06 Dec 09 Internet Freelancing

In a previous post about an online independent contracting portal, I complained about the quality of the work to be done. In a more general sense, this is really the bottom line when it comes to the difficulties in doing part-time side contracts:

I don’t know about anyone else, but I simply can’t be bothered to work for $5 or $10 per hour. Really. I could hold sandwichboard signs for that much, and skip the whole process of begging for work on the internet. $15 and $20 is where the rates start to cross into my “I can suck it up for a while” territory, but even there I would expect that $20/hr rate to land me customer relationships or provider ratings that would enable me to land higher rates.

In a purely emotional sense, it feels unfair that I have to compete with individuals in developing countries who are willing to do labor for so little money.

However, it’s not unfair – that’s just the way the market works. I have to remind myself that the “hire a freelancer” sites aren’t the whole market; they only appeal to exactly the market subset that I am least equipped to operate in: the one in which employers only care about the hourly rate, and nothing else. I simply can’t compete with a 5$ per hour code monkey who doesn’t speak english. Employers who want to hire that guy want to hire him because they explicitly don’t want to hire me at a higher rate. My advantages in traditional markets are not as advantageous in the online freelancing market:

• I have a breadth of knowledge and experience that most people don’t. This is offset in the online market because one can hire a different individual for $5/hour for as many skills as you need, and you might still be able to underbid me.
• I have experience in the defense world. Defense contractors and embedded systems developers have structural impediments to playing in the online contracting market
• I have a strong educational background that plays well into particular application domains that don’t typically present themselves in online markets

Coupled with this, I have two very important (although linked) disadvantages: living expenses are higher here than in most developing countries, and the labor market rates in my market here are much higher than what is available in online markets.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not whining (ok, just a little bit), but I think I’ve finally come to the conclusion that online freelancing markets are just not for me. Sadly.

Tags: freelancing, work

11 Dec 08 My Hiatus

Dear readers (all none of you), I’ve been away from my blog for a while now because of life circumstances that required my attention to be invested elsewhere. Hopefully, I will now be able to post something on a semi-regular basis. To explain somewhat:

I worked at a rather large defense contractor as a software engineer. I shan’t mention the name for a number of reasons; one being for my own protection; another being to make at least a nominal effort to not burn bridges.

The work was mostly rewarding. The technology there is quite interesting; in it is an intersection between technology that the commercial sector left behind, technology they’ll never have (with a few exceptions, like some of the more interesting telecoms). Even when compared to the telecoms, there is a segment of the tech there that will never see the light of day. As you might expect, there are both frustrations and excitement involved. For the second half of my tenure there, I began to be seriously frustrated with the corporate culture there; part of it was simply the reality of working for a giant company, and part of it was simply the reality of working for a defense contractor (which makes it like working for two giant companies simultaneously). But there was a third major part of it that was really starting to bother me: I was never going to be deeply involved in the essential business there, and thus my ability to do things I want to do in my career would be artificially limited. That company was a systems integrator, not a software company. To be sure, there were lots of interesting software projects, but that wasn’t the company’s essential business; more like a value-added service that went along with the main business.

There were other secondary issues as well. Most of that didn’t have to do with other people, except as it related to the environment and corporate culture. There were financial incentives to leave as well.

So I stuck to my work, and didn’t talk about leaving and kept it a secret that I was looking. I wasn’t looking hard, though. I was passively observing the local tech market, looking for a landing pad. I interviewed a couple of times, including once with a premier Valley firm. Ultimately though, I decided I didn’t want to become a Californicator. There were a couple of potential openings that I found through personal contacts, including one with my brother at his trading firm in New York. I pursued that option for a couple months and had it all settled out, and the credit market problems ended up closing that door for me. I went back to my contacts again, and it turned out that the timing was just right for me to join up with a small .NET/SharePoint consulting firm in Dallas, called Cogent, with whom I now work.

One of the benefits of working for Cogent is that they encourage the developers to write blogs and articles, because it increases their exposure, so I hope to be able to post at least a few times a month on topics of interest to me.

Tags: career, work

16 Mar 06 Working @ Geekdom

Go to a local high school. Go to a restroom, and inspect the stall walls. You’ll find all kinds of things written on the inside. “Call xxx-xxxx for a good time”, grotesque etchings, racial slurs, and sexual humor are the type of things you might find.

Go to the nearest university campus, and you’ll find much the same. Go to a local restaurant, and there will be little difference. Go practically anywhere that has even a semi-public restroom, and you’ll find similar things.

What kind of graffiti do you think I find in the stalls at $work?

Long division, carried out to 12 decimal digits.

Tags: work