Working for free and what it taught me
codeofrob.com
codeofrob.com
The thing is, you are not taking into account that there might be times in the future where you could actually need some backup money. For example an illness (or simply old age) could make you unable to work for several months or even years. Not even counting other things you might want to do that money could come in useful for. In the future, you also might have a family.
I'm certainly not advocating missing out on life for fear of running out of money and running in the treadmill like crazy just out of fear. But saving money in the good times probably can't hurt.
What i would say is never ever discount. Either work for exactly what you want to be paid, or work for free, dont work for a discount. Discounting has the problem of having the obligation associated with being paid, but without the satisfaction of making you feel like you're being paid what you're worth. It also sets the baseline of what the client/employer thinks you're worth, they'll have the same expectations as if you'd be getting paid your usual rate. If you work for free, usually, the expectation of delivery is far less, which gives you more freedom.
well you only live once right ;)
Those two things do not mean the same thing.
> Experience in Tool/Language X is a stupid thing to ask for
I'm pretty sure my experience with Perl won't allow me to write useful C within two days, no matter how experienced my coworkers.
It would've been much more interesting to read about how he actually found his "jobs".
Paying a couple hundred quid to hire me for two weeks is free. When I said expenses, it was the cost of getting there and putting me somewhere to sleep (not hotels mostly, thankfully).
By charging that small amount, it means they're serious about bringing me in because it demonstrates commitment.
I paid for my own upkeep over this time and burned through the best part of 25k EUR - all worth it.
I see what you did there.
And as Joeboy says, it would be months. I can say this with confidence because i know enough about C to know how little i know about it. Just the thought of memory management and all the complexities involved makes my skin crawl.
I feel confident that if I was asked to do C at one of these gigs I'd have been able to deliver something useful. Perhaps less if it was C++ because it's a bit swiss-army knife and there are a lot more "don'ts" to pick up.
I'm only saying: Some skills are so radically different that you cannot transfer easily from one to the other. To give a counter example in the other direction: When i taught a former Lisp developer Perl, it took him 3 months to get to a good level, and 3 more to be on a very high level. And he's an extremely bright guy.
Then again, he had never done web apps before. Maybe the language matters a lot less if you're staying within the same problem domain.
If you asked me tomorrow to go and start doing system programming in a language I knew well, I'd probably be screwed. Ask me to work on a database engine, compiler or web app and I'd be okay.
I'm mainly focusing that ire on the typical enterprise stuff LOB stuff, where it truely is all the same and just because you'd been writing Foo v1 for three years doesn't mean you won't be able to write Bar v300
This really resonates with me and I've come to the same conclusion from my own, similar experiences.
Its a shame mass media has cultivated an irrational fear of outsiders into everyone.
Ironically, even the people I've met who have been so kind and generous often try to be helpful by warning me about such and such race, or part of town, or different religious people to avoid because they're dangerous for one reason or another.