Promote yourself as a young, intelligent and enthusiast developer with coding and design skills. Price your hourly rate at $80-100/hour; and get your tuition paid in the next couple weeks.
Edit: Quite a discussion here. I'd like to add that an important part of doing business is trust. Clients are going to throw lots of money that's going to evaporate on HTML and JavaScript code. They want to be sure that you are the guy who is going to give them the right result.
Tip: Make a decent lab page. Look at design agencies in sortfolio and copy them (not their design, their strategy). Build a couple more projects, and open source them on Github. Send emails to design agencies, and try to build a network.
Finally, decide if you want to do this for a living or concentrate on EE. The overhead to get a single project is the same to get a constant stream of projects.
In all types of pitches — to employers, VCs, etc. — desperation is the absolute worst thing you should ever let transpire.
- I just felt like a piece of shit when I wrote it because I have no connections and have had a very hard time trying to get a normal job. I also had no confidence that any of this would work out so that did not help my ego when writing.
- When I submitted this to HN, it was fairly late and I went to sleep about half and hour later so basically I slept through the entire discussion going on here and it would have been a bit late to change anything after I woke up.
- There was a comment or two saying that maybe I should change the post of labs.im (before I went to sleep) but I did not know what I could write. I didn't just want to write something like "im smart and can do this well" because anyone could say that and I particularly dislike talking about myself like that.
Also, to anyone that has emailed me, I have not replied to any emails yet but I am starting now. And sorry for the late reply.
As an employer, what really concerns me are retention rates. I don't want to spend more time a month later looking for another developer.
The way your story sounds is like you want to work for one month and then you will part. I don't know what your plan is, but if you just want to freelance temporally I suggest you go to sites like Elance or oDesk, you will not get much but you will get something. On the other hand, if your looking to start freelancing, even when you begin studying, I strongly suggest you update your homepage and come across more confident.
Finally, if your in a bad financial situation, don't announce it. People will take advantage of the situation and make you work for something your not really worth, when in reality, you know you're worth more.
Did I mention "Yes"?
Look, I used to be you. And lately I've been missing me so I thought it would be fun to sit down with me and advise me on what I didn't have the guts to do years ago.
You're very worth it. Your site alone shows a combination of the following:
- The ability to program something more than just "hello world", a linked list, or the fibonacci sequence. You'd be surprised how many so-called computer science "graduates" I've interviewed who can barely do that, and if so, ONLY that. Don't underestimate the ability to actually program. Contrary to the impression you might get from Hacker News and Proggit, where it seems like everyone and his mayor is learning to code, MOST people in this world can't. There are great people in this world who don't or can't program. They may be smart, but they aren't programmers.
- Experience with modern Javascript, web apps, HTML5 (whatever THAT is), and all the deployment logistics that go along with those things. There are great programmers in this world who can write compilers but who never really groked the web or how to put stuff on it, let alone cool dynamic stuff that works. They may be programmers, but they aren't developers.
- You seem to be able to make it all LOOK good. This is something I still struggle with and, even if all you did was copy something from somewhere else, your site still shows that you care about aesthetics. In this brave new world where geeky toys (read: programs) have become seen in the mainstream as actual "products" (thanks, Apple), people - even geeks - are starting to demand more from their software. They demand that it be friendly, intuitive, and look nice. This is a great advance in our industry. It finally denies us all the permission we've been giving ourselves to produce crappy-looking and crappy-acting software and then hide behind how hard it was to get it working at all. There are great developers in this world who grok the web and apps and all that and still for the life of them can't make something that looks nice. They may be developers, but they aren't designers.
- Your site and HN submission show an aptitude for - or at the least more than a passing awareness of - the necessity, power, and effectiveness of marketing. There are great programmers, developers, and designers in this world whose creations never see the light of day. They may be all those things, but they aren't marketers.
So go back again and take stock of your marketable inventory. You seem to be a:
- Smart
- Programmer
- Who likes to develop "products" as well as cool programs
- Knowing it's important that they look as good as they work
- And realizes that none of it matters unless people know about it
And you don't think you're worth a measly $80-$100/hour?
You know what that is? It's our traditional economic and academic systems infesting your mind with some of its most anachronistic and worthless beliefs. In days gone by, that piece of paper was a requirement to get anyone to even LOOK at you. But now?
No.
You're in the right place already at Hacker News. Here we have people who need good talent. They know it when they see it. They know how much more important a Github and app portfolio are than a "To all whom these presents come greeting..." poster on your wall. In short, they aren't pointy-haired bosses. And you don't want to work for those anyway.
So do me a favor, me: demand what you're worth, and do it before you begin to BELIEVE you're not worth it. Because then you won't be.
If you are in a position to hire devs (with a proper
budget for it), would you hire this gentleman for $80/h
knowing that he is a 2nd year EE student in Australia?
It looks like you have some skills - use them to promote yourself! :-)
Nice work!
Anyway, this was meant to be temporary, and I got a job for a year, before deciding to return to freelancing. This time, however, I figured that I had little to lose by attempting to charge what I wanted to get paid. I also switched to charging on a per-day basis.
What happened? In terms of work available, very little - there's lots of work out there. I found that I was able to spend longer on the initial discussion phase, as the cost of doing so was minimal compared to my overall day rate, and it led to happier clients - everyone wins.
My rates have continued to rise ever since, and I'm on the verge of hiring other programmers to take some of the load off me alone. I could go on and on about the charge-by-the-day option, and how everyone wins with it: clients don't worry about whether having a conversation with me will be charged - of course it won't! - and it gives me the freedom to create huge amounts of client satisfaction if I do a ten-minute fix for free.
So, charge good rates, in daily increments, and do so happy in the knowledge that you're charging a fair rate for valuable skills.
Love the honesty on your http://labs.im/ page. But you might be underselling yourself. You are saying you are willing to work cheaply because you are young and a risk.
You are capable of using node.js, you use phantomJS, you seem to have good product and ux thinking and you are able to use github. Just the last one alone puts you on the upper 50% of the worldwide freelance market. Not to speak of the first three things i mentioned.
As somebody living in UK i appreciate your modesty and i wish you all the best for your jobhunt. Projects like this are genius thing to do, continue until you find something :)
There are clients who want to hire good developers for a lot of money and those who want to hire good developers at university who don't know how much they're worth yet for peanuts. That's not always bad, I've had at least one great client in that category, but it's not lucrative—granted you may have to take what you can get.
Nonetheless, OP: I urge you to aim higher than "work for cheap" and please please please reword your acquisition letter to sound more like "I'm a good developer but I didn't have a portfolio so I made these things," rather than, "it will be a big risk taking me on"—maybe to them it will seem like a risk, but you know better!
As somebody living in Argentina and born in the US, I should have no appreciation whatever for your modesty :P but I do, since I think my first cold emails to potential clients went something like yours: honest, but embarrassingly modest. But I soon learned that toning down the modesty is a great way to get more clients and charge them more (seriously, you'd be surprised how high your rate can get, even as a relatively untried uni kid).
Also, don't forget the monthly HN freelancing threads if you aren't already aware of them. Here's Aug 2012's: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4323612
I've always found that a bit strange, but maybe you know something I don't?
For the record I'm based in Norway, and English is my second, not first language -- but even if it was just to recommend friends and acquaintances that are in a similar position as op -- I would really like to hear how you would suggest going about looking for such work?
Moral: hiring is more like a hookup than a rational assessment of capability.
Then you know D3. You can sell yourself as a package that can create beautiful visualizations.
Then you made it to the top of HN. This is no coincidence. You got here on purpose. You studied previous post and knew exactly what to make that would interest this crowd.
All that makes you a smart person, way above average. Go charge a lot of money.
Having said that, you're not too much of a marketer.
I think I'm pretty much in the same situation as Nafis. I'm majoring in Electronics and have a passion for computers.
Only difference is, tuition is quite cheap here in India (around $5000 for 4 years). So, small freelancing projects help me sustain.
Though the quality of education here is questionable. One year into college, all I have learnt is * Stuff as much portions you can during the term * Write the exact things from the textbook on your exam * Forget or vaguely remember it in the holidays
That's not really what I hoped for. Hopefully, it gets better over the years...
Also, be sure to pursue internships and if you have opportunities to network/get connected in areas that relate to your professional specialty, take them.
Unfortunately this thread shows very clearly that whether you get good grades or bad, and whether you learn a lot or a little, your actual (even vividly demonstrated!) capabilities are comparatively much less important than the emotional tone and images you use to market yourself. So start also to think about those things.
Low Cost, Connections, Visa stuff are a few reasons I'm still sticking on to it. All of them are not core to college. I think this is something that needs to be fixed before people lose faith.
At times, I feel I'm wasting time on coursework (around 9 hours a day) but I somehow convince myself that I'm not experienced enough to judge.
That being said, it did indeed get way bettery.
I would create a CV on http://labs.im rather than a text story about your situation. You should use your knowledge to create a kickass CV page.
I agree the other comments that you are going to be peppered with low paying freelance offers, you might as well register on odesk.com or similar. But I believe that your software skills are much better than that.
By the way, Some of the cities (Brisbane, Sydney & Melbourne) in Australia have a thriving startup scene, you should hit them up.
It looks like it falls here:
offset: $(this).offset().top - $('svg#data_pointer').offset().top + 18
Note: I am in a vbox of Arch running Firefox Aurora 16, so I also don't know if it is a browser bug.
EDIT: I didn't mean it in a bad way. Trying new stuff is a perfectly fine reason for doing things and this looks quite beautiful. I was just looking for an answer like "this helps you see whether more karma is given on weekdays or weekends". Statistics and visualization should answer meaningful questions, I think.