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Comment by atlantic | Hacker News Reader

Your father should try to find development work online. Nobody cares about your age, or even your qualifications. It's all about your track record and your capacity to get things done. It takes a while to get your first few gigs, but once you build up a small client base, work goes smoothly.

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He had a local client base, but he started to loose all of them because of the crisis... so I should probably suggest him to start working with clients from another countries, totally agree. Thanks!

Have any good resources to suggest? (aside from oDesk, where I sense it's become a race to the bottom price-wise.)

Don't think in terms of offering the lowest price. When you are selling your services online, price also tells the client how much your work is worth. Never compete on price, just ask for whatever you think is fair, given your knowledge and experience. I work on oDesk, and I've always obtained well-paid work. Just a question of patience and establishing a reputation.

Getting a reputation would seem to invove doing at least a few projects at a crappy rate from what I gather.

You can start off at, say, half your target rate, and/or on smaller projects than you would usually take on. Once you have two or three decent recommendations under your belt, then your online career will take off.

You don't have any contact info in your profile. I would like to run some questions past you, if you have the time?

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