I'd say - go to https://news.ycombinator.com every 4 hours and find your way
535 karma · joined April 16, 2013
Slowly, it turned the other way round - I got shut-in. Started from not having to go to local store daily - because it was a waste of time. I could not relate to a calendar-day. Sometimes I would start my work at 6pm in evening and sometimes at 3am in the morning. I tried to discipline myself, but it did not work out for valid reasons. And I started introverting due to lack of social contacts. Health wasn't an issue - because home gyms were good enough and I think those kept me off any depression. The shut-in introduces pretty bad habits. The "freedom" was out, I was working most of the time - it almost felt like a self-imposed prison in the name of discipline and saving time. Sometimes I have wondered if my life was any better than placing my brain in a box bionically connected to a computer.
Now, I make it a habit to go out once every day or couple of days, same time for 45 mins-1 hour a bit after the busy day starts for most. It is a HUGE waste of time but it acts as a tether for my work day, makes me feel grateful for what I have and surprisingly, results in better productivity.
I see RBI Governor is competitive and responsible enough (and better than many other developed-country's central-bank governors)
As far as Uber's case goes - they used a work-around to bypass the restriction. It is unethical and illegal to do so. Many other Indian startups are also trying to do the same - and they must stop working around RBI rules.
1. Getting justified fruits for people's labor (researchers). Say- getting a great ROI like 1000% or huge ROI of 100000%
2. Getting greedy and trying to multiply the the ROI at the cost of human lives.
I have seen pretty stupid patents (that are logically obvious or near common sense) granted to American companies in tech sector (and have been astonished since I helped create some of those). I believe pharma is no different.
For a minimum rate in Philippines, I would say you should target 1/2 (or 1/3 if cost of living is really low) of the rates a similarly-productive person would earn in the US. If you are unable to get even 1/3rd within the first 3-4 months, you should take up a job and improve your overall skills in parallel. You may find clients and people telling you 1/4th or even 1/6th is good enough - its a no no, not sustainable.
I work as a consultant and have also hired freelancers occasionally. Your expected rate is certainly doable. Even if you start with Elance/ODesk you can easily achieve $25ph pretty quickly if you can communicate well, and ask important questions. Also try to get long-term work at your expected rate and charge higher for short term work. I find it easier to get a fixed-cost projects at a better rate compared to getting a higher hourly rate.
2. When working remotely you have lesser chances of charging more than half the rate of a similar person living and working in the US (and with rest of the western world). Even if you charge half of that say $50ph, you are doing really good. Beyond that, try starting a firm and build local presence.
3. For money, focus on a particular type of work you can get good at pretty quickly. If you are an RoR person - stick to it. Allocate few hours if you want to do something like PHP or some strange new tech - just to learn.
4. Once you are set and earn a minimum rate comfortably, target not to work above 20 hours per week. Typically many people have degraded productivity above 24-25 hours per week. Focus on efficiency and improving it consistently. Leave the rest of 20 hours for reading, educating yourself, increasing domain knowledge, for hobby stuff and figuring out ways on how to charge higher :)
5. Write blogs, contribute to open-source, answer questions on stack-overflow, take up learning some bleeding edge stuff. I usually get a lot of work just because of these.
Market economics, opportunities, education, language and culture for North American region and Asian region is quite different and sometimes counter-intuitive. So when a US-based-person says "I can get $100ph fairly easily" - you should always introspect what/how they are doing differently.
I'd exchange so-called-high paying job to get a job like ISRO now (Somebody misguided me in my early days with the same logic you mentioned)
Obviously IT guys get paid a lot when they settle in US. I can tell you most of these guys are skilled a lot and can do that with little effort - Nobody's stopping them. And when they do, they earn in multiples than most of the IT jobs there.
Scarily, NABL website has a meta description set to "Joomla! blah blah blah..." that shows up on Google search results.
This is a good thing and a bad thing - Good thing: since it is the lowest amount for this position, you have an upper hand. Its difficult (and costly) for them to replace you.
Bad thing - why did you not get a raise and why you are at that lower end - does it have something to do with your performance, or is it just some crappy office politics keeping your pay down?
If you performed well you deserve to get a raise - at least to compensate for the move to office. So definitely ask for it.
Also, do you go to office for 1-2 weeks in a period of about 6 months or so - It is also important to get a feel of your office environment if you all were not a completely remote team.
The downside though - I sometimes feel I am wasting my time (because not many do so) and occasionally worry about opportunity costs.
Example: "stackoverflow or localhost:8081" would be "Development" kind of work. "news.ycombinator.com" --> "Reading" "gmail.com/outlook.com" --> "Commmunication" "facebook.com" -- "Unnecessary waste of time" ...and so on.
The reports would simply show- how much time I spent on what segment (Productive work/ General Browsing).
A chrome extension/app would be a good starting point - personally I do not use other browsers unless absolutely required.
Further I would also like it to automatically classify and show what kind of content I spend time browsing - like "Entrepreneurship / Programming / Nuclear fusion / Space Travel / ... "
If anybody wants to try it - let me know. I can dedicate a very small amount of time on this.
Few people asked what I changed that caused this sudden change in incoming leads.
I do not know what exactly worked - but here are few things I changed.
1. It may be the calendar - but my intuition says its not just that.
2. Made my profile more keyword specific instead of lots of text. Uploaded a picture. I also researched a lot on other successful Elance profiles. There were two categories there a) Sounds cool to other freelancers, developers - I switched from this to the one below: b) Well formatted, keyword rich (for humans too) and shows up better in search results and shows up important stuff in the shorter profile views.
3. Removed the hourly rate from my profile. I did not charge much lower later either. But I figured out that fighting for that $1 extra is not worth if I am going to lose a lead and spend more time looking for other work. I think 49 < 50 should be represented as 49 <<<<< 50 (These are not my actual hourly rates). This may have been a biggest problem in getting invites.
4. Changed my profile such that it is more focused to what I want to do and passionate about (data-science/machine learning) rather than what I am good at (web-development). This doesn't really seem to have any impact on the kind of work I get - I get both equally. This has more due to my personal choice - I did not want to do web-development at my day job and at freelancing (it kind of gets boring)
5. Updated my blog with one pending post I had created earlier but had been lazy to upload it.
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6. Reduced a lot of self-pitching in the proposals. I carefully choose whom I write proposal to. Client history, Previous hiring rate/cost, Client's project award ratio, understanding of technology, understanding of requirements, timeline suggested. I tend to focus on leads who seem to have a lesser understanding of technology but better clarity on requirements.
7. Chances of getting selected when somebody invites you are far greater than competing with 50 or 100 proposals. If you are invited - it seems that you are more likely to get work at your preferred rates.
8. Placing bids when the requirement is fresh and new (or has less proposals). Chances are that in case of lower proposals, client has received many proposals like "I can do in it $XXXX". A good proposal with relevant questions tends to stand out. If something has more than 12-15 proposals with rated freelancers - I back out unless I think I can make a very strong proposal or if this project is a "must-try". There may be tempting high value projects 3 days old with 80 proposals - chances are that the client has started discussing with somebody else in those 3 days. I used to spend a lot of time on such postings, and almost immediately discard those nowadays.