3 ms·
Ask HN: In my situation, how good would it to work on oDesk?
I'm a pretty good frontend developer with almost 8 years of experience although most of it was as a freelance.
Right now I'm working at a web agency making US$10000/year (a bit below the market locally but it'd be hard to find another job in the area from what I've seen due to my lack of a CS degree).
The late hours and unrealistic deadlines are starting to wear on me, specially considering most of what I make disappears after a couple of months because it's basically advertising. I wouldn't mind working late if my work had even a bit of meaning.
I'd love to work remotely but I haven't had much luck sending resumes (maybe because I don't live in the US or my portfolio is lacking due to the vanishing nature of my work). My major weakness is that I haven't used Backbone and Angular which are very prominent in most frontend job postings around here and other sites. I really want to learn how to use them but I don't have time due to the aforementioned agency job.
I have read a bit about oDesk and while most people have bad experiences I feel that maybe it would be the best way to escape the agency grind. But maybe I would be sacrificing my job security (I need to pay rent after all) for nothing.
I feel lost and a bit disheartened and I'd really appreciate any advice you may have.
- macarthy12 13y ago> US$10000/year Where you from? That seems VERY low, even for Asia. Have you any portfolio? When you say frontend, do you mean CSS/HTML or photoshop/graphics? Are you familiar with Grid systems / bootstrap / foundation / responsive design?
- lnanek2 13y agoMaybe he meant 100k/year? That would be below market in the US for a web dev with 8 years experience. Lack of degree is pretty meaningless if you can actually code. I'd happily hire him full time for a full year just helping with games and fun web projects of my own for $10k/year, lol. On eLance I end up paying more like $5k a month for an active project for a single developer.
- dubious 13y agoI wish it was 100k. :) But no, just 10k/y.
- dubious 13y agoSouth America. Front-end coding (HTML/CSS/JS). Admittedly mostly jQuery for the JS part. I have a portfolio but I'd prefer to avoid posting it publicly as it's connected to my name. By mail maybe if you're curious? I'm familiar with CSS frameworks and I have experimented with Bootstrap and used Foundation once or twice but I mostly use Sass and Susy for my grids.
- macarthy12 13y agoIf you mail me offline, (email in my profile) I'll have a look at your portfolio. Are you just starting out?
- dubious 13y agoThank you! I hope I'm not being too presumptuous but I also attached my resume in case I'm missing something there hurting my chances. Feel free to ignore it. :)
- lnanek2 13y agoIME odesk/elance rates are half what you can get in person...and some of those in person jobs just amount to meeting the client once a week
- dubious 13y agoThat's discouraging but thanks for posting. EDIT: I was thinking, maybe it's not worth it at your income level but maybe for mine it wouldn't be so bad? Maybe I'm grabbing at straws.