Continuation of the story .
It was getting dark. Both directly and indirectly. I was looking for a job as a programmer with great diligence, but there were no options.
In my city, there were 2-3 ads for a 1C developer plus, a rare case when teachers of programming courses were required. It was 2006. I started my studies in the 4th year of the university, but my parents and the girl did not ambiguously hint to me that I was looking for a job. Yes, I wanted to. Therefore, having passed a couple of interviews for the position of a course teacher and not having won luck there, I was already rushing to master 1C: Accounting. With a baggage of dozens of books read and hundreds of programs written in C ++ / Delphi and Java, I started learning 1C out of hopelessness.
But to my happiness, cable Internet has already been “brought” to our city, and it was possible to try your luck by posting a job search ad on the sites. Having mail on mail.ru and often going there, I found the announcement section for myself and wrote there about all my rich experience in the field of software development. I already wrote in the last part that the first ten responses to my ad were in the spirit - "write to Gates." But the 11th was a guy who turned my fate around 180 degrees, just as it happened at the first lesson in programming courses.
I received a letter in my inbox, something like this:
Hello Denis,
My name is Samvel and I am the director of OutsourceItSolutions.
Мы noticed your ad about looking for a job as a developer on mail.ru. Ready consider your candidacy. I propose to talk in more detail on ICQ - 11122233.
Best regards
Samvel,
CEO,
OutsourceItSolutions
Such semi-official and over-business style continued throughout the entire course of our cooperation. As they say in the West, I had "mixed feelings". On the one hand, a person offers a job, and it seems to be not the slag that we had in the city. On the other hand, nothing was known about this company, what it does and what conditions it offers. Of course, it was necessary to act, while there was nothing to lose. We quickly contacted ICQ, Samvel asked me a few questions and offered to meet to sign documents to get started. Questions from him were general and concerned mainly my skills and experience.
Like these: “What do you write on?”, “What can you show?”, Etc. There were no “What is the difference between an abstract class and an interface”? Especially tasks in the spirit of “flip the array”.
It was the beginning of September, lectures at the university were exclusively in the specialty, and I went to them. Along the way, I came across, either my father's friends, or friends of friends who wanted for free, a full-fledged Enterprise solution for their business or government institution. It was also an experience, and in my free time from lectures, I improved my skills on these volunteer orders.
In short, there was no money, there were no opportunities, so Samvel remained the last hope to break out somewhere.
On the day of the meeting with Samvel, I asked my classmates if they wanted to go to an interview with me for company.
Samvel stuttered that if I have friends with IT skills, then I can bring them with me. What was read between the lines was "we take everyone indiscriminately." Few of my classmates agreed, or rather, this is one out of ten respondents. The irony is that those nine who had important things to do, like beer or Counter-Stirke on the grid, after a while also got to Samvel or went through him.
So, a guy named Seryoga, who agreed, went to scout with me what kind of business this person had, and to look at the prospects. Serega always harnessed himself to any whoredom when I offered him something. I often gushed ideas, like creating a social network for job search, and Seryoga joined in, at least as a consultant. By the way, in 2006, LinkedIn was just developing, and outside the States there was nothing like it at all. And potentially, a correctly implemented idea of such a social network could be sold today for .
But back to the meeting with Samvel. I had no idea what was ahead of me, and under what conditions we would work. The only thing that interested me was whether I would receive my coveted $300/month, and if I'm lucky, then using the stack of technologies that I knew.
We agreed to meet in a crowded place, near the stadium. There were benches next to us and it was noisy. This place, near the center of an industrial city, was more suitable for drinking a bottle of beer than signing a contract for a new job at OutsourceItSolutions in the person of a CEO named Samvel.
Therefore, the first question to him was: “What, you don’t have an office?”. Samvel hesitated, and averting his eyes, replied that not yet, but we plan to open it.
Then he took out two contracts from a plastic bag from the supermarket, for me and Seryoga. I tried to delve into what was written in them, but I had never read anything like this in my life, and this legal language caused rejection. Unable to bear it, I asked:
- And what does it say?
- This is an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement
- Ahh...
Even more confused about what it was, I had to nod. For another five minutes, I frantically searched the text for key words such as “fine”, “credit”, “obliged”, “in case of default”. After making sure that there was nothing like that, he put his signature. Let me remind you that Seryoga was with me for moral support and the search for new earning opportunities for myself. Also, not understanding what he was signing, he repeated this action after me. We exchanged a few more words with Samvel. Again about my skills and experience. Asked if I know PHP?
Here with something, and with PHP very seldom worked. That's why I said that I know Perl. To which Samvel arrogantly threw out - "That Perl is the last century." Even though the age has just begun...
Anyway, not being sure what would happen next, I, mixed with nervous laughter, said to Seryoga: “Well, they didn’t sign the death warrant…”. Everyone looked at each other and Samvel promised to send further instructions by mail.
The next day, a letter arrived in which I was given a "corporate email", a link to my personal profile and instructions on how to fill it out. Also a sample of the completed profile of Samvel himself.
I think in this place it is worth telling what kind of company OutsourceItSolutions is. The company as such did not legally exist. There was a very weak site with a flashy design of those years and a gender. Samvel. Probably sitting in shorts and a T-shirt in front of a monitor at home. He was also a web developer, on which he made the main income with a rate of $ 20 / hour. I used to cross paths with his father, who was doing the same thing that Samvel did. Namely, I was looking for senior students of IT specialties, who could be charged for orders to the west. The usual homemade outstaff.
So Samvel has been registered on the oDesk freelance exchange (which is now Upwork), since its inception in 2004. Of course, he already had an advanced profile, a lot of skills, and a clear understanding of how to work with foreign customers.
Also following in his father's footsteps, he opened his own agency on oDesk. He brought people like me there and took a percentage of every hour he earned. At that time, he had about 10-15 people in the agency. The last time I looked there, the number of "IT-specialists" exceeded a hundred.
Let's get back to my work assignment - fill out a profile on oDesk. As you understand, Samvel brought me to freelance. It was the only opportunity to earn something at that time and in that place, with my knowledge. I'm lucky. As did most of my friends who went freelancing after me. Now most of us have 10-12 years of experience in IT, freelancing, remote work. Not everyone from our group did so well, but this is a separate issue.
When I saw $8/hr at the top of my oDesk profile as the 160th bold, I quickly started multiplying that figure by a forty-hour workweek, then by 1280 hours a month. And having counted as a result $ 2107, I experienced joyful euphoria. I immediately figured out how much time I would need to buy a used VAZ-2000, which cost about $XNUMX. With even greater enthusiasm, I rushed to fill out the profile and wrote in it everything that happened and might happen.
In the column Other Experience, I wrote that I play football well and was the captain of the team. For which Samvel tactfully hinted that this experience was off topic and that it should be deleted. Then I started taking tests on oDesk. This is such an occupation, and even if your last name is Stroustrup, then it’s not a fact that you will get the highest score in C ++. The questions were written either by Indians or by other freelancers, which was full of ambiguities and sometimes errors. Later, oDesk sent me these questions with answers, and asked me to review the tests. I found at least 10 mistakes and incorrect wording.
But nonetheless. For the Delphi 6 test, I got 4.4 out of 5, which was an achievement for me. And in C ++, it’s even a “first place” medal, which, as it were, means that Satan himself has not been able to pass this test so far. This was the result of my efforts to learn the standard and write a compiler. Therefore, even with a blank profile, I already had a competitive advantage over other freelancers.
My oDesk profile in 2006-2007
I must say that in 2006, oDesk.com was such a cozy place where posts appeared 2 times a day, in the Desktop Software Development section. They were answered by 3-5 people, mostly from Eastern Europe. And with an empty portfolio, you could grab a good project. In general, there was no competition, and so it happened. I received the first draft fairly quickly.
Somewhere within a week or two, Samvel sent applications for work in my niche. Then he told me to send it myself - I have application templates.
First clients
Ironically, my first client on oDesk was a student from America, with a problem similar to the one I solved for our students for pasties. Around 10 pm, the first client knocked on my Yahoo Messenger. I was a little nervous, because I felt that I was on the verge of something important. And the future depends on this order. In any case, like almost any normal person who goes to work on the first day. Yes, and not working before.
This customer guy sent me a Word file with a detailed description of the task to the smallest detail. Examples of I / O and code design. The quality of the requirements was an order of magnitude higher than ours. Despite the night outside the window, I rushed to write the task to send it to him today. It was important for me to get the first positive feedback. This was followed by a standard client question - "how long will it take to solve the problem?". I figured that the business would be here for 3 hours, plus an hour to polish everything, test it.
It turns out 4 and by tradition we multiply by 2, in case of force majeure and lovers of finishing touches. I answer: “8 hours, tomorrow I will throw off the solution.”
In fact, I finished by two in the morning. And in the Western part of the USA it was still light. Therefore, after winding up 5 hours in the tracker, I sent the solution to my first student client from America.
The next day, there was a lot of joy and gratitude from this guy. In the review, he wrote how wonderful I am and that he did everything in 5 hours instead of the declared 8. Here it is - customer loyalty. Of course, I would do it for free, if only long-term orders would go to me. But what was my joy when I received as much as $ 40 on my account. Not $2 from our students, but as much as 40! For the same job. It was a quantum leap.
Long term client
As time went on, I came across various trifles, which still gave earnings above the average for the city. I just got to the bottom of what was going on. It was necessary to speak English, and fluently. Although I studied the language at school and university, but the native-speaker is another matter. Especially if it's American. At that time, the program Magic Gooddy was popular, which translated entire sentences.
There is also a built-in speech synthesizer. This helped a lot, although the quality of the translation was in the style of Ravshan and Jamshud.
Magic Gooddy - a program that helped to communicate with the first customers
I once applied for a job where I had to write a plug-in for Internet Explorer that collects data from the MySpace social network. Today, both projects are a relic of the past. And in 2006, it was mainstream. No one thought that Facebook would shoot, and MySpace would completely die out. Also, no one used Chrome, because. he wasn't there yet. And plug-ins for Firefox - were not popular. In the States, the share of IE was many times larger than other browsers. Therefore, the customer’s rate was correct, only with the timing he lagged behind by 5 years.
Well, I was given a test task for a couple of hundred dollars, to write a plugin that logs all the events that occur in IE.
How to do it - I had no idea. We were not taught this at the university, there were no such orders. I had to go to my favorite rsdn.ru (StackOverflow was also not helpful) and search for the keywords “IE, plugin”. What was my joy that some other programmer made a blank of what was written in my TOR. After downloading the source codes, pulling a window on them to display browser event logs, I sent the task for verification.
Half an hour later, the answer came - “I am very happy! This is exciting work! Let's continue to cooperate!".
That is, the person was satisfied and eager to continue on an hourly basis. What was surprising to me, he offered to raise my rate from $10 to $19 over time. I really tried hard, but I lacked the experience of running a project alone. And Andy (that was the name of the client) tried to motivate me either with money or with stories about how he was looking for an investor. With all this, Andy is just the person who gave me the confidence that freelancing can make money, and very well. He also gave me the opportunity to leave Samvel and create an individual profile so as not to pay extra interest for nothing.
In total, I worked with Andy for over a year. All his requirements, ideas and ideas, I embodied in C ++ code. He told me how he runs around for investors to scale the project. He invited me to America several times. In general, we have developed friendly relations.
But don't trust the Americans you do business with. Today he is your friend, and tomorrow, he can change the budget of the project without blinking an eye or even close it. I've seen a lot of this in 12 years. When questions concern money, all values like family, health, fatigue - they do not care. Direct hit to the head. And no more talking. About clients from the CIS, I generally better keep silent.
It was 2 cases, out of more than 60, which ended in nothing good. Such is the mentality. And this is the topic of a separate post.
So, earning as a local oligarch on the Andy project, I already came to graduate from the university in my own new car.
It seemed to me that ahead, all the roads before were open. I believed that we would still find investments for this project, and I would be at least a Team Lead in it.
But not everything is so smooth in this business. Having received a diploma of a specialist, I went to the sea with my girlfriend, to relax and have fun. It was then that Andy slipped me a pig. While I was relaxing, he closed the contract, and when I asked for an explanation of the reason, he reluctantly replied that there was no money, everything was decaying and there were a lot of bugs in the project. Therefore, fix this list of hundreds of bugs for a couple of hundred, and see what happens next. Cool twist though. Of course, it's not the Dropbox company that closed Mailbox for $100 million, but the next steps weren't entirely clear.
So I floundered like a frog in a can of milk, trying not to drown and whipping sour cream. But the pay became much less, there were more requirements, and I said that it was time to end the cooperation. So things won't go any further. Years later, Andy again turned to me for advice. He still cannot calm down, and he is sawing new startups. He speaks at TechCrunch and other events. Now I have created an application that almost instantly recognizes, translates and synthesizes speech.
As far as I know, I received several million investments.
I started looking for a new client on oDesk, which was difficult. There is one drawback in good income, stability and rates. They are chilling. If yesterday I could earn $600 in a week by adding a couple of features. That “today”, with a new client, for the same $ 600, I need to do more work, simultaneously delving into the client’s tools, infrastructure, team, subject area and, in general, the specifics of communication. Early in your career, it's not easy.
Before returning to a normal mode of work, with the same earnings, a rather long period of time passed.
In the next part, a story is planned about the global and local crisis, the Middle level, the first completed major project that saw the light of day, and about the launch of your startup.
To be continued ...
Source: habr.com