doozy

> Like writing freebsd-update in POSIX shell

How is this a bad thing? It is part of the base system, so it's either /bin/sh or C.

Supply and demand, the one thing economists get right.

You seems to be assuming the supply of software developers will keep outgrowing the demand for them. Why? I predict the exact opposite: As the developing world develops, local demand for software will keep outpacing global capability to create developers. I live in the developing world, I should know.

99% of people cannot play an instrument. 99% of people cannot draw. 99% of people cannot do math. 99% cannot develop software. And that's a conservative estimate.

Today's computers "Just Work", no one needs to know anything to use one anymore, and it shows. You find today people working as developers who would have a lot of trouble just using a computer from as late as 20 years ago.

Developers are getting dumber, not smarter. As abstractions have been piled upon abstractions actual programming skills have decreased. No one knows how to do anything anymore without an IDE to hold their hand and a web browser to look up everything. We've replaced the hacker with the hack.

Am I exaggerating? Try interviewing a few people for a developer position and see for yourself. The level of incompetence is astonishing. Degrees, experience or national origin seems to have no correlation whatsoever with their skills.

Fossil diff is the killer feature for me. Thanks for your great work.

That's how we all learned. That, and I remember downloading Netscape 2.0 and finding an html tutorial in the help menu.

I should start claiming 20+ years of web development experience.

I also adopted their mail client, I've been using its successors pretty much uninterruptedly until today.

"By the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000 servers - of which 2000 were commercial - and 10 million users."

That was the time I first gained internet access. So that puts me well within the first 1% of internet users. The web felt huge even then. But it was much slower, I still remember my 14.4 kbit/s modem.

From craigslist, and I ended up working like a week to earn $100.

But it got me started.

FREELANCER SEEKING FREELANCER (Remote, UTC-5/EST)

I do a lot of Python work and I'm often fully booked. I'm turning down enough work to keep another developer employed, so I'm looking for someone with some serious Python skills who is interested in working remotely (part time or full time).

I need someone who is capable of doing things way beyond CRUD apps. Some of the work I do involves massively concurrent servers, collaborative filtering, financial trading, graph databases, developing Python extension modules in C... but there's some CRUD going on as well, mostly RESTful APIs and scrapping.

No rookies. 5+ years of experience minimum, but I would strongly prefer candidates with 10+ or 15+ years of development experience.

Must speak English fluently and live in the Americas time zone.

Must have a working knowledge of version control, automated testing and be proficient with the Unix command line.

Technologies: Python 2 and 3, SQLAlchemy, NumPy, SciPy, Twisted, Flask, Tornado, QuickFIX, Celery, RabbitMQ, Redis, PosgreSQL, MySQL...

hndenep@kaffeeschluerfer.com

So your "business" has not enough capital to pay its founders a below market rate salary nor to pay a graphics designer.

Don't take this the wrong way, but it sounds to me you don't have enough capital to start even a pizza joint. Are you sure you should be doing this startup of yours?

The appeal of startups is they are the only chance to be paid what one is worth. The alternative is to toil for the rest of your working life making enough to live but not enough to ever be financially free.

The elephant in the room is software developers are massively underpaid. If so many are willing to take the risk is because a one in a hundred chance of success is better than a 100% chance of going nowhere.

I've played the startup lottery, twice, and look forward to do it again. I'd rather own a percentage of a company that has a minute chance of success than a contract signed in blood for a "market salary" for the rest of my life.

$1500 pays perhaps one day of salary for your team of 3. What kind of business has problems affording that?

Not impossible, its akin to having a P vs NP problem.

Properly estimating a software project takes just as long as developing the software itself.

When people want estimates they somehow assume they can be given on the spot, or at most with a few hours of work. Nothing further from the truth.

A good software estimate is a project in its own right. It takes time, a deadline and a budget to break apart a software project, design a solution, identify its subtasks, identify its critical path, research alternatives, evaluate frameworks, tentatively assign tasks to teammates, write down an estimation report, discuss it with the customer, etc.

And then you end billing the customer for 120 hours of work to conclude the project can be done in five days, give or take a week.

No one will pay you to do something you have not done before.

But it's fairly easy to find programming work if you have done something similar in the past.

Pick a project that you like and develop it. Make it open source. Research what companies work on that niche and use the same tech stack and contact them about an internship.

Also ask your parents, teachers, or any other adult that knows you and see if they know someone who may hire you.

> - less language barrier. I find it really hard to understand non-native speakers over a bad skype connection (high quality headsets would fix this I believe)

> The language barrier thin is very real. I'm not a native English speaker and have very hard time understanding people with heavier accents. It's especially bad over phone/web conference.

Solution: Hire only people who speak good English (yes, you should test them / interview them before hiring them!)

Ability to communicate properly and proficiency with collaboration tools rank high on the list. It's also crucial to be able to properly identify and evaluate the contributions of any team member.

Remote is also largely incompatible with micromanaging. If you don't trust the ability of your remote developers to take decisions on their own the team is likely to underperform and fall apart. This is one of the main reasons remote works much better with senior developers.

1. is absolutely true. Real time communication has been crucial to my success as a remote developer. I'm in South America so it's easy for me to work at the same time as coworkers in the US. I worked for a some time for a British company and after a while I just decided to wake up 4 hours earlier so I could communicate with my coworkers.

2. and 3. shows your organization has communication problems. One of my favorite ways to combat that is to do some pair programming. You'll get to know people quite rapidly if you are talking to one each other 8 hours a day.

As someone who has worked 10+ years remotely (based in South America) I think it's a combination of factors:

Supply and demand. Why hire remote when there's plenty of warm bodies locally? Most companies do not need, and cannot afford, top-tier talent. Labor shortages are a myth.

Managerial incompetence. How many of the managers have any experience managing a remote team? Do they know what to do and what not to do?

Remote is frequently seen as synonym with "cheap, sub-par foreign developer" and there are many good reasons companies avoid that.

IMHO, remote-friendly organizations will prevail. The ability to hire from a much larger pool of talent and save on office costs gives them the upper hand.

Email + IRC + Mumble + Any combination of version control, bugtracker and wiki.

Why people pay for this kind of thing is beyond me.

Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Jamaica, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh...

All apparently doing pretty well.

Sending $1 billion a year since the start of Plan Colombia (1996) implies Colombia would have received over $20 billion by now. In reality the amount of American aid to Colombia is about half of that.

And American aid does not come in cash, the money can only be spent in shiny new American-made military hardware. That's why the Colombian army has lots of Humvees and Black Hawks, paid for the U.S. taxpayer.

It really is a poorly disguised subsidy to the American military industrial complex.

In any case, considering Colombia has the second largest GDP in South America (after Brazil) at about $300 billion a year, receiving even $1 billion a year would be statistically speaking, noise.

Venezuelans have been leaving the country for the last decade or so. There are huge numbers of them here already.

It's not easy for them to leave because their currency is basically worthless and access to hard currency is restricted to the well-connected.

Also the Venezuelan government closed the border about one year ago. They also kicked out all Colombians from Venezuela. According to the Venezuelan government everything bad that happens there is consequence of the vast Colombian-American right wing conspiracy.

Colombians are generally cool about Venezuelans, as the two countries are very similar to each other and have a long history together (at one point they were part of the same country). Neither the people nor the government opposes Venezuelan immigration, as far as I can tell.

But Colombia ain't exactly the land of milk and honey and Venezuelans know it. If they are not rushing in greater numbers to the border is because they know that, while there may not be any shortages or blackouts here, jobs are also few and far between.

As someone who lives next door to Venezuela, it seems to me the situation over there has really hit the proverbial fan.

Venezuela has been in a disastrous economic situation for years, but nowhere as bad what we are seeing these days.

Just yesterday their government opened the border with Colombia for 12 hours (they have kept it closed for a year) and about 125 thousand people crossed into Colombia to buy basic groceries and medicines. 30% did not cross back.

Fair enough, but the point stands. If I were given the choice of a $70k/year position in Sao Paulo or, let's say, Miami, FL. I would take the Miami location without hesitating for a second. $70k goes a lot further there than in South America. Literally everything is cheaper in Miami than in SP (or Bogota, where I am).

Most software developers, as most people, in South America simply cannot afford the standard of living of a first world country, even when they make a great salary for local standards. Most things don't cost any less just because the local population cannot afford it (and very often they cost more).

You're comparing local salaries with remote salaries. It's very different, 95% of local guys are unemployable remotely due to a combination of lack of language skills (huge factor), low skill level, shitty work ethics (another huge factor) and being stuck in dead-end technologies like Java.

When American companies look for remote developers they want people who speak excellent/perfect English, are in the same time zone, have (at least) above average skills and are willing to work like Americans do (Americans are workaholics, you'll be surprised at how damn lazy/unproductive most people are). I've been working remotely for 10+ years and I've been asked to find local talent several times, and finding it is hard. I've only vouched for one guy in all this time, and he quit after 6 months and moved to the US (and the pay was spectacular for local standards).

That's not the point, the point is $70k in Sao Paulo buys you a lower standard of living than $70k pretty much anywhere in the US but in a handful of cities.

$70k in Sao Paulo doesn't go much further than $70k in New York (or Tokyo, London, Paris, Singapore...)

Do I have to remind you how much a computer, a smartphone or a car costs in Brazil compared to the US?

I doubt your claim of finding "good enough" developers for $35k. I was making more than that in my first job, fresh out of school, when I had zero real world experience, working remotely for an American company, and that was in the early 2000s.

Most companies would be elated to find even a competent html/css/js coder for that price.

I got my first remote position in 2002. That's 14 years ago (time flies, doesn't it?). I wouldn't call that "still very new".

I do agree it requires a certain know-how to make it work. It seems to me there's more of a shortage of knowledgeable managers than there is of able developers.

It may be a splendid salary in some locations outside the US, it is not in many others.

Americans tend to believe they are wealthier than anyone else. Not so! Apart of the fact several countries in Europe have higher salaries (and cost of living than the US) there's the fact major cities are much more expensive than smaller ones, even in poorer countries.

Case in point: The most expensive cities in the Americas are Sao Paulo, Bogota and New York. You can easily enjoy a higher standard of living earning $70k in most of the US than you can in Sao Paulo or Bogota (I've lived in both, I know it for a fact)

Should you hire me? I'll give you 10 facts about myself. Decide for yourself:

1. As a kid I taught myself to program using Borland Turbo C++ for DOS and Deitel's C How to Program book

2. I've been on the internet since the days of Trumpet Winsock and NCSA Mosaic. I used HotDog to create my first website in 1997 (and yes, it had an under construction gif and a download Netscape link)

3. I've been a FreeBSD user since 2001, although at one point I administered a few Linux servers for a living

4. I was the sole developer of two different startups. One based in the UK (2006-2007) and another in Buenos Aires / New York (2010-2011). Details in résumé

5. I used to be active at Rent-a-Coder, my profile with a decade long track record of perfect scores and rave reviews over a wide variety of technologies is still available: https://www.freelancer.com/u/denep.html

6. At one point or another I've been paid to develop in Python, JavaScript, C, PHP, Perl, x86 Assembly, C++, Java, Matlab, Delphi and others

7. I've worked 10+ years remotely. Both with Americans and Europeans

8. I've taken a couple of years off here and there to travel around the world on a bike

9. I'm pragmatic and open to learn new technologies or frameworks. While I have my preferences, my skills are portable between stacks

10. I only post on these threads like once a year, so get in touch if you believe I may be a valuable addition to your team. I'm flexible about hours and would consider part-time, full-time or contract work

  Location: Bogota, Colombia (EST/UTC-5)
  Remote: Yes, I've been doing so for over a decade
  Willing to relocate: Not right now
  Technologies: Python, JavaScript, C, Perl, Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis
  Résumé/CV: On request
  Email: hndenep@kaffeeschluerfer.com

SEEKING WORK - Remote (EST / UTC-5, but flexible about hours)

Remember when developing a website involved writing cgi scripts in Perl, cross-browser compatibility meant supporting Mosaic and Netscape, Java applets were the hottest thing, HotDog was cool and people debated whether to install Slackware or Red Hat? That's when I first started doing web development, today I believe I'm starting to get the hang of it.

At one point or another I've been paid to develop in Python, C, Java, PHP, Perl, x86 assembly, Matlab, Fortran, JavaScript and a few others. I do mostly Python these days.

Buzzwords: Python, Flask, Tornado, Django, Celery, Redis, PostgreSQL, MySQL, NumPy, SciPy, SQLAlchemy, asyncio, BeautifulSoup, lxml, requests...

You can see a handful of my past projects and customer feedback here: https://www.freelancer.com/hireme/denep

Resume/repository: on request

hndenep@kaffeeschluerfer.com

SEEKING WORK - Remote (EST / UTC-5, but flexible about hours)

Full-stack senior developer with a bias towards Python.

Buzzwords: Python, Flask, Tornado, Django, Celery, Redis, PostgreSQL, MySQL, NumPy, SciPy, asyncio, BeautifulSoup, lxml, requests...

You can see some of my past projects and customer feedback here: https://www.freelancer.com/hireme/denep

hndenep@kaffeeschluerfer.com

  Location: Currently in South America

  Remote: Yes (Second time I've ever posted in one of these threads, last month I 
  received many interesting offers but they weren't REMOTE. Guys, I'm not moving
  to SV any time soon)

  Willing to relocate: Not right now, I may go back to Europe next year

  Technologies: At one point or another I've been paid to develop in Python, C,
  Java, Perl, x86 assembly, Matlab, Fortran, R, PHP and a few other languages. I
  do mostly Python these days.

  Résumé/CV: On request

Some projects I've recently completed:

- RESTful API for a mobile app (Relational database design, PostgreSQL, Flask, Jinja2, collaborative filtering, NumPy, SciPy, JSON, Sphinx)

- Concurrent, asynchronous, scalable tool to check a wide variety of responses on clusters of servers over HTTP (Python 3, XML, ElementTree, concurrent, requests)

- A couple of scrappers for large amounts of data (asyncio, BeautifulSoup, lxml, pdftotext, pdfminer, requests, MySQL)

- Scalable, non-blocking proxy for Android/iOS/BlackBerry push notifications (Tornado, Supervisor)

- Redesigning an existing document-oriented database as a document/graph database (MongoDB, OrientDB)

- A couple of mobile-optimized websites (jQuery Mobile, SQLite, PHP, Symfony)

I'm partial to FreeBSD, Vim and the command line, but adapt to whatever I have to use to get stuff done.

I've also completed a few dozen gigs in a major freelancing website across a wide variety of skills, you can check my work history and feedback there: https://www.freelancer.com/u/denep.html

If you think I'm a good fit for your project, contact me. I'm available for full-time or (even better) part-time work.

  Email: hndenep@kaffeeschluerfer.com

SEEKING WORK - Remote only

At one point or another I've been paid to develop in Python, C, Perl, Java, x86 assembly, Matlab, Fortran, PHP and a few other languages. I do mostly Python these days.

Some things I've recently completed:

- RESTful API for a mobile app (Relational database design, PostgreSQL, psycopg2, Flask, Jinja2, collaborative filtering, NumPy, SciPy, json, Sphinx)

- A couple of scrappers for large amounts of data (BeautifulSoup, lxml, PyQuery, pdftotext, pdfminer, requests, MySQL)

- Concurrent, asynchronous, scalable tool to check wide variety of responses over HTTP (Python 3, XML, ElementTree, concurrent, requests)

- Scalable, non-blocking proxy for Android/iOS/BlackBerry push notifications (Tornado, Supervisor)

- A couple of mobile-optimized websites (jQuery Mobile, SQLite, PHP, Symfony)

I'm partial to FreeBSD, Vim and the command line, but adapt to whatever I have to use to get stuff done.

I've also completed a few dozen gigs in a major freelancing website across a wide variety of skills, you can check my work history and feedback there: https://www.freelancer.com/u/denep.html

If you think I'm a good fit for your project, contact me. I'm available for part-time or full-time work.

Email: hndenep@kaffeeschluerfer.com