Ask HN: I will work for free ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1207725

by swdev • 16 years ago

22 56 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am willing to work for free on interesting project until you find me useful and decide to pay for my work (hope this will occur within few months).

My current location is bangalore and I'm a senior developer (10+ yrs exp.) working for Top notch software consulting company.

Very interested in mobile technologies. Love to work on iPhone or Android applications

Profile: * C#, Java, Ruby, Rails * Silverlight, AJAX * Windows, Mac, HPUX * Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, SQL, database schema design. * Subversion, Git, ClearCase * Knowledge of object oriented design concepts and design patterns. * Proficiency with n/jUnit, n/jmock, ASP.NET framework, and CruiseControl.NET. * XP, TDD, Continuous Integration

maxklein• 16 years ago

What about PHP? I have something you will like, but initially, the project is PHP based.

x10nd2• 16 years ago

what about PHP?

eam• 16 years ago

I believe he wants to know if the poster knows php as he didn't list it on the post.

swombat4• 16 years ago

I don't think this is a good approach.

As an employer, I wouldn't want to invest the time in getting someone up to speed with my systems if they have no "lock-in" that means they'll stay with me until they've paid off for that initial ramp-up period (which would cost me time). I particularly wouldn't want to do so for someone who already has a job at a software company - I'd clearly be a distant second (if not third or fourth) priority in that person's life.

Next, about the profile - I suggest you pick a narrow specialty that you really want to work on (e.g. Ruby on Rails), and focus on that. I don't think many people, particularly start-ups, are interested in hiring a "C#, Java, RoR, Silverlight, Ajax" guy. That long list makes you look unfocused and implies that you probably suck at a lot of technologies rather than being very good at a few.

My suggestion to you would be: pick one technology with a thriving OS community (e.g. RoR), and contribute open-source software. That's one way to work for free that will greatly enhance your value to potential employers. Start a blog, talk about your experiences with Rails, promote your open-source projects, etc. You'll soon find paid work coming your way.

HaltingState5• 16 years ago

He lives in India. A programmer there makes 350,000 Rs a year. All these responses are so discouraging.

"That long list makes you look unfocused and implies that you probably suck at a lot of technologies rather than being very good at a few."

In my startup, we have everyone doing everything. If all someone knows is java, they are useless to us. Each of us had to learn 3 different new languages each just to get our product to launch. We do not have the luxury of having someone with 10 years experience who only knows Java. If something needed to be done, someone had to do it. If we did not have the skills in the group, we had to learn them.

The critical factor for success in a startup is not 10 year of experience in one narrowly defined technical specialty. Specialization is for insects. The most important characteristics for effectiveness in a startup is the ability to learn and the capacity for getting things done. This is one of the key differences between working in a startup and working in a larger company. In a startup you have to do your own marketing, sales, programming, interface design... Everything needs to be done and it is an expensive luxury to have a person specialized in each area that is required.

" That long list makes you look unfocused and implies that you probably suck at a lot of technologies rather than being very good at a few."

"That's one way to work for free that will greatly enhance your value to potential employers. Start a blog, talk about your experiences with Rails, promote your open-source projects, etc. You'll soon find paid work coming your way."

If you want to be poor for the rest of your life and at the mercy of an employer, this is probably a good strategy. Instead of attempting to make yourself more appealing for sale to your bourgeoisie overloads you would achieve greater success and freedom by focusing your efforts on creating something that has value and which people are willing to pay for.

plinkplonk7• 16 years ago

"He lives in India. A programmer there makes $1200 a year. All these responses are so discouraging."

Rubbish. The average annual pay for someone just out of school with zero experience in Bangalore is about 10,000 $. (I live in India fwiw).

The lowest salary I've heard of is about 500$/a month and this is for a "walking dead" warm body who couldn't code to save his life outsourced to dumb Western companies to pad team size. You can just about survive and live very frugally in Bangalore on this.

"you would achieve greater success and freedom by focusing your efforts on creating something that has value and which people are willing to pay for."

This is excellent advice (just discount the "burgeoise" anti employer ranty bit).

shabda6• 16 years ago

> A programmer there makes $1200 a year.

Pretty sure you missed a zero there. :)

swombat4• 16 years ago

Specialising in something doesn't mean you can't do other stuff. I have done, in my time, Java, PHP, C, ActionScript, Ajax, Ruby/Rails.. hell even Basic and Pascal while I'm at it (and that's just the ones I actually built functioning software with...). But I wouldn't list those on my CV. At this point in my life, I'm primarily focused on the Rails + Flex stack, and I would be lying if I claimed that I'm proficient at all the technologies that I once was proficient at. You NEED to be able to pick up any technology required along the way, of course, but you can't be proficient in all those technologies at the same time.

I do not believe for one minute that this guy is proficient at all those technologies. It's a full time job just to keep up to date on Rails, let alone on Java and C# as well! The obvious conclusion from that list is that they're just technologies he's familiar with, rather than technologies he's good at. Therefore, the obvious conclusion from this "CV" is that he's not good at any of those technologies (or at least there's no hint as to which he might be good at), and just listed them all in a shotgun approach. That is NOT a good hiring signal.

Bullshit. That strategy (blogging/being active in the community + copious open source contributions) will soon have you connected with more freelance work than you know what to do with. Beyond starting a start-up (which this guy is clearly not ready for yet), it's pretty much as close to freedom as you're gonna get as a programmer.

Working for YOUR start-up? That's not HIS freedom, dude, that's just slavery in service of YOUR freedom.

jagtesh3• 16 years ago

swombat, everyone doesn't want to be an entrepreneur.

I'm an Indian, one who has lived in Bangalore for the past 6 years. I made a conscious choice of not working for an outsourcing outfit and instead plunged into the unknown realms of entrepreneurship. But I was lucky. I'm young with no dependents. No additional responsibilities other than taking care of myself. It's OKAY for me to get my hands burnt, because I know I'll survive to fight another day. On the other hand, many of my peers have their parents and siblings to take care of. Not to mention their own family if they're married. It's a big risk in India to lose a job and there are lesser financial instruments to aid the people (it's impossible to get a credit card without a job and the govt. doesn't pay anything to the employed, rather it _can't_).

Once you've lived under these circumstances, it's understandable to see a person who wants to work in a field they enjoy while having a sense of job security. Maybe because they have 10 years of experience in their fields, (which would pay them significantly more than Rs.350,000, esp. in _Bangalore_), a chunk of which goes into settling their EMIs. In such a case, jumping to a new field won't earn them as much while it could leave them stranded (there's little or no demand for non-Java/Oracle/BI Suite/.NET specialists here).

While I hope this give's a better insight into a Bangalore office worker's way of thinking, I do agree with your suggestions.

RiderOfGiraffes5• 16 years ago

This is a pet peeve of mine, and my apologies if it feels inappropriate. I also recognise that, given your post, you are likely not be a native English speaker. If that's the case, please accept this as intended to help you improve your already excellent English.

However:

  > ... everyone doesn't want to be an entrepreneur.

The opposite of "Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur" is "Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur" which is (logically although not in emphasis) equivalent to "Some people don't want to be entrepreneurs."

To say "everyone doesn't want to be an entrepreneur" means that there are no people in the world who want to be entrepreneurs, which is clearly false, because some people do.

Again, apologies, but this is a common mistake, and it's really worth being able to recognise it when you see it, and to be able to avoid it.

Sometimes it's worth recognising it and ignoring it. Apologies if this was one of those occasions.

alnayyir• 16 years ago

>That long list makes you look unfocused and implies that you probably suck at a lot of technologies rather than being very good at a few.

Virtually everything programming-related that I've learned has contributed to a more rapid grokking things differently/deeper that I work with on a professional or personal basis.

I'm a generalist for two reasons.

1. I believe a renaissance style understanding of programming languages and informatics contributes to my ability to rapidly pick up and in a deep way grasp what's going in anything I have to work with, and

2. It's simply needed by my employers. I don't work in the corporate world anymore, although when I did contract for large companies, I worked as a .NET dev with a specialty in debugging and reversing. Now I'm a django/ajax/admin/db generalist and I enjoy it more.

I'm a generalist because it's simply what my employer needs from me.

They don't need someone who knows MS SQL Server in and out, they need someone who can make rapid decisions about what tool out of hundreds is going to be able to best fit their needs and rapidly learn how to deploy it for them.

There's really only two kinds of understanding when it comes to software. Structural, and memorization.

The first large chunk of learning a programming language or technology comes to grasping the structure of how something is built/designed and utilizing that knowledge to be able to predict how things should be implemented.

The second part, and certainly the more laborious/time-intensive is memorization. That's anything that falls out-side the "least-surprise" vector and that simply requires memorizing the intricacies of how things interact. (C++ and the English language are notorious for this)

Having a broad understanding of virtually any software concept is a form of human-caching. It's caching the common engineering tropes that underlie the things you have to work with on a regular basis, and if you know anything about deploying software stacks or how hardware works, you know that caching is everything.

Simply being a static human .NET/Rails/PHP machine might look attractive to an employer, but it leads to dangerously narrow decision making from a broader sense and could lead to problems later if the company wants to pivot to a better approach/technology.

Anecdote:

Over the past year, my company has moved 2 projects from Jboss/coldfusion to Django. We have 5 more projects to perform the same switch for. This coming week I'll be converting the svn repositories to mercurial. I've already centralized the repository infrastructure, switched them to Linode for the VPSs, will be setting up an extra off-site backup service soon, and we've switched them from Eroi to a local message sending system, saving them $150k per year on mailing costs.

All the while, I'm converting perl scripts that handle billing and commissions for another business within the company to python (for direct integration within django), have written an entire customer management frontend + backend, and I've only been here 6 months.

By all means, tell me a PHP/Rails/Whatever monkey is more valuable.

A good developer can do anything you ask of them in the web world. Exceptions being hardcore Quant type (statistics, huge databases) projects or embedded work (requires strong understanding of the principles of writing software closely mated to the hardware and knowing ANSI C in-and-out, if not the assembler for the target platform).

I mean, I wouldn't exactly expect a Rails dev to be able to tell me what the const and volatile type qualifications mean when combined and where you'd normally see them. For my part? I got 9/10 on an embedded.com C dev test, whereas the global average is 4-6/10. I've never even worked in the embedded industry.

But do I know x86 and arm assembler and could probably slap together a control system for a production line in a pinch? You bet.

I take great pride in being a programming chameleon and in learning as much as I can on my own time, I have no idea why you'd desire a person to be narrow.

You think Paul Graham got ahead because he spent 10,000 hours mastering the blub everyone else was using?

x10nd2• 16 years ago

Your 10 years is a waste of career, if you agree to work free of time, also its a waste, if you offering for the price of a soda

shabda6• 16 years ago

[Hope this doesn't sound too harsh.]

I few months back, we were hiring and Put up an ad on Monster. One of my reject criteria was "having more than 3 unconnected technologies". Even with >10 yrs exp, listing all the technologies you might be connected with doesnt look nice at all.

Also no matter how desparate I am I would never,

"I am willing to work for free on interesting projects", as that just leads to wrong people and wrong expectations, who dont value your work or time.

Also if you want this ad to be effective, a newly created account with no credentials like a Github account, a blog or your site doesnt help.

shabda6• 16 years ago

If you are looking to work full time at a startup a number of Indian startup blogs have job sections

pluggd.in venturewoods.org

You might meet some interesting people at Bangalore's Barcamp and Startup Saturday.

Proto.in has a forum which has frequent job postings.

The web links for these are googlable, but I am too lazy to do this right now.

Confusion• 16 years ago

  having more than 3 unconnected technologies

What do you consider 'unconnected'?

  that just leads to wrong people and wrong expectations,
  who dont value your work or time.

QFT

shabda6• 16 years ago

C#, Java, Rail -> Why all three, eaither is a substitute of other. MS-SQL, Oracle, Mysql -> Ditto above.

My point being that if you list all of them you probaly do not know any of these at the level I want/require.

plinkplonk7• 16 years ago

" One of my reject criteria was "having more than 3 unconnected technologies". Even with >10 yrs exp, listing all the technologies you might be connected with doesnt look nice at all."

WHile it is your privilege to use whatever criteria to reject people, this is complete nonsense.

I know many excellent developers from my days at ThoughtWorks who are experts in and move seamlessly between the java/j2ee, dotNet and RoR stacks. If you understand the fundamentals behind one web stack you can shift trivially into another. Many have contributed code to both j2ee and RoR (say).

If you really understand http (and associated bits like sessions, caching etc), sql (and associated bits like database scaling/sharding etc) , an ORM, Javscript (maybe a framework like JQuery) and have worked on some large web apps for a few years, switching to "unconnected" stacks is the least of your worries. Web dev doesn't change all that much over the years.

The only significant change I see is the rise of NoSQL/"BigData" and really how much time does it take for a talented developer to come up to speed on these things especially if he is working with people experienced on the "new stuff" (for whatever values of "new stuff")? Web Dev is hardly rocket science stuff taking decades ot master.

The rest of your post though , this bit

""I am willing to work for free on interesting projects", as that just leads to wrong people and wrong expectations, who dont value your work or time.

Also if you want this ad to be effective, a newly created account with no credentials like a Github account, a blog or your site doesnt help."

is very much on the dot. Let me add to the chorus of voices here advising you to actually build something/write some open source sw so people can judge how good you are. "Free" is hardly the criterion one use when bringing on a new dev onto a critical project (All startup projects are critical projects)

mapleoin2• 16 years ago

Well those three technology that you mentioned are actually connected, and you mentioned a very strong link between them: they're all web stacks. You actually cited that part of the original post: "...having more than 3 unconnected technologies..."

vaidhy• 16 years ago

I do not see a way to contact you.. My email id is in my profile. Ping me and we can check it out.

HaltingState5• 16 years ago

Send an email to HaltingState@gmail.com

I have a friend who is working on some awesome iphone games and could use someone with experience with OOP design patterns. He would be willing to split revenue generated by the applications. Right now he is doing Objective-C development for the iphone (easy to pick up).

The android platform is going to be a huge opportunity in a few years, but the iphone is still the largest app store market, so that is what he has been concentrating on. Mobile development is an awesome opportunity and a very good area to develop experience in.

charliesome• 16 years ago

LOL no thanks

erlanger• 16 years ago

Why not just throw yourself into an open source project? Many pay down the road if you're successful enough, and you get to keep your dignity. More importantly, you'll know you aren't being exploited.

mapleoin2• 16 years ago

Getting into an open source project with the objective of at sometime getting a paid is a very bad reason to join an open source project. Besides the fact that there are absolutely no guarantees of that happening the attitude you'd probably bring to the project wouldn't be beneficial for the community there.

braindead_in• 16 years ago

I am looking for someone to port our Skype recording plugin to MAC. Can definitely pay later on.

adrianscott• 16 years ago

I don't think you should knock the guy for having experience with a lot of technologies and mentioning them. Like he mentions 3 languages, c#, Java, Ruby. (My resume has a lot more and I'm hiring, not job seeking.)

What might help you a bit more in marketing yourself, swdev, is to mention a bit about some projects and/or accomplishments. hope this helps.

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