Yeah, the overhead is real, but can't imagine it's 75% before taxes and no way $40/hour contractors are effectively working at McDonald wages.

And does the overhead depend on your rate? Maybe at $100/hour, it's easy to find gigs and you don't have to be an uber-X specialist, so you can afford to take on a wide variety of gigs and learn on the job if necessary, but if your rate is $200/hour, you'd have fewer potential opportunities narrowly tailored to your specialty and you have to spend more of your own time learning to make sure you stay uber-X specialist.

Shoe,

Find better places to work (if you wanted to actually have a full time job).

I mean that very seriously. There are lots of great places that give you enough freedom/responsibility to work as efficient as you'd like.

I really like not having a full time job. It's really appealing to me to work like a maniac for a few weeks or months and then not deal with much work at all for a few weeks/months straight.

I find it really hard to turn off work mode. I can't just goto an office from 9-5 and then not think about work when I'm off. My mind usually gets engulfed on any given project and I can't really enjoy myself until it's done. It is actually pretty bad (or good depending on how you look at it).

How did you find the clients you have right now? I remember thinking, man, that guy needs better clients from a while back when you were talking about how your clients can't afford heroku or EC2 or something. Also, do you work with other people in your projects or are you the sole developer in most cases?

Virtually everyone who makes a good living thinks about work when they are not working. How important is it to you that you take long unpaid vacations? Employers are also far more accommodating than high-paying clients. It does seem to me that you're horribly underpaid for no good reason, unless your flexibility is allowing you to work on some kick-ass startup you're not telling us about.

candybar,

I don't go out searching. I think my problem stems from "bad networking". The people who refer me work are not quality clients.

I'm the sole developer every time. I outsource design work by either buying templates or hiring people when I think I'll have trouble creating a design that a client wants. I also do most of the content writing and typical SEO "activities" with a fall back to an SEO agency that I have some friends at when I can't deliver since I'm not very well versed with paid campaigns and hardcore GA tweaking / report generating.

I don't take vacations and I'm not working at a cool startup.

All,

I had my iPad stolen today. It's protected by the standard PIN code, but how secure is that against a decent cracker? How hard would it would be to connect the iPad to a computer and access all the data on it? Basically, I'd like to know if I should consider all the data compromised. I know that against a sophisticated cracker it would be, but would it also be compromised in the hands of your run of the mill computer thief (someone with decent skills and access to google, but not a true professional)?

Not sure what kind of work place exists that would nearly require you to work less efficiently. Sounds more stressful than too much work.

Since I'm so swamped at work, I built a database. I have four tables with over 200 columns. I bet no one here questions my sanity.

g_m: Sorry to read about your iPad. That totally sucks.

I thought there would be a way to remote nuke or brick the iPad. Does Apple offer such a service?

What to do if your iOS device is stolen: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5668
Erase your device: http://help.apple.com/icloud/#/mmfc0ef36f

Thanks guys.

I should have added a bit more info to the OP. I have already logged into iCloud and reported the device lost and requested the remote data deletion. However, since my iPad does not have 3G, the remote wipe would only take effect if the ipad happened to be taken within range of an unsecured wireless network, at which point it would connect to the internet and receive the signal to erase itself.

But until that happens, my data is still just sitting there, protected only by the ipad PIN and (maybe?) vulnerable to anyone who plugs it into a mac?

I suspect its safe against anyone unless they really wanted your data. If I remember correctly they have progressively longer lock outs for people just trying the code manually so I think it'll be hard for them to actually get in without some fancy trick. I also seem to remember needing the pin before it would sync.

I assume there's a way for them to hard reset the device and that's what they'd want to do?

Also, sorry. That sucks.

chrome has the feature where you can search a site directly from the omnibox, so i type in "tube x" and it'll search youtube for x. the way this is set up in the chrome "manage search engines" settings, so for twitter the url you input for the search is: http://twitter.com/search?q=%s (%s being the placeholder for your search term). for sites that have an "=" in this search results how do i set this up?

i want to have an "omnibox" search tag for http://www.draftexpress.com/. the search page being http://www.draftexpress.com/search.php

any pointers?

"x site:draftexpress.com"

?

lol no

Yeah office jobs tend to be either chaos or doldrums. Two years ago I was bored. Now I work 60+ hours/week and herd cats all day at the same place.

Yeah, I was thinking about it more and that article is one where there was so much exaggeration/dishonesty it obscures the actual message.

Showing everything in after tax salary is rather lame. And pretending like building equity in your business is just throwing money away is also lame.

I think smaller tech-focused companies are much better at always having interesting work and balancing work/life balance. In about 8 years of working full time I can only think of one 2-3 month period where I didn't have real work to do (so we spent that time building cool tools/doing some useful refactoring) and about 1 year where I was working way too hard. I think I've been pretty lucky about where I've worked though.

g_m,

:'(

i would apply pacal's wager here. the upside for assuming the data is compromised and being right >>>>>>>> the downside for assuming the data is not compromised and being right.

Shoe Lace,

Working by yourself doing a bunch of things, it's gonna be hard to land quality clients with budgets because they can hire a team or a dev shop with multiple specialists. You're just not going to win those bids even if you get better at networking. Even if you're really good at everything you do, they won't believe you and you still won't outperform a team of several experts, you can only undercut them on price, which puts you in a bad situation.

Unless you're looking to scale up and hire specialists and become more of a manager/sales/biz-dev guy, you're probably better off specializing and working as part of a larger team. From a career perspective, I like the Nchabazam route of working through a consulting firm/dev shop and selling yourself as a developer, not a one-man start-to-finish web dev shop. They will be able to get you a higher hourly rate and better clients than you can get yourself. The other option is just to apply for jobs and sell yourself as a contractor.

Economically, it's better to have one skill that's worth $100/hour than three skills that are worth $80/hour each, because the limiting factor is the number of hours you can work. I had a similar problem earlier in my career but had to pick a direction and move forward. Also, if you don't have a lot experience working with other developers, it would be good to have that experience before you become too much of a cowboy. Being able to work with others in a large project is worth much more than pure coding ability and you also don't run into certain types of technical challenges in short, solo projects.

I haven't heard of any tools for cracking the iPad out there, which doesn't mean they don't exist just that it hasn't hit any of the Mac blogs out there. Considering it's Apple I wouldn't expect it to be hidden for long. The chance that there is a secret way to get into an iPad and the guy who stole your's is the one who knows it is pretty slim. You can't do much with an iPad plugged into a Mac without being asked to unlock it.

How often do you clean it?

If the standard pin code is 4 digits like it is on my iphone and grubby ass fingerprints are aligned in a near grid like fashion, 'cracking' it can't be too hard the ol' fashion way.

7. Learn a field really well (quant finance, supply chain, advertising analytics etc) and start a company or consulting firm in said field.

candybar,

Yeah time is definitely my weakness when it comes to this stuff. I would love if I could just concentrate on the development aspect of things and let other people worry about writing content, doing the design work and eventually pitching people.

I'm not even a control freak either with the other aspects of what it takes to go from nothing to a finished site. It's just close to impossible (for me) to turn a profit when a client only budgets like $1,500 for some site.

I'm stuck having to perform 3-4 different roles. If I outsource the non-development work then I end up with maybe half of that but I would also be in charge of running the circus which is a large block of time and responsibility. It ends up coming out to be some wage that is likely bested by a 17 year old girl working at the gap.

Shoe, you can certainly do better than that, can't you? I thought that entry-level devs with nearly zero experience are able to make $1,500 in a week.

You know vanilla JS and Node, both very difficult languages to learn well. With Node being esoteric and (probably) poor documentation, the prerequisite would appear to be a strong ability to program and an unusual talent for figuring out things.

Even with your self-admitted no math knowledge, you were still able to finish off that Intro to Programming course. You seem to have a strong hacker-ethic and a deep interest in learning and dissecting problems.

On top of this, you must have a lot of finished full stack websites, using both SQL and NoSQL, most of which are apparently hand-coded.

All of this has to sound impressive to someone somewhere. I would think you'd be able to get some decent contracting gigs from all of this. High-demand is one thing, but the fact that you know languages and concepts that perhaps 100 people in the US know, and there are immensely interesting and difficult problems being solved in those areas, I would expect that you'd have little problems getting some great jobs after a bit of ramp-up.

I totally get it though. I personally hate working for other people and I suffer massive self-confidence issues. I'm absolutely mystified by terrible programs. While I'm sure I could do much better than the average con-artists pumping out Drupal and Megento sites, I simply don't know how to instill confidence in people I am asking for work from.

My job is currently suffering a massive issue with one of the websites they are having built. The story is sort of complicated, but the gist is that someone is building a new site for them. He ended up hiring someone who could only program in Visual Studio, and he chose to use a framework no one ever heard of, and as far as I can tell, has documentation worse than the mind-share. It has taken him 8 months to build up a simple store-front so far. Basically, this wacko threatened to walk off the job if he didn't get his way from day one.

A previous job had something similar happen. The cost was under 10k, but it took the company 8 months to "build" the site. By "build" I mean they installed a theme, perhaps tweaked a few product names, and sent it back.

The point is that I have enough faith in you that you don't want to be a turd and you don't want to be a turd-programmer, and I'm pretty sure that you've proved that beyond any doubt by now. The fact is that you are fighting against these idiots and that is where you have no chance of winning or improving. Definitely take a page out of Nchabizam's strategy, or heck, you had a job offer from your x-nemisis. Why not go for it?

impresssive (seasonal!) video I saw today:



blows my mind the standard of this