forcetenhen

I regularly see entry level positions around £15k - often a little less. From looking around relatively recently, if you want £30k+, you need to be project managing at the very least (in a buzzword-compliant sense that is).

Things have picked up a bit lately if you're a Rubyist. Interestingly, the same companies paying £15-20k for perl/PHP coders have no problem dropping £30-40k on ruby.

I tried a couple of times, got Raymond Chandler, Margaret Atwood, Stephen King and... Dan Brown. All for different elements of the same page. In turns inpsiring and soul-crushing..

And as usual it'll end up with the same old list of reasonable problems, 'unforgivable' omissions and miles upon miles of ridiculous hyperbole. It's started already. Is abuse of includes or goto an inherent problem of PHP? I was abusing includes 15 years ago when I messed with C and my earliest BASIC was the code equivalent of snakes & ladders.

All this kind of thing tends to do is embolden the snobs, put the backs up of the faithful and be of no practical use to any reasonable person looking for honest answers. It doesn't even have the virtue of being a humourous discussion since it's been flogged to death over the whole internet for a decade.

The brush & soap is still the most satisfying shave I've ever had. I'm not sure how effective it really was compared to others as it's been a while, but I certainly felt the best afterwards and itched a lot less.

On a friends recommendation, I recently switched to one of those cheapo King Of Shaves. It looks ridiculous and it was a bit fiddly to get used to, but it's doing ok. Prefer it to the crumbling Mach 3 anyway.

He made some wrong predictions 2 years ago for the European Championships so he's not infallible, though he appears to be getting much better :)

Quad core 2.8Ghz, 8GB RAM, 2TB internal, further 2.5TB in rats nest of external disks. 2 x 19" monitors. Running W7 and Snow Leopard via VM for iDev,

Plus a crappy old laptop I had to upgrade to 1.5GB RAM after it came with 512MB and Vista. Used only in cases of extreme laziness.

That's why I like the twitter. It's more "look at this X" and a direct link without all the padding that would go into justifying an article.

Smashing Mag's Twitter feed I find to be be more useful than the site itself. There's a fair bit of fluff but there's a lot of good stuff too. Plus, it's updated at a furious rate.

Ok - long delayed response since I lost my damned login :)

Thanks very much for all the replies, MUCH appreciated - and it seems to have given me the big kick I needed.

Since I posted, I managed to wangle a £10k raise. Basically gave a polite ultimatum with a well sourced list of equivalent jobs ~£30k. It's a good start!

I also took on board some of the Rentacoder type tips and have started to build up a rep on there. Did a few all-day $20 jobs, which was horrible, but I've just now finished a couple of jobs at $150 and $250 with around $500-800 due to complete soon. On top of that, I dug out a couple of old contacts and emailed on a whim. Could have £2k monthly coming in from their project overflow.

I'm also gonna look into doing some FOSS stuff if I can somewhere I'll make a good fit.

tl;dr: thanks an effing million. I was wallowing in self-pity and knew it. I really needed something like this. Now I'm slowly getting rich :)

He ended up selling them all yeah. Minus tax and whatnot, he still pocketed a tidy sum and decided to forego university (which it was originally to pay for) and become a business god.

I used to work for one of the companies who bought in early (they're top left somewhere :). Not sure it brought us much, if anything, though it did get the company logo on TV a few times when it was picked up by the news.

pro-red mis-disinformation.