pentupho

Dead or not, it's still a good choice if you want to deliver native windows gui apps.

$150/day living expenses? $4500/month? Where are you?

I've been doing odesk/elance gigs for a few years, and though I can find work at $25/hour, the competition is stiff, it's a pain trying to get paid for all hours billed, and the clients aren't those you can easily list on a resume (good portion of the jobs are well-paid corporate sysadmins/programmers outsourcing their jobs, or shady fly-by-night spammer/advertiser types). All meaning, if companies really think $75/hour is normal in some areas, but more established programmers are unwilling to do fixed-price contract, then those contracts are low hanging fruit for the likes of me.

> Instead it took over a year and the lead developer on the project walked away making a rate of right around $10/hour.

To me, this sound like: if you accept a fixed rate contract knowing it'll work out to $10/hour, you can be employed for an entire year. Yes, please.