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I feel similar as you do. I haven't taken the steps to go freelance route yet.

My biggest issues as an employee are lack of autonomy to work on my own hours, projects, technology, teammates etc. As freelancer, you may be able to choose your clients, fire them if they are not a good fit etc. Sure you may have to suck up and work with bad clients once in a while. But the idea of autonomy is very alluring to me.

As devs, we usually do have a lot of flexibility but sometimes you just want to take a few weeks off, you cannot do that as an employee. We have deliverable at end of this month and my boss is already talking about next deliverable. If we do freelancing right, after a big project, we would take a week or so off.

And you can start off as freelancer but overtime you can grow and create a consulting firm. I read this book, Developer's Hegemony, it had a lot of good ideas about how to go about doing this.

Anyways my plan is to freelance on the side for a while before quitting the job.

In my experience, a lot of shops with Java in their tech stack usually get devs from Infosys or other consulting companies. So you are competing with super cheap labor.

I do similar thing, but I just call it just "Keywords".

Then I have separate section, Recent Skills, where I list buzzwords which I have decent experience with.

I agree. I used to believe in absolute freedom of speech on the web. But then people start sending goatsx or whatever as joke in emails. I learned to avoid opening any links form certain friends.

MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter was nice clean space to hangout for a while. Then horrible and traumatic pictures and videos start showing up in my feed. I know the world is horrible place but I don't need constant reminder about it. I unfollowed as many people as I can.

Now as a parent, I cannot constantly monitor these supposedly safe sites. I have seen disgusting or violent videos on YouTube for Kids, Amazon Videos aimed at kids, and even some kids shows on Netflix.

These platform should be responsible for the content they host, no matter who uploaded. That would be one way to clean up flith.

That's why I will pay for cable TV again and let someone moderate content for me.

Yes but they understand that in free market, they have to spend money on quality employees to make money. Hence, people still invest in companies where employees are treated better than their competitors.

Unhappy employees is not good for business over long term. That is why you see in news that racist, sexiest, or other bad actors getting fired even when they were top performers.

You are lucky that you can ignore politics.

As a minority, who has repeatedly faced discrimination; at various jobs, airports, in restaurants, and at social events, I cannot ignore it.

Also I believe it is a moral obligation to stand up for weak. So even if you are privileged enough to be not affected by politics, you should participate in it for your weaker friends and family.

I have been considering freelancing route for a while. And the reasons you gave above are same for me.

In addition, I work in a big corp where I spend a lot of time red tapes formalities but contractors in my team only have to worry about their code and they get paid almost double some employees.

My question is how did you get started? I know you said subcontracting, is it through a consulting firm or do you do it through your own firm?

You can learn sales and marketing when you have a product. In mean time, read books on these topics.

Completely unacceptable.

All of my managers were available during vacation if something truly blows up. But they never planned to dedicate a few hours for work on their vacations.

What your company needs is better processes and policies. iirc, most my managers planned their vacations so that it was not right before or after major releases or other events.

>> My inbox is my to-do list. I email myself things that I need to do too.

> I was vaguely aware that people do that. Why does that work for you, though? Surely one could take up the habit of maintaining a todo list with one of the million apps out there? Is it the "I have to do email anyways" or that it's all in one place?

Yes I think main reason is that it is all in one place. Every time I check my email I get to review my tasks. Also it is easier with some tasks like if my boss asks for something in email or I get a bill. I don't have to go open another app and copy email in there.

Between my work and gmail email accounts, I don't get much spam in my inbox. I also use filters, so newsletters, emails from various systems such as build tools, github, social media, etc, go to appropriate folders.

My inbox is my to-do list. I email myself things that I need to do too.

Unlike Slack, no one on email minds if you reply back a few days later. I like that it is async medium for communication.

Honestly, I think email is great and it would take a lot for me to give it up.

Personally, it seems I touch wrong buttons quite a bit on my phone. I also click wrong buttons when using mouse but that is rarer than pressing wrong button on my phone.

The most annoying part is using touch screen in my car for GPS. It might be bad UI but also viewing angle might be making it hard to press right button. But then again I would not expect a physical keyboard in a car.

In physical land, it is very rare that I press a wrong button. Maybe when playing intense video games, I press jump too soon or use wrong gun. Oh and of course while typing.

Touch screen is still very inaccurate and you don't develop muscle memory.

You are more likely to touch wrong button on touchscreen than on physical ui.

Drone racing sounds amazing especially if it is autonomous racing.

How does one get started in this? I saw this https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/events/ai-innovati... but still don't know how I can start at small scale as a hobby.

Unfortunately, too hard it is too monetize a game on a web.

I see people downloading games on their phones without thinking but don't know anyone who paid for a web-only game.

In another life, I worked for small webdev/marketing consultancy. Their clients were multilayer marketing firms, subscription services startup and other startups.

The company was run by car salesperson types.

And their clients were even more sleazy. One of the popular joke they repeated with clients was that everyone is unhappy, and if they are not, then they haven't seen the right ad.

It was pretty amazing to see "startup" founders come in and say they want to make the world a better place. Then say they need to target stupid people because they spend the most money. Or only an idiot would buy their crap but there are a lot of idiots.

A lot of subscription services are started by rich stay at home spouses. Many of them didn't even really care about about making money but just wanted it as a status symbol and a way to get their pictures appear in their friend's feed. It was funny how wanted to make sure their friends saw their ad, even though they knew their friends will never buy whatever.

After working there for a year, I decided I will never deal with anything remotely related to adtech. Professionally, I am not yet fully removed from adtech. Stuff I work on now is indirectly used by adtech companies.

But I used to spend a lot of time making websites monetized with AdWords. Now I do algotrading as a hobby and feel a lot better about it. There are no false pretenses. It is just about making money. Honest, pure, simple. And it is challenging.

So I would say ads are definitely a lot worse.

This is seems like a good advice to increase competition by using nationalist sentiments. The problem is that many of these nationalist countries would outright ban competition. So people who demanded local alternative will end up with less competition.

It depends on if you are a builder or a tuner. If you enjoy building stuff stay away from DevOps. It feels like endless config changes and fine tuning.

If you enjoy tinkering with stuff, DevOps is awesome because there are 1000s of small settings you can play with.

If you like control, programming is the way to go because you can pretty much do anything. In DevOps, if developers didn't expose some setting, you are s.o.l.

You can use Netlify for this: https://docs.netlify.com/visitor-access/password-protection/...

Seems like a good idea but a bit too complex, first you need to find an OS project that is close to your company's projects. It may work for PHP or JavaScript but not sure if it would work in less popular languages.

Then many bugs that appear simple might be a lot more involved. I have looked for easy bugs in my favorite open source projects, there are not many. All low hanging fruits get taken care of immediately in popular projects.

Then there are many semi-abandoned projects, so even if candidate fix the bug, it may not go anywhere.

And if you do find actively developed project, how long before maintainers accept the bug. Are you going to wait and see how candidate answers maintainer's questions and get their changes merged in?

Are you going to pay candidate for the work? Otherwise, if this becomes common, companies may take advantage of candidates to have them fix bugs in softwares they use.

They are asking what you did, not what they should do.