commonsense

Get the fuck out of here. The amount of engineering the founders put into facebook far outpaces $10k. You're living in a fantasy land.

WHAT? The explicit purpose of this is to combine the presentation (HTML) and logic (PHP) layers.

"Consulting" does not just pay the bills. You're thinking of freelancing for dipshit entrepreneurs who think $10k will buy them the next facebook.

Ding Ding Ding. Real consulting starts at $100/hr and has no cap on effective rate. One month of this should pay one person's bare-bones living expenses for at least one year.

"Freelancing" is the term most people think of when talking about bullshit web programming jobs that pay very little. They only take these jobs because they've failed to save up enough money to say "no" and they lack the experience to know that real money can be made consulting.

Does this offer any benefits to XML comprehension beyond syntactical sugar to allow echo avoid the use of quotes and to remove the god-awful <?php ?> syntax (which puts it at par, at the very best, in my opinion)? Does it handle XML syntax errors gracefully? Can you do native transformations on bound variables, for example, or do any more sophisticated XML DOM-ish tag functions? The post doesn't mention anything about any of these issues, which is where the real advantage would lie. If any of that were possible, you could put the browser DOM (and validation) one step closer to the application logic. As far as I can tell this just attempts to ambiguate the VC in MVC, where Django tries to replace V with T (template).

As far as I'm concerned this only increases the squinty-eyed "WTF" factor between PHP and other languages.

Anyone who's spent the 1990s coding Perl CGI will tell you just how big of a step backward this is.

As a reforming beta I hope it's true. As a member of civilization I hope it's not. :(

No. Learn something very few other people know and it will explain itself.

Don't go for most positions. If you're a run-of-the-mill developer, of course you'll get shit wages. Learn something unique. Something that takes effort to learn.

> I can't tell you the number of times a recruiter emailed me something like "He says he wants 90, but he'll actually take 80".

Of fucking course they'll say that. You can always assume the recruiter will not keep anything in confidence - the dominating strategy in this situation is to tell them your minimum and NOT waver from that. With exception given to a +/- 5% counter-offer. Once you budge, they know you're weak. Give an inch, and they'll take a mile. The business managers who hire people can smell weakness from a mile away - it's their JOB to capitalize on that weakness. That's what they went to school for. It's what they live and breathe on a day to day basis. You won't be able to empathize with them until you run your own company, whether it be product or consulting. It's capitalism in the raw.

The problem is that most people who are desperate for a job think the offer on the phone is the last one they'll get, which is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Grow some fucking balls and the entire post-hoc world will open up to you.

I would take it one step further. Always have at least two active contracts at any given time. Real leverage.

That's my fucking point! Remember bartenders get paid in cash. And they're free to spend that tax-free cash with a MASSIVE homie discount when they go out to bars and restaurants and clubs and other establishments in the same city they work in because hospitality industry people give each other discounts.

How much do you think a developer who charges $50/hr is grossing after taxes? Not EVEN $75k, especially not if they apply the same confidence to their Schedule C deductions that some people on this forum have applied to their careers.

Highly skilled people like competent UNIX engineers should be making a LEAST 2-3x a bartender.

Naive, naive, naive.

Think of it this way. Look at a company's overall profit margins - the profit they are making off of your labor / work should fall within this ballpark. If it's not, you're being ripped off, because that means other employees (or shareholders) in the firm are capturing a larger share of the value you create than you are, compared to the average.

This is really, really, REALLY simple math, folks.

1. They take % of base first year salary on W2 - their incentives are aligned with yours. A good deal.

2. They take % of base hourly rate - their incentives are also aligned with yours. A good deal.

However:

3. They receive a flat hourly cap - their incentives are opposite yours. They're trying to fuck you.

4. Flat retainer - their incentives are technically neutral, but the lower they get you onboard, the better they look because their client is spending less. They're trying to fuck you.

> 1. Sure, but bartenders have people skills

No they don't. They serve drinks in very loud, noisy bars where everyone is drunk. That's the kind of bartender that makes $75k+

Furthermore, so do I. That's how I charge $150/hr.

> 2. According to last month's data, our pool of potential employees has 10.5% unemployment, and you can afford to live on food stamps?

That's begging the question whether or not I am employed. I am employed. I have other clients. I do not live on food stamps. I am currently making my asking rate on a regular basis and have been for nearly a decade, or else I would not be asking for it. If I were not able to make this rate, I would lower it. This is very simple logic, although it may not be if you are viewing it through the prism of desperation. REJECT the prism of desperation. It will handicap you for the rest of your professional life.

> 3. There are many talented and desperate ways to reject your application, but you've probably heard them all.

Really? The only one I've heard is "we can't afford you.", or "we found someone cheaper", which really is not my problem at ALL.

You need to get those cojones, or you will be continue to be taken advantage of. Business people actively LOOK for weak willed developers. But - believe it or not - they respond positively to developers with balls, because they are so unaccustomed to hearing it. This is a basic tenet of human nature that many developers do not realize because they are too busy preoccupying themselves with machine logic.

At some point, you need to tell yourself that you've learned enough fucking machine logic. You're not going to be writing assembly language for these people. You're building applications (dev and integration work, basically) that will make them money. That frees up your brain to think of other things like human interaction and how to sell yourself.

Humans are not machines. Business is not a logical process. It's human interaction. When money changes hands, it's from one human (or group of humans) to another, no matter how deep the abstracted technical logic has been built to be.