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Fancy working online? (so you can make the move)


LaaMok

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On 12/12/2017 at 02:56, LaaMok said:

I am going to create a full course to teach guys from scratch to make money online, this isn't a get rich scheme or false promises,  it will introduce you to starting out, polishing off, give you ideas and paths to take. I am confident people will find a great idea along the way,  or maybe you have a business to promote already or a website you want to finish off or improve?

LaaMook, did your course end up coming together? Seems like something I would be interested in.

I do some work and courses remotely but would be interested to hear your perspective on things given that you've been at it a while. Particularly interested in the state of Bitcoin (in Thailand and elsewhere) and any opportunities on that front.

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  • 6 months later...

Always interested in online businesses for side income streams, if this gets off the ground.

Thoughts on the state of web tech in '20 and '21: 

1. Trying to learn a little HTML to get a "webmaster" role at a nonprofit / small business and then persuading them to let you work remotely hasn't been viable for about a decade now. As others have posted, it's too easy to move this kind of thing to India or the Philippines if you're flirting with the idea of letting a USD employee work remotely anyway. The race to the bottom destroyed the offshoring industry, so this is not a good time to attempt to jump onboard that (rapidly) sinking ship. There is no future in building the $1k website.

2. However, platforms like freecodecamp go significantly further than that. This is key. There is a ton of money in the $10k - $50k budget area, along with massive shortages of talent. Specific fields (front-end development on single-page apps, security, devops, enterprise Drupal projects, cloud deployments / orchestration) can't find enough talent. Facebook, Google, and Amazon will always grab the top tier; everyone else is forced to raise their salaries and negotiate benefits (like international remote work) and are still having trouble filling shortages with six figure salary options. The recession is already freezing hiring at a lot of shops, but these are the areas where the demand will return fastest. 

3. The US will continue to offer the highest salaries for all of these fields. If you can deal with all of the other drawbacks of a US employer (and there are many), this is where you want to be. You will frequently find salary offers at twice or close to twice the European rates if you're in a US tech hub. 

4. There continue to be several ways to make yourself offshore-proof; one of the easiest is to build competencies (like the ones I listed above) which are still difficult to offshore reliably and with high quality levels. Another is to get very good at managing projects / clients / both involving offshored teams. 

5. Failing that, building up to #4 is a good way to build a solid consulting pipeline. 

5. A lot of the people I know who've successfully negotiated a partial / full remote role were non-remote to begin with. This is not a problem for people who see this as a long game, are willing to put in the time, and think that those six figure USD salaries are worth it. This is not viable for the folks that were hoping for #1 above; it is getting much harder to convert ~20 hours of online reading and ~10 hours of HTML tutorials into a job. This is more of a career.

6. Programming bootcamps are a useful shortcut to the process, but are usually a 3 month full-time (or more than full-time) commitment + $20k in fees for a 99% placement rate at a $95k starting salary as a junior developer. These will take a hit during covid, but I'd expect them to recover very quickly.

7. A lot of employers are going to be more willing to have the work-from-home and remote-work conversations now, but this is a double-edged sword. I think it'll be great for most employees if you were lucky enough to keep your job through the pandemic, but it will also open up conversations on hiring and salaries. It is highly unlikely that a company will continue to pay NYC / SF / London salaries indefinitely if those roles are being filled by folks working out of their Costa Rican condos.   

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3 hours ago, jmukh said:

Always interested in online businesses for side income streams, if this gets off the ground.

Thoughts on the state of web tech in '20 and '21: 

1. Trying to learn a little HTML to get a "webmaster" role at a nonprofit / small business and then persuading them to let you work remotely hasn't been viable for about a decade now. As others have posted, it's too easy to move this kind of thing to India or the Philippines if you're flirting with the idea of letting a USD employee work remotely anyway. The race to the bottom destroyed the offshoring industry, so this is not a good time to attempt to jump onboard that (rapidly) sinking ship. There is no future in building the $1k website.

4. There continue to be several ways to make yourself offshore-proof; one of the easiest is to build competencies (like the ones I listed above) which are still difficult to offshore reliably and with high quality levels. Another is to get very good at managing projects / clients / both involving offshored teams. 

5. Failing that, building up to #4 is a good way to build a solid consulting pipeline.

I agree with all your thoughts and appreciate the insight. I'll add a few of my own.

I the offshore gigs are very competitive. I recently got a 500 word spreadsheet translated into 6 Asian languages for $5 each. All by a different native speaker. I also just got a result back after almost a month after contracting a Pakistani woman to build me an advanced wordpress website for USD $500 on fiverr. The work is nowhere near finished yet. Those numbers don't look like a way to get rich quick.

The continued dominance in the IT industry by half a dozen big tech firms is wiping out many IT jobs I would think. Advances in software such as IaaS and PaaS must be carving into the demand for ops techs.

I'm very interested in your points 4 and 5. I have worked in remote IT for the past 6 years for a US eCommerce company. I only scored the job by a chance meeting on a forum like this. Apart from the general devops support and some help desk I am pretty much left alone to assess the path forward and investigate new tech. I also do some dev work. I think I stay employed by only earning a low contract wage compared to those mentioned above.

For the OP, I would probably not shell out for a course until you have exhausted a lot of the free stuff online, especially youtube videos. There's a lot of crap out there but many are very good.

For anyone wanting to spend a few months boning up on skills to get employed remotely, these are the skills I would be looking at. This is very much an opinionated list and by no means exhaustive.

1. Decide from the get go if you are a front end web developer / graphic designer doing pretty user interfaces or want to learn to code. Don't do both. If you want to code learn how to make a page in html and make it pretty with css then move on.

2. Most corporate infrastructure is moving to the cloud with the lion's share going to Google and Amazon. Learn Amazon AWS resources. The accounts are free and if you pay attention to what costs money you can get a lot done for free or almost free.

3. Learn basic linux administration.

4. Learn basic / advanced networking.

5. Learn Docker.

6. Learn Kubernetes. Having a kubernetes cluster is a must but you can use local kubernetes implementations to some extent

7. Learn Terraform, in particular how to create a kubernets cluster from AWS resources. Stay away from helm and other CLI's.

8. Learn a programming language or two. I recommend Go and Dart, both Google languages. Neither of these languages appear very high up the list of jobs in demand right now but they will do in future. They are also very easy to learn and fun. Dart / Flutter is great for building mobile apps and there will be a lot of work there in future. Flutter may supersede html in future. Steer clear of legacy languages like C, PHP, Ruby and Java, While these languages are very much in demand they are hard to learn well or don't work well with new container technology. If coding is boring, you will get sick of it so learning a modern language is important.

Edited by Kahoy
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Your recommendations for Go and Dart are interesting. I usually recommend that people begin with a language that solves a particular need for them so that it stays relevant and interesting; for example, can you teach yourself enough Python to build a nannycam out of a $5 raspberry pi, a $30 camera module, and a $2 teddy bear? The problems with Go and Dart, or even a technology like Docker, is that the relevance is difficult to communicate to people who are new to the tech world. Docker, in particular, seems to be gaining traction because senior management has heard the "container" buzzword from the ex-Google types, not because they've understood anything the devops architect has been saying for the last five years.

I've also found much better resources on the more established languages for when people get stuck. I know a very large number of people who gave up on Ruby a decade ago because step 0 of a tutorial had a problem with the ever-changing world of homebrew scripts, and troubleshooting something like this requires an in-depth knowledge of Linux / OSX file systems and permissions, which this target audience (by definition) didn't have. Today, there are extremely stable, bug-free ways to learn Ruby online, with extensive support on both getting unstuck and learning how to get yourself unstuck (an essential programmer's skill). The toolchains are more stable, and the assumption that you have to be a geek to begin this has mostly dissipated. This isn't the case with something like container tech, where the assumption is that you're a technocrat with significant devops experience and you're just adding one more tool to your (well-worn) toolkit. 

I do agree that staying ahead of the technology curve is critical. Indian outsourcers stayed with the $500 WordPress project two decades past the point where they should have transitioned into Drupal or other enterprise CMS platforms. Similarly, (and possible related), adoption of modern toolsets like SASS / LESS or Bootstrap took forever to arrive on the subcontinent. The emphasis isn't on scaling by building a team to work on a $5000 project tomorrow, it's on filling a call center full of people so you can crank out more $500 projects simultaneously, with the night shift making outbound cold calls to every small business in Australia to keep lining up those $500 gigs. 

There are exceptions, but in general, figuring out what a US client is paying a US consulting shop $100k to do and being able to deliver that consistently at $80k wouldn't be a bad model for building an offshore life. 

An interesting hybrid might be to train other people on this, so that you can transition to having some portion of your work (say, 10% to start) being done by a local you pay 8% of the price, knowing that you'd start with spending another %8 of your time on training and management overhead, but with a goal to eventually reduce the overhead and scale by hiring another couple of folks. I know a Filipino who was so successful in training other locals and parking them in desks that his "company" was eventually bought by his main US client and turned into their offshore hub. Every Indian currently fleeing Trump's America and heading back home has attempted this and most of them have failed; being the foreign face of an offshoring shop if you can figure out how to do this effectively would likely far exceed most offshore consulting salaries. 

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14 hours ago, Kahoy said:

I also just got a result back after almost a month after contracting a Pakistani woman to build me an advanced wordpress website for USD $500 on fiverr

Used fiverr a few times over the years the rates are unbelievably low .

i have had work done  which has cost me £150 it would have cost me at least £500 in the UK for exactly the work

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