Updated 25.09.2018FAQQ: What does the process of working with you look like?A: I always go to meet the employer, so I worked out a fairly democratic scheme of work.
The most important thing is that I never take an advance payment, hoping for the decency of the counterparty.
The approximate scheme of the work is as follows:
1) The employer sets the task described by the general words in a tracker
2) To get started, I need a detailed Technical assignment (hereafter TA). If the employer can provide the TA himself, this is excellent. Otherwise, I myself make a TA, I have a huge experience in this area.
3) TA is sent for approval to the employer. At this stage, the last edits are made in small details.
4) After the approval of the TA, an approximate budget of man hours is determined, to implement the scope of work. Here it is necessary to clarify that in practice, as a rule, in the process of performing the work, new, unknown details appear, and previously predicted time of work sometimes increases significantly. This is standard practice in software development.
In process of doing the work within the scope of TA I close the executed tasks in the tracker of works, indicating the really elapsed time. Tracker (using a primitive self-made work tracker) automatically considers the total time spent on the implementation of work under the TA.
5) The amount of work done is uploaded to the dev/production server and provided to the employer for verification.
6) After the check, the employer must pay the completed amount of work within the agreed time.
Typically, one stage of work takes 7 or 14 days. Thus, money arrives to my account approximately 2 times a month, and only for the works actually performed (postpay)
Working under this scheme I take some risks, but practice shows that I always get paid. The exception is the risk that at the very end of the cooperation (the last stage of the work when the project rolls into hell), the employer may not pay this most recent stage of work. So my last employer owes me about $2000, but I do not blame him, because I know for sure that his project is unprofitable, and he simply has nothing to pay me.
The above scheme of work is by no means necessary and can be changed in one direction or another. I just know from experience that this scheme, as a rule, always suits the employer.
Q: I have an amount of work for X hours and I'm willing to pay $Y, do you agree to cooperate?A: I'm not a “Freelancer” and have never been such a person. I'm only aiming for a constant full time job. If I offered a one-time job, even for good money, I always refuse. The reason is simple, from experience I know perfectly, that the "mental context switch" in the long run always gives negative results in terms of productivity and, ultimately, I earn less and I get tired more. It is impossible to work effectively on many different projects at the same time. Therefore, I worked with all past employers for at least 1 year on a regular basis (usually 2+ years).
Q: Do you have accounts on the social networks Linkedin, etc?A: No, unfortunately (or fortunately) i'm not a public person, and I do not have and never had any social networks accounts.
Q: Can you show me the source code you wrote?A: Yes, although I do not upload my source code to public (github etc.), I have hundreds of thousands of lines of code written directly by me on my computer.
Upon request, I can provide all that is required (for example, the source code of the core of the crypto exchange, it is one of my recent works).
Q: How much do you want to earn?A: I would say that the minimum rate at which I could work is $10 per hour.
But I know that in practice different employers have a very different idea of what is a man-hour. For example, at the last job my rate was $30 per hour, but I closed in the tracker 2-3 hours per day (although I worked full time as a damned one).
Therefore, I will say this: The minimum salary necessary for me is $1600 per month ($10 * 8 hours a day * 5 working days * 4 weeks) - this will allow me to pay my bills. I also hope for significant increase in wages if the employer likes me.
Q: Can I see examples of projects you have worked on?A: Yes you can!
https://rusex.love/This is a social network (dating) platform. Initially, the project script was purchased by my employer for ridiculous money of $250. After installation on the server, it turned out that from a technical point of view, the purchased script is completely inappropriate for production. With the simultaneous online only 50 people script created 100% load on the CPU on the powerful dedicated server.
And then they hired me.
I found out that it's impossible to optimize the script for work under a high load with simple efforts. Every separate component of the application was written horribly.
Then, starting with the bottlenecks, I began to translate parts of the project into my own engine.
In its best days (2017) the project had a attendance of 30k unique visitors daily and simultaneous online reached up to 1500 people (400 logged + 1000 guests) - all this worked on a single dedicated server, and I think this is a good optimization result.
Huge work was done, a lot of money was spent for development and marketing. The project had serious ambitions.
But then the money ran out and the project gave up.
https://playmarket.pro/ruThe project is of my another employer. This is a marketplace of gaming items similar to
https://www.g2g.com/ https://www.playerauctions.com/ https://funpay.ru/ etc
The project began in 2014 and is a typical long-term construction. While we were chasing perfectionism, other projects systematically occupied the market, after all, leaving us virtually no room for grow.
This project is really good from a technical point of view. It is the subject of my personal pride. I'm sure that even if the guys from Google viewed the code base, they would not say anything bad about me as a developer.
I understand perfectly well that two half dead projects are not a great merit for a developer with 11 years of experience, but I have something to answer:
1) If I was a participant in a successful startup, would I have been looking for a minimum-paid job in this forum at 34, starting from scratch?
2) The success of the project depends not only on the Lead developer but on the team as a whole. If there is no market niche and there are marketing errors, then no matter how hard you try, there will not be a result. For my part, I want to say that for all the years of work, no employer or colleague has said a bad word about me. Everyone just said that it's nice to work with me and I have phenomenal stability and efficiency.
3) In addition to the projects above, there are a lot of projects (some in the public some already do not exist) that I developed (crm, trackers, marketplaces, etc.). But their appearance, and functionality is not much outstanding, so I do not see the point of showing them here.
