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To all young freelancers in low-income countries: I want to share my experience, of 6 years working for a piss-poor country, and 6 years working in freelance, and then emigrating. Here's what you should watch out for, and what to expect:
My first salary was barely 1.5$ per hour. I lived in a piss-poor country that taught me a lot (like why it's piss-poor).
The main thing to note when you're a developer in such a country, is that you're being fucked. Your employer might scream at you and tell you how bad you are, while barely paying you. That is you ... being ... fucked. Gain some confidence with the help of friends and family, and a great effort from yourself, look at what freelance gigs you can find, and ditch anything related to jobs in your country.
Being a somewhat able developer, but with modest experience, I started my freelance gigs for 5$ per hour. Because I was lazy, and freelance gigs weren't exactly being thrown at me, I was making 100$ per week, AFTER the companies I worked for appreciated what I did and offered themselves to up my pay to 12$ per hour. Yep. I was lazy. You will likely get lazy in freelance too, so be prepared for this.
My luck changed when one of my clients became a full-time employer, at 15$ per hour, with a well organized team where I actually worked for 40 hours per week (I had already amassed 8 years of experience...). For people in first world countries that will seem laughable, but in my country I was king of the hill, getting paid more than government CEOs that ended up in the news as the "most well paid".
That was the top of the pyramid for international indie freelance, as I would later find out.
I didn't do stuff that was very difficult. In fact, I felt like my abilities were rotting while I worked there. I had to change something. So I started looking for better offers. I contacted many companies that were looking for a senior developer, and the interviews went well, and all was fine, except for my salary demands. I was asking for 25$ per hour. Nobody was willing to pay more than 15$ per hour. That's because of my competition - tons of developers in cheap-to-live countries that had the same, or more to offer, for the same rates. Globalization.
So I moved to Germany. As soon as I was legally able to work, I was hunted down by everybody. I was told that it takes a month to pass the whole hiring process in Germany. My experience demonstrated that 2-5 days is enough to get a signed contract with "Please start ASAP".
There is freelance in Germany as well. And in the US. And everywhere else. A "special" kind of freelance, where you have to reside locally. The rates that this freelance goes for is much, much higher than international freelance. I'd say that 100€ per hour is ok-ish. Some people (newbies, or foreigners who don't speak the language well) get less, around 60 or so. Smart experienced locals get around 150-200 or even more.
It's all there. Companies want good developers to solve their business problems with IT solutions, and they'll beg you to take their money if you can deliver that.
So code!
Learn!
Accummulate experience!
Screw the scumbags that screw you for 1-2$ per hour!
Anyone able to write something more than "Hello World!" deserves more.
Do the climb! There's literally room for everybody up there! There is so much to do, that I feel like there will never be too many developers.
Thank you for bearing with my long story. I hope it will help you make it shorter and more pleasant for you.12 -
Once upon a time in Devland, there were two best friends @Alice and @Michelle and they worked together at The DevCo company as developers.
After a tough day handling an @-ANGRY-CLIENT-, they thought that they had to go and @RantSomewhere and so they went to a café. At the café, they ranted about some stupid clients, and @theItalianGuy at the third floor of their office building who never picked up calls, and @thatJavaGuy from the second floor who, they thought, was @notarealDev, and the usual stuff about their work. Somewhere in between, @Alice thought it would be @funvengeance to @hack @theNSA; “@karma is coming to get them”, said @Michelle.
To do this, they knew they’d have to take help from none other than @Gandalf who lived in a nearby @cave. So, the next day, taking a leave from work, @Alice and @Michelle embarked on journey to meet @Gandalf. After about an hour’s drive, they reached @Gandalf’s @cave. @Michelle went ahead to knock on @Gandalf’s rusty cave door. Being a lazy @necromancer, he magically opened his door 2 minutes later. “Who is't dares to disturb me in mine own catch but a wink?” shouted a voice from the back; “We’re two developers from DevCo and we need your help in our mission to @hack @theNSA”, shouted @Michelle. After a few seconds, he replied, ”Hmm… N'rmally I wouldst sendeth thee to mine own cousin @Hagrid, but in thy case, I sayeth thee shouldst visiteth the detective who is't goeth by the nameth @S-Holmes”. @Alice replied back, “Thank you, Sir @Gandalf, we’ll get help from this @S-Holmes, I’ve heard that he’s an @exceptionalGuy”; “Mine own pleasure, Farewell!” said @Gandalf, and the door closed shut.
So, @Alice and @Michelle went back to their car, and that time @Alice raised a question, “How are we gonna find this @S-Holmes? We don’t have a phone number or anything so we could contact this guy.”
“We should call @thatJavaGuy from work, I’ve heard he is a man of resources, he must know how to contact @S-Holmes”, said @Michelle.
And it was true, after a call with @thatJavaGuy, they were able to obtain @S-Holmes’s phone number.
“Howdy, this is @S-Holmes, what can I diddily ding dong do you for?”
“Hi, I’m @Alice, I’m from DevCo and I was hoping that I could get your help in our mission.”
“What kind of mission?”, asked @S-Holmes.
“We want to @hack @theNSA.”, replied @Alice.
“Okay… I think I might be able to hel-diddly-elp you! There’s an old and abandoned laberino noodly-near @stacked Street. It was made in @1989 and since then, it houses a magical computeroo that can hel-diddly-elp you in your mission. So, you just have to connect the computeroo to the Internet and you can diddily ding dong do your programmeroo thing and then you'll have access to the the noodly-nsa diddily ding dong database!”, answered @S-Holmes.
S-Holmes continued, “But I shall warn you, there's a riddly-rumorino that the laberino was abandoned because of an @electric-ghost that lurks there, but I bel-diddly-elieve it is just a computeroo program that was diddily ding dong designed to try to @stop hackers from accessing the top secret stuff!".
“Okay, thanks for your help! I bet we can handle whatever this @electric-ghost thing is, so… Goodbye!”, replied @Alice.
“Goodbye!”, said @S-Holmes and that ended their conversation.
Luckily, the @stacked Street was just a couple of miles away from them, so they reached the lab quickly.
As they got close to the lab they saw something that really surprised them…
--------
To be continued in part two...
(Do you want a part two? :/)
My first ever story is a little special because it is kind of dev related at it has "cameos" by various devranters, as you might have noticed.
How many did you count?
More in Part Two.
Thank you for reading and please, any feedback is welcome. Did you like it?
I haven't really revised it once, it is straight out of the keyboard.
Should I drop the "@" ?
But then it would impossible to spot some of the devRanters .
Let me know.
PS
What should be the title?
1)Alice in DevLand?
2)Adventures of Alice and Friends: Hacking the NSA?
You decide..(or maybe I'll pick the second one :D)22 -
Fuck these stupid frustrating trends. It drives me fucking crazy. Scrolling a website and sections overlap each other, text flying in as you scroll, stuff fading in, images moving over text panels. FUCK OFF!!!!!!!!!! I want to read the content, I don't want to feel sick and confused. Clients - DO NOT SEND ME A LINK TO THIS KIND OF WORTHLESS SHIT, SAYING 'I WANT IT LIKE THIS'.
Used sparingly and intelligently, animation can add to the UX, but it rarely is.
Remember the 90's when lazy designers used the photoshop bevel and emboss filter on every fucking thing, the web was contaminated. Cunts.1 -
My first project at the job was implenting a website, designed by the same company we mostly worked with.
It was very stressful because half of the 2 months calculated for finishing the project, these genius designers needed for their design. Until then, I had almost no tasks to do...
When the designs finally came, I worked on it and two weeks later was a meeting for review and to decide about some details.
These fuckers then concluded, that the whole design did not fit the page and that they would rework it.
Two weeks later, on the planned release day, we finally received it. A completely fucking different design! Wow!
My boss was pretty angry and so was I. We had to move the release 4 weeks ahead, the client was pissed like a stinking hobo and it needed a lot of convincing to keep that client...
It's fucking nerve-wracking as well that we always have to wait in most projects for weeks for clients or designers to add the content before we can publish a website.
They don't seem to care if they have 2 months or 2 weeks, we never were able to release one single project on time, because of these lazy fuckers...3 -
So at this startup i was single iOS dude age 34, android had 1.5 dudes, one older, one you ger. That 0.5 younger was tech director, really good, so they churned for two guys. Millenial, nice guy, never making conflict, just being sleazebag.
Nobody explained to boss why iOS was always late with features, even when i complained. So i got help, 10 months later, project was unpolished but stable, codewise. Now i interview and hire a guy, age 27, who was all yeah dude no problem, and that being my first interview, i fell under his friendly appearance. I ignored a fact that he didn’t know 90% of stuff i was asking him, because he was so friendly and outgoing and we will do anything attitude.
The guy knew very little, was childish and irresponisble. He showed at work at noon. He started telling me what to do, his senior collegue who started the project. He argued about everything that i would tell him. So i spent three to four hours a day charting with him, because we were in different cities. He had two uears of experence, but he was below junior level. And he refused any of my advices for learning in free time. No, he said, thats my free time, you will not tell me what to do. Well, how do you plan on being better, i asked. He said, i learn by doing. But, since he was at his job only six hours a day, instead of eight, and since he was productive only for 2, i guess he was lazy.
He would deliver a UI he would make, without business logic, and tell it is done. Then clients would call me and ask why text fields are not saved..
This all took me month to understand. I lost time, i lost trust, and soon he was fired.
But, soon i was fired also, replaced by another two devs who i had interviewd and formed a team. I was discarded as trash, just like that. I have even worked overtime to catch up with android guys, unpaid.
Took me year to recover mentally from this.
Lessons learned: be objective when interviewing. Job is business, not friendship, trust no one, keep neutral on work. Leave honesty for someone else, honesty will be used against you. Never criticize two girls in office who disturb developers by talking about sex and dicks all the time, dressed sexy, they are girlfriends of people ranked above you. Leave code perfection for your projects.3 -
If your client doesn't know what the fuck he wants to see on his website even with all text and images included - don't take this fucking job.
They will let you choose a template and you end up switching it 5 times. "Oh we don't like it. What else do you have? Oh, this looks better." Next day "We don't like this theme anymore. We want to switch to what we had before."
If people can't draw their home page on a paper I tell them go fuck yourself straight in a face. I always put these people on my reference list so my future clients know I'm straightforward, not lazy, not low skilled, but honest with dumbasses like some of my previous clients.
You are asking for a basic website with 5 pages, you have a shitty budget and then I have to customize the entire theme and tweak every fucking possible element in CSS, HTML and PHP. Go fuck yourself. All you get for your money is WordPress with 15 min consultation how to copy paste your shit and save it. Never do fixed budgets, never work on projects like this if it's under $500-1000. Meet with the client to understand him/her better and see if he is a jackass-perfectionist or a chill person who won't be picky.
That's my memories of being a freelancer, trying to get any job for any budget just to build my portfolio. Never going back to this, at least not for small businesses with less than $5,000 budget. Reading people before you start working with them is a good thing.2 -
Clients that ask you to build X and then when you ask about said details to know everything up front, you get a deer in the headlights look.
I get it, not knowing right away is fine, but 5-6 months later and still "not knowing", being absolutely lazy with no responses to questions or just dumping the work to me to figure out from whatever source material you got it from and force me to crunch to save your ass isn't fun for me and I really don't give a shit about how much praise you give me publicly for the job I did.1 -
So I am finally plunging into continuous integration. If I make one more deploy script mistake, I've lost enough time to merit having learned a better solution than bash scripting calling git and rhc and py files I wrote. I have failing tests that are failing because they weren't updated after the million and a half urgent changes in the past 2 months, so it's time to act like I am a TDD fanatic and write the tests correctly. So much work. All from me listening to the constant req changes, listening to the urgency, letting non-devs get under my skin if you will. I'm optimistic in all the wrong places - I think I can write that by end of day let's try it. I'm lazy in the wrong places - I think that I can write that test later, because all I changed was XYZ (which took all night but I said I'd get it as close as possible didn't I?). And I think these handful of bash scripts are good enough to make sure I run tests? But remember, I didn't write the tests or I didn't go back and update them. Or the tests that fail, I'm too lazy. And so much of the tests, I would need to use, idk selenium for, and damnit if I really don't want to dig for element IDs to wait for every time I need an AJAX call.
Okay wow, I really did rant here. And discredited myself a bit lol I need to ignore the wrong lazy and embrace the right lazy. Protect myself from myself and from contributors. It really is, up to me now, to rescue myself from my bad habits. Bad habits perpetuated by clients urgency every day, to change things, that should have been finalized in November if we wanted a stable flipping system in January. It feels like the blind (client) leading the blind (me, when I do dumb shit like rush features out the door half tested).
Anyway all this came out, because I have been reading about continuous integration and stumbled upon this quote. And thought someone might laugh at the anachronism like I did
2 -
One of our clients IT team is lazy as fuck they slack too much, it took them 2 weeks just to respond our email (We already sent like 2-3 reminders in between).
Client:"We fucking pay you and it's still not ready, how much time it will take?"
Us: Just respond to that email ffs so we can proceed.
Client: Oh, there was an Email? we will have a look into that.
Even after, it took them 4days to send fields which were meant to be sent like 2weeks before.
(in between 4days we had called them just for the fields again and even after the fucking call they send that fucking fields after one reminder)
And of course, still, the blame game is on us.2 -
Client asked me to complete the job as fast as I can and, here I am, waiting for the review of the latest version for the past 2 WEEKS.
Good thing, she paid up the entire amount beforehand. *Rubs hands in glee*3 -
When my manager, blatantly miscommunicated several things to me a couple of years ago, and scapegoated me by saying a comment I NEVER once heard said about me, in any context ever, "you communicate badly-- you need to communicate better", I took it seriously.
Fast forward, two years later. I'm doing wonderful at my job, yet I cannot get over that incident. I thought about it some more. Why did she say that to me? Why did she address it to me after her mistake? Why was she not aware of the real reason I missed the meeting?
Out of all useful bits of knowledge I gathered over the years, it's kinda comical that psychology came in the most handy at the workplace. There's very little to be gained from trying to psychoanalyze strangers, friends, and family... but it's almost saved my life at the job.
You see, if I attack an approach even in the most formal tones, or even worse, defend my approach, there's nothing coming from that. The situation now becomes my situation. When I become "aware" of the truth of the situation I become able to control the situation, not just myself. That way, you're not in a fisticuff fight with your boss, and you are not left defeated by the situation. Exercising control of the situation in such a manner that they are left defeated by the situation, not by you directly, is the only way you can win as an employee.
Any other way, you'll get under-appreciated, underpaid, overworked, overlooked, etc.
So, my boss at the time, was defeated by the situation of her being a bad leader; and instead of clarifying those feelings to me or ignoring them entirely... she validated her false self using her real emotions.
You can only reverse that, by developing fake emotions, to display a real self.
They can't blame you, and when they feel self-defeated, they cannot pretend it was you who caused it (bringing it back to a sane level of reality). They might rage if they're childish but it will not cause a single hair in your body to twitch because you did not "respond to their email" or "throw someone under the bus for their convenience", the situation did, they beat themselves by attacking you while the situation came down on them.
If I had to explain I would say that the situation is controlled by creating a mirror of the employee that follows their orders perfectly. That employee won't feel defensive: they already do everything right. The employee is crafted by becoming aware of the teams impacted in the situation and their true intent and creating "the situation", "the owner".
"The owner" reflects to people from the perspective of the situation and not from your own. This way you can't make a wrong move and are not emotionally involved with yourself.
It enables you to emotionally notice others. It also makes you safe, because you have the situation-mirror that's really doing the battling. The situation-mirror eventually creates a situation where the other person starts attacking reality (the situation) instead of attacking you.
Now, it's up to you whether you want to use that as a way to cooperate with your boss to beat this new reality, or as a way to gain coherence on your reality outside of your boss. I have noticed most people tend to realize this somewhere along the line and retreat and stop fighting, and quit their jobs.
I've been doing this in a corporate environment for a couple of weeks. I have already become greatly stressed and subjugated by the company for which my company works for. 20 of them sit here every day and devalue everything. Yet.... They're completely incompetent, spoilt, lazy and worst of all, they control how the software is being created. There isn't a single person on their side responsible for their requests to make sense and work with each other. So you can imagine how much blame they need to assign to us devs. They don't know what they want but want something anyway and then they'll see if that's what they want but everything under the tightest deadline possible. They're all clients and they all escalate to the board of directors any bad word directed at them. So you can imagine the narcissism that develops in that environment.
I have made them argue with reality and self-defeat numerous times. They have now started to back off and are being more polite and courteous. They have also not escalated anything anymore. Just as I was faking "happy" while I felt intimidated by them. I have not committed a single angry act and yet they are not feeling superior anymore. The reality of the situation is that we need to make a software and if you make them battle this instead of battling you, they can't beat you.6 -
Not leaving my last job earlier.
History: Supervisor / Lead Developer was a complete moron who watched videos on facebook and youtube, engaged in heated discussions on facebook, wasted my time by showing the work of other companies and vines, smoked in the office and towards the end gave me shit for not meeting deadlines of the work that he was supposed to deliver. Project that I was working on had very lazy clients so I was free for even 2 days sometimes and that’s why I decided to help my supervisor on the project assigned to him but in reality I was handling two projects all alone.
Aftermath: My indie games started gaining traction on google play and I found a client and I made 5x my salary at my last job.1 -
Is it sad that I look forward to the weekend so that I can actually write some code rather than:
- Helping clients that can’t / won’t read docs
- Explaining to test colleagues that we need repro steps and can’t fix a bug based on “I was doing something and it crashed”
- Writing any regular expressions for another dev where it’s more complicated than ^[A-Z0-9]*$
- Wading through legacy VBA that’s littered with GoTo, global variables (even i, j and k for loops are fucking global!) and all the other fucking lazy shortcuts that save you 10 seconds at dev time and cost you (which ends up meaning me) hours in subsequent debugging.
I love writing code, and I think I’m pretty good at it, so can I please just get on with it?
Fellow ranters, please tell me I’m not alone in this. -
Today I was orders to check out one of our applications. Accounting said that the Twilio bill was constantly increasing even if we do not get any new clients. In 10 min I found out what is the problem. All calls are recorded and stored in Twilio, which charges handsomely for such service.
Developers instead of downloading those recording to our data lake, use Twilio as storage, because no coding was involved.
Company lost around 30k dollars this year and around 10k-20k in previous ones, because someone was lazy to spend few days to download mp3 from url. -
TD;DR: I have school instead of vacation but 5 hours of spare time. I got my laptop with me and I'll work in school.
I didn't want to take part of the course-trip with the 12th graders (my course sucks, there are too many assholes for the neutral people to compensate). After speaking with the director, and the only condition was to tell the course why. I did deliver them a nicely put "fuck you, you bullied my only friend out of this school" and now is the time where I visit the 11-graders while the other 12-ers are on "school vacation".
I got a "new" plan for the courses I should visit. Today, Wednesday, I have 5 FUCKING FREE HOURS IN A ROW. Oh yes, baby, the teacher generating the plan hates me as well. (He really does but it's probably just unlucky not his fault).
So today, I decided, I would take my heavy-ass laptop with me, in a laptop bag, which doesn't fit into the school bag I have and my laptop doesn't fully fit in the laptop bag as well (sticks out), that's the perks of having a laptop!!
— so I can work on my (I wanna say this once in my life without being a professional) "CLIENTS PROJECT" - the funny thing is that the client is a (really fucking good but small) advertising agency and too lazy to design their own website. Since I had my internship, they know how hard I *can* work even without being payed. Now they do wanna pay me but that's another story.
I'm on the bus and I have this monster of a bag which isn't lighter than a freaking huge bag of rice and I'm so fucking excited for this day. The library is my best friend. Hopyfully I'm going to find a socket for power..
Sorry for so many commas, I'm german. :D3 -
Running a small company. All of us work from home. I am a designer and coder in one person, but now mostly taking care of cash flow, work done etc., while I have my dear girlfriend as only designer and an old friend as only front/backend developer. We are doing mainly small presentation websites on drupal, and a lot of webdesign.
Now I want to ask more experienced devs here. As the "main guy" I am responsible for everything running smooth with clients, money flow etc. But I am constantly running in a serious problem with my developer.
He most of the time gets the job done. But it is as fucked as possible. It looks good at the first view, but when you check the code... Oh god. Not only once he wrote me he did the job and when I checked it, it was like 50 percent done and rest was let untouched. He is using the oldest approaches in css as possible. Most of the time setting fixed widths even when I told him not to do so. Thing is, he knows how to do it properly, but he rather set the fixed width for all the devices than write something more scalable (imagine fixed width buttons, now imagine a website with 5 translations and now imagine how it behaves on mobile phones).
I want to be in a state where my dev writes me he did the job and I can INSTANTLY pass the changes to client with a trust of good done work. Without checking constantly all the work after him. Or it is normal and it works like that everywhere?
As to mention, I think he is pretty good paid and this is not money problem. It even does not look like he is demotivated or anything. When I speak to him it looks more like he is lazy to learn new things and lazy to do a good work. What would you suggest? Thanks4 -
Ticket: implement compression algorithm to crypto object x
Details: object to big, we must devise a way to compress it. A deflate algorithm should be added here, yada yada yada we did not have the time Yara yada...
Go see crypto provider's documentation... It has compression options... -_-
You lazy fucking stack overflow copy question dimwits!!! Jesus fucking Christ! This reached production like this shit, I've got clients complaining of the size of the payload because you are a bunch of lazy fucks who can't even read simple documentation!!!
I want to kill someone for wasting my time and patience... Don't call me for this kind of crap... I have better things to do!
I mean, the time it took you to write the ticket should suffice... -
I need a new professional email address and i was thinking of going with an encrypted email service, do you guys have any recommendations on what to use?
My only requirement is that it needs to work with desktop email clients like Thunderbird, i am too lazy to use a web browser :)11
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