Another advantage that freelancers have when working over the Internet is the nature of the relationships they can build with their clients. The relationships that traditional employees have with their employers tend to be more or less one sided, meaning that almost everything is done based on the terms of the employer. For instance, at many low end jobs, it is the employer, not the employee, that dictates the hours that the employee works. On Monday, an employee may be required to arrive to work at a specific time, and then on Tuesday, they may have to arrive to work at a completely different time. This type of schedule is great for the employer but terrible for the employee.
Unfortunately for the employee, they often have little say in the matter, because the employer can easily hire someone to replace them. This is the type of relationship that you will experience when dealing with any type of large corporation or bureaucracy: it is their way or the highway. If you don't like the way things are done, you can go work for someone else. Most employees accept this type of relationship because they need money to pay bills, but the reality is that they are little more than serfs for the organizations they work for.
The relationship that you can build with your clients as a freelancer is much stronger than this. The reason for this is simply because when you deal with a client, you're often dealing with a human being, as opposed to a large organization. Individual humans are infinitely more flexible than large organizations, and this means that you can work with them in a manner that gives you more freedom. Another advantage of working with a network of clients is that each client is different, and the requirements that any given client has may be completely different from those of another.
As an employee, you have a single source of income from one employer, and in my opinion, this is highly risky, because if that one employer decides you are no longer valuable, they can fire you or lay you off, and this eradicates a single source of income. In contrast, when you work as a freelancer over the web, you may have a large network of clients to earn money from, and if a single client disappears (this will happen inevitably from time-to-time), you have other clients, or sources of income, to earn money from. This is one of the major advantages of being a freelancer as opposed to being an employee. As a freelancer, your goal should always be to cultivate strong relationships with the clients you work for. In later chapters, we will go over this in more detail, because the type of relationships you maintain with your clients can mean the difference between your success or failure as a freelancer.
Ultimately, working with individual humans is a lot more advantageous than dealing with large organizations that have multiple chains of command. Some corporations are so large that many of its bottom level employees have no idea who they are truly working for; a perilous situation indeed. When you become a freelancer, you can be secure in knowing exactly who you are working for, and what they expect of you. While humans can understand each other, corporations don't understand humans, and this is precisely why working for a corporation is inherently risky.