MortenK

Unfortunately in the realm of machine learning, quantity does not equate quality.

Olympic weightlifting is just the name for a discipline which incorporates a specific set of barbell excercises. It's injury rate is indeed extremely low (From Hamill, B. “Relative Safeety of Weightlifting and Weight Training” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 8(1):53-57, 1994 https://imgur.com/a/0jI0CzK).

Your typical gym-goer does all kinds of other stuff though, like crossfit and similar nonsense, which is highly injury prone.

The "classic" (i.e. Olympic) exercises, is a very safe sport.

I made a little file archiving tool for Windows, because I wanted to be able to archive stuff and find it again quickly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm7wimDNTZ8

Check out indiehackers.com there's a ton of case stories you might find interesting.

How about just travelling a month's time first, before deciding on a year? Go to south America, SE Asia or something, check it out and relax. It'll cost a month extra of rent, but it doesn't sound like the financials is a problem. And if you decide you want to travel more, you just return after the first month, get your affairs sorted and off you go again :-)

Do you use a Google api or do you send http request and scrape the response html? As I understand the gogle search api got deprecated some years back. I am a few days from my laptop so can't properly read it for myself :-) thanks!

Why would you consider R&D to be the only expansion expense?

Extremely interesting application.

I googled it and found a PC Mag review from 1994 with a funny passage: "We did a direct import of a 1000 record database from both ACT! And Organizer, and the operation took only a minute on a 486 system" :-)

"Both are signs of inexperience."

Case of pot calling the kettle black methinks.

I wanted to upvote but accidentally downvoted.

Start with consulting agencies. That's companies that acts like brokers between independent consultants / contractors and companies.

Later on, you can get business from LinkedIn, mouth to mouth, previous clients who now contact you directly etc.

econsultancy.com most likely have some studies and reports on it.

Fully agree. Nationality alone isn't a sure fire indicator of quality. I find that on average there is a higher success rate with eastern europe / russia vendors, especially when the onshore personnel are inexperienced with outsourcing. But of course there is hits and misses no matter what country you choose. Finding a good vendor in any location is a discipline in itself.

And yes, if a company decides to outsource with low price being the overshadowing priority, they are likely to end up with the amazingly low price and amazingly low quality vendors.

And he never returned? That's terrible. I had similar experiences during Maidan especially, but it's (mostly) back to business as usual by now.

You should try other outsourcing destinations. Large timezone differences are indeed a hurdle, and culture differences is always underestimated. Add to that the general ineptitude of managing projects in large companies, and you have a recipe for disaster.

In Western Europe, the most compatible culture and therefore easiest place to start, is Eastern Europe and Russia. If you are in the US, I'd personally just outsource to US companies in the midwest. Some of my western European clients are actually doing this now, as for example NC hourly rates are lower than Moscow rates.

Managing projects where you have big cultural differences require many years of experience in that particular area. Even then, it requires a much higher project management effort.

If management of a project with a local team take on average 10% of total project time, a project with developers in a markedly different work culture will easily take 20-30% of time spend.

If you try again, try to see if you can get a client with a decent sized mailing list. Warming up is usually done with progressively larger sendouts. So you'd start with maybe 500 sendouts, then a thousand, then 3000 etc.

But anyway yeah the barrier to entry has risen really much. It's much harder these days than just a couple of years ago, and it probably won't get easier either!

Outsourcing has worked for me and my clients for 10 years or so. The main aspects of making it work is vendor selection, local manager with outsourcing experience and proper choice of engagement model.

The author, Yegor, is arguing outsourcing categorically does not work due to lower vendor margins from 2001 and today.

What he fails to mention is that while Eastern Europe has risen in cost, there's still plenty of locations with much lower cost and therefore much wider margins. In such locations, his main argument would no longer be valid. Even in Ukraine, there's huge difference in cost of living and therefore average salary across the country. Kiev is very expensive. Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Donetsk, not so much. But nowhere are you going to find 300 USD a month developers. 2000-2500 maybe, but not 300.

Further, the vendors he describe are not good vendors. Good vendors will raise the price to provide a sufficient margin in order to provide a good quality service. Bad vendors will sell with low price being their only parameter, and yes, such companies will typically have the mindset of "milking the cow". Until they fold from one day to the other, that is.

Finally, the mismatch Yegor describes between client and vendor expectations could be entirely removed if he just chose a different engagement model. For product development, you shouldn't do a fixed-price project model. Rather, do a monthly retainer based model for the same employee(s), where you pay the vendor x amount of dollars for the full allocation of person x. This way there's no prioritizing from the vendor company that can influence your project (unless the vendor is straight up fraudulent). And with a cancellation notice of 3 months, the margin can be lower as there's no risk for the vendor.

What country are you in?

OP, I don't know if you are reading the comments here but in case you do: Don't get discouraged so quickly.

The reason this is happening is as the blurb from the MS postmaster help page: Your IP doesn't have a reputation yet.

The reason these rules are in place aren't about email monopoly, it's about spam. If anybody could setup a SMTP server and start firing off large amounts of mail, spam would be even more endemic than today.

You can configure your server perfectly, but that doesn't mean much, since it's your IP that's the problem.

If you have legit objectives, it's a pain in the ass for sure. But you are not the only one having this problem, and there's a solution for it.

All the big email service providers (ESP's) like Neolane, Exact Target, Mailchimp, Campaign monitor etc share this problem when they onboard a new client, who requires their own IP.

Deliverability is a surprisingly deep, technical topic, and all major ESP's have entire teams of specialists working on this.

If you want to make such a service as Fastmail, you need to get really into deliverability. It's not a walk in the park, but it's not impossible either.

I'm not a specialist in this particular area myself, so I can't give you that much specific advice. I've just worked elbow to elbow with a lot of these guys, so I know what kind of challenges they work with.

One thing I know for sure is really important, is the "warming up" of IP's. Basically the IP you are sending from needs to accumulate some reputation over a period of time, typically a month or two.

If you send out reasonably small amounts of mail to email addresses that exists and the recipients does not explicitly report you for junk mail, your IP get whitelisted and you will get a much higher delivery rate.

There's no quick fix unfortunately, and email reputation is hard to gain and fast to lose.

But it certainly can be done. You sound very competent on the server side of things, so to get your fastmail-like service up, I think it's just a matter of a bit more persistence and studying deliverability as a technical subject.

Hope this helps.

Why would you even post job listings and ask people to apply, if you think no good developers apply for jobs?

This is incredibly accurate, and applies equally well to contracting in other roles than as a developer.

High-end contracting within not-so-common software and / or specific business domains.

The contracts are often very long (some many years) and the rates are sufficiently high to get you to 250K and beyond, even after accounting for sickdays, medical insurance, pension, vacation etc.

You can get there through experience in specific technologies like SAS CRM, SAP, Salesforce etc, meaning tech's that are not so common without necessarily being completely niche. You can also get there as a generalist developer with exceptional experience in a business domain like automotive, finance, retail or whatever.

The rates can get extreme when the developer is specialized in both a specific technology and business domain.

A specialist in marketing automation + finance for example or datawarehousing + retail etc.

The serious clients who have the money you are looking for, are not going to hire a random guy in Thailand based on a forum comment.

At your suggested rate, these clients will be able to get an on-location contractor with significantly more experience (think 10-15 years). I.e. No hassle with international payments, timezones and what not.

Compare that to what you are suggesting: A very high cost (150 USD an hour) at a very high risk (completely unknown resource). This makes it a highly unappealing business proposal.

For you to get that rate while being remote, you need to have already established yourself with such clients, i.e. You need to have worked for them before and built a lot of trust.

The problem here was not with outsourcing as a discipline, it was with lack of experience in outsourcing. The lessons learned in the post are typical of first-time outsourcing attempts, but entirely incorrect if you have an experienced person leading your efforts.

A few tips for OP and others reading:

1) If you are western and it's your first time, avoid suppliers from the Middle East and the Far East (Pakistan, India, China etc). The cultural difference will be too big a mouthful.

Instead go with locations closer to home, i.e. Brazil/Chile for US, Eastern Europe / Russia for EU.

2) Do not use bottom barrel suppliers. $10 suppliers, will deliver according value. If they were better, they would charge more.

3) You need to know about local holidays. Eid in Pakistan, the Chinese new year in Far East, the orthodox christmas in Russia etc.

Good suppliers will inform you of these well in advance. $10 sweatshops will send you the dreaded "Oh btw 14 days national holiday is starting now, thanks bye".

4) Strongly consider time and material pricing model. Fixed-price is appealing. But in usual custom projects, the estimation will statistically speaking be way off. You'll then end up with scope / price negotiations and bad relations.

You'll also be more likely to continue with a bad supplier because of loss aversion i.e. "we've already paid 50% of the total project, let's just see it through". This results in death march projects usually.

5) If you do not have an experienced outsourcing manager, the next best thing is a supplier with strong project managers and experience in outsourcing. Find a consultant or broker that can find you one such supplier.

Most users probably don't miss features in LO as such. The issue like with much open source software, is UI and stability related.

Joe Marketing ain't going to jump through UI hoops and do complex bug work-arounds, when he can avoid this entirely by buying a MS office license for 200 USD or whatever the price is.

Please don't start a witch hunt on the basis of a handful internet comments. We should be better than that.

Wouldn't such people use Word or Pages rather than markdown though?

Not sure it's possible to automate easily since mailchimp is a rather simple esp. I might be mistaken though, it's been a while since I used them. You could probably solve it through the API or at least through a bit of recurring manual work.

That's very true, you'd be unsubscribing some false positives. Usually this is marginal though, and it's a tradeoff worth taking except if your recipient group have an abnormally high use of image off. Also, you can decrease the percentage by hosting content on a landing page since in most tools, a click will also register an open.

A tip if you already use lifecycle programs: Set up your marketing automation tool to automatically unsubscribe your recipients from the program, if they are not opening the first 2-3 emails (thereby showing a lack of interest in the specific program). This allows you to keep a higher percentage of email permissions, which you can use for less frequent communication.

Otherwise a large part of the uninterested segment will end up revoking their email permission, i.e. Unsubscribing from your permission base entirely.