When I was still working at the non-profit while I was in college, there were several occasions when I had to call MS support (server migration issues). I never had a problem with them. In fact, I tended to have great results, but then we had the professional/corporate support package and weren't messing around with the home users support people.
I agree, largely because that's what turned me off of rentacoder. I looked around once and saw things with a max bid of $500 for something like two month's worth of work.
First I thought it was depressing. Now I look there when I need a laugh (though, for my giggles, I usually look at the college kids who want someone to do their assignments for them).
The other things you have to consider are Taxes, 401k, savings, and insurance.
That's over 1/2 of what you charge right there (in the US) if you're doing things above the board.
For that reason, $100/hour is pretty normal because that makes it more like $40 or $50 that we actually see and then the work isn't necessarily steady, so you put back money for when you're between contracts.
I must be really weird because I've been that guy (both in groups composed mainly of blacks and of asians) and have felt perfectly fine. I admit that I tend to be a little strange in that there's not a whole lot that I worry about physically because I grew up training martially, but still...
In fact, they usually wanted to drag me to their parties. *shrugs*
The simple truth is that most new businesses (something like 2/3 or 3/4) fail. It doesn't really matter what field they're in, most of them tank. The thing with basing a business around open source software is that you can't really expect your money to come from the software itself, but rather you have to find something to leverage with the software (services, hardware devices, support, etc).
Every business has pitfalls. This one just happens to have some weird ones.
So just because I want to make a living at something that I actually tend to enjoy doing (late night bughunting sessions asside), I'll never last?
I'd love to know what experience you have in the field. Not to mention what you're smoking, because I've got news for you: the professional caliber tools are still being written by people who do it for a living. Just because they work on some of those tools in their spare time for their own reasons doesn't make them hobbyists. At the end of the day, they are still professionals in their field.
I agree about the double edged nature of open source software. People ask me what the benefits in open sourcing their software is and if they can still make money on it.
My answer tends to be if you plan to make most of your money on support, training, specialized implementations, setup, etc then you've got a chance. If the only thing you're bringing to the table is the software itself, then opening it doesn't make a lot of sense.
I sort of walk a line of being a buisnessperson and an open source advocate. Sometimes it's a hard line to walk, but we do what we can.
It is possible to do both. An easy example for most slashdotters would be open source authors who get paid to write oss by companies like Redhat and IBM.
I feel your printer pain. I cheated and got a cheap little network print server. plug the printer into that and then plug the print server into my router.
I was around for RH6. It made me want to throw my computer out the window. For most things FC4 is a breeze by comparrison, though I am a CLI person because I grew up in DOS land and then got experience with unix and linux in college.
Like I said in my previous post, it should just work. hardware should be supported and installing, maintaining, and deleting software should be easy. A lot of progress has been made there (video, sound, and wired network worked perfectly out of the box. so did my battery gauge. That impressed me. and yum is my new best friend). However, there are still a lot of picky little things that should work easily like my wireless card and your printer.
As it is now, we have a bunch of people with good ideas who don't want to play together sometimes. Granted, they play together really well most of the time, but the temper tantrums do happen sometimes. Until that changes, it's not ready for my grandmother unless she has help setting it up and maintain it. I think it's ready for heavier buisness use though.
it either "just works" or the average person will stick with windows. Linux has come a *long* way since I first tried it in 1998, but it's still got a way to go.
Personally, I use both linux and windows because I develop software. For the magazine, it's all linux and open source. I see the positives and negatives with both.
I think my happy linux moment this past week was that it only took 2 hours to reinstall the linux side of my laptop. the only downside is that my wireless card (broadcom) still doesn't work and I am tired of fighting with ndiswrapper.
Yes, some of them only use urine. However, some of them also use hair. With the hair-based ones, if you get a folicle, you have live cells. Hello DNA test.
Actually, it requires one, or a few, distros that solve the problems of buisness and normal people, solve them *well* and get enough publicity to be known to the general public.
Having the greatest solution in the world doesn't do you or anyone else any good if it gets lost in the noise of "look at my distro!"
As someone who has tried to help linux make inroads into the places where I've worked or contracted with, I'd like to see it get picked up by more of the general populace. This means that it's going to have to change a bit and become a bit easier to use while not doing away with the security that we've come to know and love.
Think of it this way - fewer worms and zombies clogging up the networks (I may not be infected, but I do feel the bandwidth hit), better security in general, lower operating costs, and any number of other reasons.
However, I think the biggest reason at the moment that I want to see linux get more of a foothold among the general populace is because it's now sort of my job. The thought of being able to affect change and get paid for it appeals to me even though I was doing it before getting paid to do so.
I turn off my laptop, I leave my cell on the desk, and then I go outside to do something (wander around town, go shopping, sit at the lake and watch the wind on the water for a while). It's a nice stress release and the world is still running when I get back.
Unfortunately, it doesn't happen much lately, because I'm up to my neck in deadlines. That said, I should probably get back to writing.
"important" managers and executives don't deal with the helpdesk. They tend to see it as beneath them. Instead, they go straight to the senior technical people.
Being basically 2nd in charge of the technical operations at the non-profit where I worked, I got to see a lot of this. Thankfully, most of them were good enough about it that they waited a bit (or delt with one of my underlings) if I said that I was too busy.
I attribute that last part to the facts that most of them were really decent people (which is rare at a lot of places) and a lot of them had seen first hand what my definition of "busy" was ("I need to be in 12 places right now and can only pull off 3 of those").
I'm almost as bad. I buy most of mine used - previously through a cd shop just off campus that had really good prices and, now that I've graduated, through amazon's used marketplace.
I think all of the new cds that I've bought in the last 2 or 3 years have been from local and regional bands at their shows.
I agree with all of these points. Especially the last one. Every time I hear a Jamster "ringtone" I want to shoot the person with that phone. repetedly. starting with the feet and working my way up.
"and have had to sit through many interviews where high priced candidates didn't know how to implement an equals method."
You know, even though I know people who fit that description, it still makes my head hurt. It's not like they're being asked to overload an operator in C++ (which can be a little bit of a pain) because Java won't let you do that (or at least it didn't. I don't know if 1.5 changed that).
It was weird. I met the company behind the mag saturday, they looked at my resume, poked around my website, and offered me a job that I completely wasn't expecting. Aparently they decided that I'd be a decent fit for the position because I am both a decent tech and developer as well as a fair writer.
This would be more than technical writing since I'd also be doing the tech projects that I'll be writing about, so it will be experience either way. The first couple of months are going to be long because I won't make anything on it right away (the magazine is paid for by ad revenue), so I'll still be doing some consulting until it takes off but I'm willing to give it a shot.
You know, it's weird. I'm starting to notice some former techs turning to things like writing. It looks like I may end up being one of them since I was offered the position of editor and contributing author for a new tech magazine.
I met the Asterisk and Digium people this past Saturday at Ohio Linux Fest and got to have a look at the software, hardware, and sat in on their presentation. It was rather cool.
It looked rather cool. The one thing that really caught my interest was the mac mini they made into a pbx.
Okay, nice try at a troll, but I'll bite because I've never had my resume (of all things) trolled.
1) Career center resume services are a joke for technical people.
2) It's fairly clear that you don't know much about C and C++. C and C++ are very closely related (in fact C++ is largely an extension of C) and the pair is generally referred to as C/C++
3) As the tag at the end of the resume says, sample programs are available. The ones that I have listed are a bit more complex than hello world
4) Valid point, but there are no really "impressive" projects at this point so it's moot. That should change shortly. It should also be noted that the resume on my website is a "generic" one and the resumes I send to specific companies are tailored to them.
5) You read the Chinese part in the about me section. Right after that it says I don't speak it anymore (I haven't actively used it in years). Never put anything on the resume that you can't back up.
6) Unfortunately there are no users groups here, and I HAVE been networking. If you actually look around the site, you'll find quite a bit of evidence to support that fact. I'm not the kind of person that just puts it up on Monster and forgets it.
As far as my resume being a joke goes, none of the managers or headhunters that I've spoken to have thought so in the least. In fact, a few of them helped me out with certain things on it. Their comments were constructive and well-received. Yours, however, is an attempt at being a jerk. The reason I haven't had an extreme amount of success is because the market here *is* a joke, though it is starting to get better.
It may, however, make you feel good to know that your comment got quite a chuckle out of several people (all devs and technical managers). One of them, in his mirth suggested that I "should reply to him... asking him to respectfully fuck off" as he views you as someone who does not know what he's talking about (which was the general consensus among the group).
Slashdot Mirror
If you continue charging that little, you will never make enough to plan for retirement.
welcome to the real world.
When I was still working at the non-profit while I was in college, there were several occasions when I had to call MS support (server migration issues). I never had a problem with them. In fact, I tended to have great results, but then we had the professional/corporate support package and weren't messing around with the home users support people.
I agree, largely because that's what turned me off of rentacoder. I looked around once and saw things with a max bid of $500 for something like two month's worth of work.
First I thought it was depressing. Now I look there when I need a laugh (though, for my giggles, I usually look at the college kids who want someone to do their assignments for them).
The other things you have to consider are Taxes, 401k, savings, and insurance.
That's over 1/2 of what you charge right there (in the US) if you're doing things above the board.
For that reason, $100/hour is pretty normal because that makes it more like $40 or $50 that we actually see and then the work isn't necessarily steady, so you put back money for when you're between contracts.
There's a reason we charge "so much".
I must be really weird because I've been that guy (both in groups composed mainly of blacks and of asians) and have felt perfectly fine. I admit that I tend to be a little strange in that there's not a whole lot that I worry about physically because I grew up training martially, but still...
In fact, they usually wanted to drag me to their parties. *shrugs*
The simple truth is that most new businesses (something like 2/3 or 3/4) fail. It doesn't really matter what field they're in, most of them tank. The thing with basing a business around open source software is that you can't really expect your money to come from the software itself, but rather you have to find something to leverage with the software (services, hardware devices, support, etc).
Every business has pitfalls. This one just happens to have some weird ones.
So just because I want to make a living at something that I actually tend to enjoy doing (late night bughunting sessions asside), I'll never last?
I'd love to know what experience you have in the field. Not to mention what you're smoking, because I've got news for you: the professional caliber tools are still being written by people who do it for a living. Just because they work on some of those tools in their spare time for their own reasons doesn't make them hobbyists. At the end of the day, they are still professionals in their field.
I agree about the double edged nature of open source software. People ask me what the benefits in open sourcing their software is and if they can still make money on it.
My answer tends to be if you plan to make most of your money on support, training, specialized implementations, setup, etc then you've got a chance. If the only thing you're bringing to the table is the software itself, then opening it doesn't make a lot of sense.
I sort of walk a line of being a buisnessperson and an open source advocate. Sometimes it's a hard line to walk, but we do what we can.
It is possible to do both. An easy example for most slashdotters would be open source authors who get paid to write oss by companies like Redhat and IBM.
Yes, they're pretty common in the US for everything from some factory jobs to most professional jobs.
I feel your printer pain. I cheated and got a cheap little network print server. plug the printer into that and then plug the print server into my router.
I was around for RH6. It made me want to throw my computer out the window. For most things FC4 is a breeze by comparrison, though I am a CLI person because I grew up in DOS land and then got experience with unix and linux in college.
Like I said in my previous post, it should just work. hardware should be supported and installing, maintaining, and deleting software should be easy. A lot of progress has been made there (video, sound, and wired network worked perfectly out of the box. so did my battery gauge. That impressed me. and yum is my new best friend). However, there are still a lot of picky little things that should work easily like my wireless card and your printer.
As it is now, we have a bunch of people with good ideas who don't want to play together sometimes. Granted, they play together really well most of the time, but the temper tantrums do happen sometimes. Until that changes, it's not ready for my grandmother unless she has help setting it up and maintain it. I think it's ready for heavier buisness use though.
It really comes down to one thing:
it either "just works" or the average person will stick with windows. Linux has come a *long* way since I first tried it in 1998, but it's still got a way to go.
Personally, I use both linux and windows because I develop software. For the magazine, it's all linux and open source. I see the positives and negatives with both.
I think my happy linux moment this past week was that it only took 2 hours to reinstall the linux side of my laptop. the only downside is that my wireless card (broadcom) still doesn't work and I am tired of fighting with ndiswrapper.
That last part is important to a lot of people.
2 words - drug test.
Yes, some of them only use urine. However, some of them also use hair. With the hair-based ones, if you get a folicle, you have live cells. Hello DNA test.
Actually, it requires one, or a few, distros that solve the problems of buisness and normal people, solve them *well* and get enough publicity to be known to the general public.
Having the greatest solution in the world doesn't do you or anyone else any good if it gets lost in the noise of "look at my distro!"
As someone who has tried to help linux make inroads into the places where I've worked or contracted with, I'd like to see it get picked up by more of the general populace. This means that it's going to have to change a bit and become a bit easier to use while not doing away with the security that we've come to know and love.
Think of it this way - fewer worms and zombies clogging up the networks (I may not be infected, but I do feel the bandwidth hit), better security in general, lower operating costs, and any number of other reasons.
However, I think the biggest reason at the moment that I want to see linux get more of a foothold among the general populace is because it's now sort of my job. The thought of being able to affect change and get paid for it appeals to me even though I was doing it before getting paid to do so.
I do this really neat thing sometimes.
I turn off my laptop, I leave my cell on the desk, and then I go outside to do something (wander around town, go shopping, sit at the lake and watch the wind on the water for a while). It's a nice stress release and the world is still running when I get back.
Unfortunately, it doesn't happen much lately, because I'm up to my neck in deadlines. That said, I should probably get back to writing.
"important" managers and executives don't deal with the helpdesk. They tend to see it as beneath them. Instead, they go straight to the senior technical people.
Being basically 2nd in charge of the technical operations at the non-profit where I worked, I got to see a lot of this. Thankfully, most of them were good enough about it that they waited a bit (or delt with one of my underlings) if I said that I was too busy.
I attribute that last part to the facts that most of them were really decent people (which is rare at a lot of places) and a lot of them had seen first hand what my definition of "busy" was ("I need to be in 12 places right now and can only pull off 3 of those").
I'm almost as bad. I buy most of mine used - previously through a cd shop just off campus that had really good prices and, now that I've graduated, through amazon's used marketplace.
I think all of the new cds that I've bought in the last 2 or 3 years have been from local and regional bands at their shows.
I agree with all of these points. Especially the last one. Every time I hear a Jamster "ringtone" I want to shoot the person with that phone. repetedly. starting with the feet and working my way up.
//My response to the Java bashers //thank you and have a nice day
benderResponse.bite(ass, shiny, metal);
"and have had to sit through many interviews where high priced candidates didn't know how to implement an equals method."
You know, even though I know people who fit that description, it still makes my head hurt. It's not like they're being asked to overload an operator in C++ (which can be a little bit of a pain) because Java won't let you do that (or at least it didn't. I don't know if 1.5 changed that).
I find it depressing.
It was weird. I met the company behind the mag saturday, they looked at my resume, poked around my website, and offered me a job that I completely wasn't expecting. Aparently they decided that I'd be a decent fit for the position because I am both a decent tech and developer as well as a fair writer.
This would be more than technical writing since I'd also be doing the tech projects that I'll be writing about, so it will be experience either way. The first couple of months are going to be long because I won't make anything on it right away (the magazine is paid for by ad revenue), so I'll still be doing some consulting until it takes off but I'm willing to give it a shot.
You know, it's weird. I'm starting to notice some former techs turning to things like writing. It looks like I may end up being one of them since I was offered the position of editor and contributing author for a new tech magazine.
I met the Asterisk and Digium people this past Saturday at Ohio Linux Fest and got to have a look at the software, hardware, and sat in on their presentation. It was rather cool.
It looked rather cool. The one thing that really caught my interest was the mac mini they made into a pbx.
Okay, nice try at a troll, but I'll bite because I've never had my resume (of all things) trolled.
1) Career center resume services are a joke for technical people.
2) It's fairly clear that you don't know much about C and C++. C and C++ are very closely related (in fact C++ is largely an extension of C) and the pair is generally referred to as C/C++
3) As the tag at the end of the resume says, sample programs are available. The ones that I have listed are a bit more complex than hello world
4) Valid point, but there are no really "impressive" projects at this point so it's moot. That should change shortly. It should also be noted that the resume on my website is a "generic" one and the resumes I send to specific companies are tailored to them.
5) You read the Chinese part in the about me section. Right after that it says I don't speak it anymore (I haven't actively used it in years). Never put anything on the resume that you can't back up.
6) Unfortunately there are no users groups here, and I HAVE been networking. If you actually look around the site, you'll find quite a bit of evidence to support that fact. I'm not the kind of person that just puts it up on Monster and forgets it.
As far as my resume being a joke goes, none of the managers or headhunters that I've spoken to have thought so in the least. In fact, a few of them helped me out with certain things on it. Their comments were constructive and well-received. Yours, however, is an attempt at being a jerk. The reason I haven't had an extreme amount of success is because the market here *is* a joke, though it is starting to get better.
It may, however, make you feel good to know that your comment got quite a chuckle out of several people (all devs and technical managers). One of them, in his mirth suggested that I "should reply to him... asking him to respectfully fuck off" as he views you as someone who does not know what he's talking about (which was the general consensus among the group).