I just answered questions for free for a YC company this week and informed them I do the kind of writing they need. They can't be arsed to so much as reply to my email with an acknowledgement that they have it.
I need income, not more opportunities to improve the lives of others for free, get pats on the head and told to piss off about my sad sack story that I can't afford to eat at the end of the month.
I have tried endless suggestions of what works for the guys. Email people and ask for feedback. Email top people here who routinely talk about gender parity in tech and have magnanimous invitations to email them any time. Buy a .com domain to be taken more seriously. Put together some kind of portfolio.
I have been asking for advice for literally years on how I can turn my skills and expertise into earned income and I get mostly pissed all over and bullshit excuses.
I've only given away work for free twice - once before I was a software developer and once volunteering two or three days a week for six? years for a NGO. Other than that, I charge everybody full price, including friends or family, for anything related to my day job. It sets up bad working relationships.
Again, good luck.
Can you do volunteer community management for an organizations some tech organization? Can you somehow finagle some volunteer resume copywriting for Stanford graduates through some organization? You'll never get anything from the graduates you help, but it's the people in whatever non-profit you are working with that will remember your skill and drive. Or anything that gets you working with people who can hire you later. It snowballs from there.
When I rebutted that, they did a 100% about face saying they never work for free themselves. So if they never work for free but are telling me to work for free to try get paid work, it is dumb advice. But, hey, let's not confuse anyone with the facts. Let's just pretend I'm a bitch for being pissed off that no amount of proving myself or doing what works for the guys ever works for me and it has kept me trapped in dire poverty for many years.
When the guys here are looking to do business, they exchange emails or other contact info and take it to private discussion. When I try to do the same, I get hit on or ignored.
You see this in comments on HN all the damn time that people say "email in profile" or whatever. Guys do business and help each other out via private discussions.
People leaving public comments with stupid advice they would not follow themselves are absolutely not in any way taking me seriously. It is virtue signaling, just pretending to care without really helping, and it just deepens the problem.
When guys take each other seriously as business people, they hash out problems and solutions privately. The vast majority of men will not have a private conversation with me unless they are hoping for a hookup. That is the crux of the problem here.
Both times I've said people never get work from the people that they help - only from coworkers.
Fifty percent of my income for many years came from engineers and coworkers I worked with while volunteering, and I’m still working with some of them ten years after leaving. My latest client, doing snazzy blockchain work, is from someone I met twenty years ago while volunteering.
The same networks of people-who-know-you-can-get-stuff-done build up regular big companies too - volunteering is just another way to bootstrap this outside of such a job.
If you actually gave a damn about helping me, you would have emailed me try to hash this out privately. You aren't actually trying to help me. You are just continuing to virtue signal and look out for your reputation. Solving my problem is not actually on your agenda or you would be doing something effective about it, not something counterproductive that just serves to further smear me.
The reason my website is unfocused is because I cannot get serious engagement from anyone ever. Engagement is how a website goes from being some half-baked piece of shit to being a means to provide a service in exchange for money. I cannot get serious and respectful engagement. I mostly get platitudes and shallow advice that isn't based on much of anything.
Chin up. Keep trying. Tally ho. Maybe next time.
Meanwhile, my bank account is nearly empty as usual and I am not happy about it. Platitudes do not pay my bills. Encouragement does not pay my bills. Men talking to me to enhance their reputation while pissing on mine does not pay my bills and is nothing innovative. Patio11 has done the exact same damn thing to me. He pissed all over me in public and when I blogged about it years later and someone posted that blog post here because the HN crowd loves its gossip, his only fucking concern was covering his ass and denying wrong doing. Because that's the kind of good guy Catholic boy he is. His fucking reputation matters. My suffering is irrelevant. My inability to come up with enough earned income to have basic food security no matter how hard I try and in spite of high levels of education and competence is of zero concern to him, to you and to most people here pretending they are good people and not sexist jerks.
So please stop leaving me these incredibly shitty comments that just get worse with every new one.
As baseline, I've been commenting on HN for four and half years, 3813 karma as of this writing. In that time, I've been emailed once with a question about a project I've worked on, and once asking me to put some code on GitHub. Zero offers for jobs, or offers for help. And that's totally what I expect.
A lot of your comments here, as are many of mine, are about what it's like to live in America, outside the valley bubble. That's not the kind of things that gets you job offers when compared with "How I used $HOT_TECHNOLOGY to save $HOT_COMPANY 10 million dollars."
Congratulations! You've found a marketing approach that you've proven doesn't work out for you! Now you just have to find something that works.
I've found that what looks from the outside like a secret club is really just that when people work with someone competent for a while, they want to hire them / work with them in the future. Every single one of my new clients in the past fifteen years has showed up because someone worked with me before on a project in the past.
People rarely trust someone just because the've read something they wrote. It really takes working with someone on a project where you are in the trenches together.
You site says you are a copywriter / community manager? Can you do volunteer community management for an organizations some tech organization? Can you somehow finagle some volunteer resume copywriting for Stanford graduates through some organization? You'll never get anything from the graduates you help, but it's the people in whatever non-profit you are working with that will remember your skill and drive. Or anything that gets you working with people who can hire you later. It snowballs from there.
As an aside, your site also looks a bit dated and very unfocused.
Best of luck!