge learning about productivity, organization and using the right tools, in my case, was necessary. And to remain competitive, there are no secrets or miracles: always learning and always keeping a share of new materials in projects, getting out of your comfort zone in a controlled manner. ”

Your biggest challenge

“ Training while on assignment and... going on vacation! The diplomacy and communication skills that need to be developed in order to offer a quality service in totally opposite contexts also represent a great challenge. Whether the project collaborators are benevolent or misogynistic, or extremely bad faith. The Tech world is not soft, you need to have strong backbone, but the secret weapon remains passion, love of a job well done, and benevolence."

Long-term innovative projects

" Most of the projects are long term because the cloud infrastructure issues are often very diverse in terms of business sectors or company size. But there is a common base: the cloud and/or hybrid architectures. This ranges from large groups such as the DevOps coach at Orange with Octo, or for the DGFIP with Thales, to classic SMEs such as Monoprix-online, Le Monde, to start-ups from Series A to D such as Back Market, Livestorm, Lifen, BlaBlaCar among others. "