

Ask HN: In my situation, how good would it to work on oDesk? - dubious

I&#x27;m a pretty good frontend developer with almost 8 years of experience although most of it was as a freelance.<p>Right now I&#x27;m working at a web agency making  US$10000&#x2F;year (a bit below the market locally but it&#x27;d be hard to find another job in the area from what I&#x27;ve seen due to my lack of a CS degree).<p>The late hours and unrealistic deadlines are starting to wear on me, specially considering most of what I make disappears after a couple of months because it&#x27;s basically advertising. I wouldn&#x27;t mind working late if my work had even a bit of meaning.<p>I&#x27;d love to work remotely but I haven&#x27;t had much luck sending resumes (maybe because I don&#x27;t live in the US or my portfolio is lacking due to the vanishing nature of my work). My major weakness is that I haven&#x27;t used Backbone and Angular which are very prominent in most frontend job postings around here and other sites. I really want to learn how to use them but I don&#x27;t have time due to the aforementioned agency job.<p>I have read a bit about oDesk and while most people have bad experiences I feel that maybe it would be the best way to escape the agency grind. But maybe I would be sacrificing my job security (I need to pay rent after all) for nothing.<p>I feel lost and a bit disheartened and I&#x27;d really appreciate any advice you may have.
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macarthy12
> US$10000/year

Where you from? That seems VERY low, even for Asia. Have you any portfolio?
When you say frontend, do you mean CSS/HTML or photoshop/graphics? Are you
familiar with Grid systems / bootstrap / foundation / responsive design?

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lnanek2
Maybe he meant 100k/year? That would be below market in the US for a web dev
with 8 years experience. Lack of degree is pretty meaningless if you can
actually code. I'd happily hire him full time for a full year just helping
with games and fun web projects of my own for $10k/year, lol. On eLance I end
up paying more like $5k a month for an active project for a single developer.

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dubious
I wish it was 100k. :) But no, just 10k/y.

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lnanek2
IME odesk/elance rates are half what you can get in person...and some of those
in person jobs just amount to meeting the client once a week

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dubious
That's discouraging but thanks for posting.

EDIT: I was thinking, maybe it's not worth it at your income level but maybe
for mine it wouldn't be so bad? Maybe I'm grabbing at straws.

