Which forums? Not everyone uses the term the same way. I stopped saying "self-employed" and started calling myself "entrepreneur".
When I said self employed, people either heard "unemployed" or "marginal freelance person, barely made ends meet". When I switched to entrepreneur, people heard "successful businessman". The change was uncanny.
Now, my activities didn't change. So the questions to ask are:
1. How did the people complaining about self-employed mean the term?
2. Does that match what you do?
3. How should you brand it so that the person hiring you understands it correctly?
I never had a problem with other entrepreneurs or managers. We spoke the same language. I even got some unsolicited job offers when working for myself, which never happened before.
In general, I think it's seen as a positive thing, as long as you're talking about the kind of self-employment we mean here on Hacker News. Fairly lucrative, manage your own schedule, no shortage of clients, but more overhead and uncertainty than a job and a need to focus on non-technical stuff. The latter two points explaining why someone might want a job instead of self-employment.
This is solely my opinion, but whenever I hear people call themselves "entrepreneur" I immediately think "C student in high school with few tangible skills but is sick of working as a cook at Denny's and thinks calling themselves an entrepreneur will lend them some weird street cred because they heard Dre call himself an entrepreneur".
At least being simply self-employed is easily explained away by just wanting to do some freelance work or consulting for a few months or whatever.
I think a lot depends on how the person says it too. If I had said "entrepreneur" when I just started out, and things were shaky, people would have had a different reaction.
I just say "I run my own company". It's technically true (I even hired someone) and it is looked upon much more highly than when I just say "I'm a freelancer".
When I said self employed, people either heard "unemployed" or "marginal freelance person, barely made ends meet". When I switched to entrepreneur, people heard "successful businessman". The change was uncanny.
Now, my activities didn't change. So the questions to ask are:
I never had a problem with other entrepreneurs or managers. We spoke the same language. I even got some unsolicited job offers when working for myself, which never happened before.In general, I think it's seen as a positive thing, as long as you're talking about the kind of self-employment we mean here on Hacker News. Fairly lucrative, manage your own schedule, no shortage of clients, but more overhead and uncertainty than a job and a need to focus on non-technical stuff. The latter two points explaining why someone might want a job instead of self-employment.