Philippines
Background:
I quit college because it was expensive for me. I entered the company with 1 year experience basic programming(C, C#, etc.). They have given me a book ruby "Programming Ruby" and started to work there as a web developer/tech support/call center for 3 years. I was just earning $550/month and as the company and people grow it goes down to $250 due to failed pricing and small clients.<p>I was still staying there due to clients that used the product. Also the relationship with clients that I have build because we worked on it side by side.<p>Current Situation:
I have exposed my resume online. I wanted to do remote or relocation overseas.<p>I'd like to ask what is there regular per hour rate of ruby on rails programmer. And how skill is based on the pricing. I was also hoping if $15-$20/ hour.
This is one of the most important questions in all the open source world, and yet, instead of one of the big-name writers of the hacker world bringing it to the floor, it comes in the form of a question from someone hoping to earn $15-$20 an hour. It makes me sad.<p>gdiocarez: First and foremost, thank you for breaking the silence on this.<p>As for an answer: So, the world is weird. I generally bill $185 an hour as a spot rate. I have fairly little problem finding steady work at $100 or so on a steady basis. I tell you this because I think it's fairly typical for someone living in a major city in the US.<p>My hope, and I hope everyone's hope, is that the world will generally equalize around this range, or even higher. I have observed again and again that, each time I or a colleague makes a contribution of value, we create a dozen or so opportunities for like contributions.<p>Unlike the fossil fuel economy that characterized the industrial era, I surmise that the information age is somewhat sustainable as an exponential curve of economic possibility. This is a radical viewpoint I'll warn; many of my (otherwise seemingly reasonable) friends fear that "the music will stop" unexpectedly and that today will be one of "the good old days."<p>The truth is: nobody that I know knows the answer to your question. Price yourself aggressively and work hard. I can tongue-in-cheekly advise you to try to be lucky. So far, being born in an economic powerhouse (and in an economic, racial, and social position of privilege) has worked for me.
Simple approach which while took some time, did work great for me in long term:<p>- register on odesk.com and elance.com (same owner, but slightly different projects there)<p>- start from very low hourly rate to build history and feedbacks. Make sure that every client is super happy and leave only 5 stars. Try to focus on small projects in the beginning (you don't want to get stuck on large project with low hourly rate, and bumping hourly rate in the middle project both unfair and hard to do)<p>- As you get projects closed (also reason to start with small project - to close these quickly) follow with client to make sure he leave nice review. In the very beginning you don't want really to focus on relationship, since these clients unlikely be able to pay higher rate in future, but you have to get to get project to complete client satisfaction.<p>- Bump hourly rate few dollars every week/months/x projects/x dollars billed. You need to find perfect formula here for yourself. Good signal to bump rate - when you get offers to work on project and you don't feel like you will be able to do it 'cos of a time constraints.<p>- If project does not satisfy your curiosity or feels like a BS project (this all will be based on what you personally like and do not like to do) - never decline projects, but instead make a "fuck you bid", where you multiply your "normal" bid by x2 / x5 / x10 (again, you will need to find perfect formula here). Idea is that you never say "no", but instead make client say "no" or get paid a lot for doing something you do not want. This also makes you look more expensive and your work more precious.<p>- Don't be afraid to bump rate. It is a bit contradictory, but in my practice very often well paid work came with very reasonable clients, and work where project was on very tight budget came with manager-jerk. Somehow when you charge a lot, clients respect you more.<p>- Do all of this until you reach point where total revenue will start dropping off or you find yourself without necessary projects. It is very important to keep in mind that 100% "employment" should not be main driver behind hourly rate pricing. You need to find optimal balance of number of hours you need to spent on projects vs. your hobby project or self-education. It is MUCH better spend 20 hours a week at $50/hr vs. 40 hours a week at $25/hr.<p>Hope this helps :)
$100 an hour is a rough journeyman rate in a lot of US metro areas. This implies that you're able to take a description of what software should do, implement it in code, have that code actually work at accomplishing the objective, and deliver it in a fashion instantly consumable to your clients. Also, it is a plus if you don't require handholding to do this.<p>Self-assess honestly on whether you're there yet. If you are, your new rate is $100 an hour, and you should spend the next several weeks pitching clients on why they should have you build a system for them. Where to get seed clients? I'd start by working your pre-existing clients, either for direct work (if allowed under your contract with the ex-employer and local norms) or for introductions to similarly-situated firms, <i>if</i> they were good clients. If not, skip it, find good clients.<p>Relocation is not necessary and, short term, will neither sell engagements nor immediately improve your situation.
Hi. I'm french but I live in the Philippines, and I worked with many rails programmers here. As employees, Rails programmers go from PHP 50 to 150k a month usually ( in USD, it's USD 1200 to USD 3800 - And yes the Philippines Peso symbol is PHP ;) ).
For remote programming, $15-$20 per hour is really a floor rate. Specialize yourself and become really good. Contribute to projects. Have personal project. Have a good portfolio, answer questions on StackOverflow, have a nice github. Deliver on time. Communicate clearly with your clients. More importantly, learn how to define clearly the scope of your missions, learn how to say no, how to explain why some features might take more time, etc... . Your skills are important, but to make your clients satisfied, what matters is communication and specialization. Your specialty is the value you can add to a business, and your difference vs the competition.
First off, I think you should probably ignore a <i>lot</i> of the advice in this thread. They're tossing US rates at you which are basically irrelevant.<p>There's simply no way anyone will pay $100/hr to someone in the Philippines.<p>That being said, your goal of $15-20/hr is completely doable from the start. Just go on odesk.com or elance.com and start bidding on projects. Start at $15/hr and then gradually increase your rate as you develop a great reputation.<p>If you'd like to increase your rate substantially (never to US levels, but maybe to $50-60/hr), make 3 investments:<p>1) Take English classes. Communication skills are absolutely essential for freelance/remote work, and I'd much rather pay $20-30/hr more to someone whose sentences parse readily for me.<p>2) Learn other languages and some CS fundamentals. Someone who basically just learned Ruby out of 1 book and worked at a mediocre company is never going to be considered at the top of the heap, so do what you can to move up the value chain.<p>3) Start to build a technical brand/portfolio. If you contribute to some open source projects, that's where you can really start to see higher rates (if you wrote/contributed to an open source project I'm using, I'd happily pay you $150/hr to make some changes).
Rails especially is being overrun by bootcamp graduates.<p>I would say though that $15 - 20/hour is about half of what you could charge depending on what you have to show off (your portfolio of projects). If the portfolio is bare or small with nothing very impressive, then $20 - 25/hour is where you will be at until you have something to show.<p>I recommend finding a site that you use often that you think is cool/awesome/great, define a MVP (minimum viable product) version of the site and re-build it using Rails. Make sure the front end and backend are as solid as you can make it but also don't spend more than a few weeks on it.<p>This is now a project you have to show off to potential employers, freelance clients, etc to display that you know what your doing and really show the quality they will get.<p>Once you have 3 or 4 of these projects under your belt I think you can charge +30/hour at least.<p>If you can't think of anything to do as projects, take the top websites on the internet and re-build them with a simplified feature set:
> YouTube (shows you can work with video upload/storage/encoding even if its all through gems)
> Facebook (shows you can handle authentication and user relationships as well as many different models and controllers)
> Reddit (shows you can build sites that can handle lots of link organization)<p>As a fourth I would choose one of these: KickStarter, SoundCloud or some type of mini game.<p>With these make sure to go the extra step of using ElasticSearch or Solr for auto-completion in search as well as indexing. Basically take your simple feature set and go the extra mile to make them really good.<p>Feel free to send me a message if you want to discuss anything else. I just finished a dev bootcamp myself but I have recruited for developers in the past at a few startups.
Honestly, I'm not sure that anyone can answer this for you. As a freelance web dev myself, I can barely answer it for myself.<p>I suggest starting by setting a bare minimum for yourself – the rate you need to charge to survive. Freelancing should probably be about double the rate of full-time employment, as you have a lot of unchargeable (or just plain idle) time, so you have to allow for that.<p>Then, it's really just a matter of looking around and trying to figure out what other people are earning for similar work. It also helps if you have some idea of the value you're providing for your clients, as your rate should be roughly proportional to that.<p>For instance, I know one of my main clients charges out (both my time and theirs) at a flat rate of NZ$150/hr, and a bunch of their time is unbilled, so the NZ$80 they pay me is in the "reasonable" zone (especially for pretty solid guarantees of ongoing work). My "survival" base rate would be about NZ$60/hr (NZ$40/hr at the kind of hours I manage to bill wouldn't really provide me a living.)<p>But like I say, you're in entirely different circumstances to me, so the details don't really translate at all. It's a matter of (for all of us) figuring it out for yourself, really.
You should go read "Double your freelancing" by Brennan Dunn
<a href="http://doubleyourfreelancing.com" rel="nofollow">http://doubleyourfreelancing.com</a><p>Also check out his blogs, his book goes exactly through how to figure out all your questions, like how much shouldnyou charge, how to find clients, etc
While you probably won't be charging 100+$/hour at thr beggining you can work your way up to that eventually.
Side tangent (and maybe this should be its own thread), but I would be interested to know what is generally considered billable time - where do you generally draw the line?<p>Learning a common tool (say Rails) that you will have to use for the project? Learning a very specific tool (say a function-specific library for some particular part of the project) that you have not previously claimed prior knowledge of? Studying the clients own existing code?<p>What about negotiations? Research into the required work needed for particular functionality?
1) Compete on skills, not price. There will always be people charging less than you, but that's OK. Find similarly skilled/experienced remote workers in developed countries, send them a sample RFP, and ask several for a quote. They will readily respond, and you'll have a very solid grasp of what you should charge.<p>2) Unless clients have legacy code, most don't care how their mission is achieved; they only care that it gets done on time and on budget. When talking with them, focus on <i>what</i> you will do for them - not on <i>how</i> you will do it.<p>3) On the matter of budget, the bigger the better. Financially constrained clients are not worth your time. They must squeeze more out of every dollar, which means squeezing <i>you</i>. In the words of famed bank robber Willie Sutton: <i>"Go where the money is."</i>
If you're a skilled Ruby on Rails programmer, you can get well over $20/hr as a remote contractor. It might take some time to build up to the higher pay rates, but it's certainly doable, and you can probably make decent money along the way as you develop your skills. You could try sites like ODesk and Elance on your own, but you should also consider joining an "offshoring" firm as an employee to learn more about the business and develop your skills.<p>Caveat: being a successful contractor requires more than good programming skills. You also need to be an effective communicator, find clients, plan and manage projects, etc.
Pricing your self is just one aspect of being a successful freelancer. There is a lot of other stuff that you have got to keep in mind including: client satisfaction, getting paid on time(or at all!), finding new clients, letting go of existing clients, dealing with failure etc<p>One of the books that has really helped me and the one which I refer to constantly is "thefreelancery" by walt kania [1] Give it a read. I am sure you will find it useful.<p>There is another book that focuses more on the "survival" part of your freelance journey. The freelancer's survival guide[2] by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.<p>My experience has been that<p>a) your rate usually depends upon your perceived ability to successfully deliver. Prove to your prospects that you can and they will be more willing to give what you ask<p>b)Don't mention where you are from (unless you are okay with your prospects discriminating on price based on your location, it's sad but it's true)<p>c) If you have trouble finding >$50/hr jobs then what you do instead is quote a fixed price (non refundable 1/4 in advance) and finish the job in fewer hrs it takes some practise to identify high income and low effort projects though<p>All the best :)<p>[1]<a href="http://thefreelancery.com/portable-wisdom/" rel="nofollow">http://thefreelancery.com/portable-wisdom/</a>
[2]<a href="http://kriswrites.com/freelancers-survival-guide-table-of-contents/#sthash.aElbivOX.m4tkcjAZ.dpbs" rel="nofollow">http://kriswrites.com/freelancers-survival-guide-table-of-co...</a>
As a kind of food-for-thought question rather than a topic-hijacker, how much should cost of living be taken into account for your pricing?<p>E.G. if living in Manila is 50% cheaper than living in SF (<a href="http://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/manila/san-francisco" rel="nofollow">http://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/manila/s...</a>) (and my apologies to gdiocarez if they don't live in Manila!) you probably shouldn't price yourself at 50% of the wage of a US remote worker. But what about, say, 5% cheaper than the competition so that you can compete on price (or indeed earn more, relatively speaking) without devaluing your skills?<p>I think current advice here does a good job of giving you some algorithms for taking your cost-of-living and working upwards to a reasonable wage from there.<p>(Full Disclosure: I've worked in Waterloo, Canada and currently in London UK, so I'm used to a generally lower salary than comparable jobs in the US and currently pay similar living costs to SF and NYC. :P)
One small advice is to work on the whole project, not just a small part of it.<p>If you have a very clear backend specification, it's very easy to find a good RoR freelancer to code it. Or, if you have an exact and thoughtful wireframe, practically any UI person could do a good job. And html? There are thousands of freelancer on Elance/Odesk that will charge 5$/hour. Will they all be the same quality? Of course not. But the point is it's very hard to differentiate yourself for a prospective client.<p>Now, taking on the whole project is much harder and requires more experience but it pays off because there's less competition. More specifically, if you can gather the requirements and really understand the problem, finding the best technology for it, coding it and managing other freelancers as well as delivering a high quality project with amazing documentation.. that's gold.<p>It's so much better to charge for a whole project than bill per hour.
It seems like your best bet is to move to Cebu or Metro Manila and get a job in BPO. You can start around 40,000 PHP a month pretty easily (30,000 very easily) from what I see on Jobstreet and when I go to hire. Competition for devs is fierce in the city between the different ROHQ's and BPO companies.<p>Actually we're (ROHQ) trying to hire a junior .NET dev in Makati city, here's the link if you want to apply: <a href="http://jobs.jobstreet.com/ph/jobs/5088558?fr=21&src=12" rel="nofollow">http://jobs.jobstreet.com/ph/jobs/5088558?fr=21&src=12</a><p>If you'd rather contract and work remote, best of luck to you! I have no idea what that market is like. If you're not in the city, it seems like your internet's not going to be stable enough for reliable work, and if you are, maybe it's easier to brave the traffic as you get your feet under you career-wise.
If you go to freelance, don't make your price lower than $20, even for a beginner it's a normal price. I'm disappointed and desperate to see A LOT OF indians and people from SE Asia who are ready to work for a plate of rice, they are ready to work for $5! Don't be that stupid.<p>That situation also affects the employers: they see so low prices and they consider that normal. If I were to ask those employers: would you be able to survive in your country (mostly America) for $5-10 per hour, I'd be stoked to listen to their answers!
Hey gdiocarez,
I am a student from India and still in college, I started out freelancing on Odesk with an hourly rate of 5$/hr and soon realized I was in demand and started raising my price over months. And soon I was charging 25$/hr before one of my clients hired me full time 40hrs a week at a rate of 15$/hr. So you should get started with freelancing and you will eventually know your price. If a client likes your work, he/she will be ready to pay more on next project and thats how you increase your price.
I suggest getting back to university.<p>It is about future-proofing. And for this, the actual university doesn't matter much.<p>A college degree is required for pretty much any medium to large company. This is especially so for international companies in developing countries. Think long term: 5 to 10 years down the road all kinds of opportunities can open up, don't exclude yourself from them.<p>A college degree is (amongst other things) a document, a passport, and without one you will have incredible obstacles to overcome.
Price yourself just a little higher than you feel comfortable doing. You should <i>almost</i> feel like a fraud by asking for that much money. Having been in your position before, I recognized that this question essentially boils down to confidence. The more confident you are, the higher you can price yourself and still be effective at getting clients.<p>You're looking for an absolute answer to a problem that doesn't work by that kind of logic. There's no big price sheet in the sky that says that guys with your experience level should get $X per hour.<p>Think of yourself like a priceless painting at an auction. Nobody knows how much you're worth until someone digs deep into their wallet and pays $X million dollars for you. And the reason that caused him to do that could be as much about his art-hungry, gold-digging spouse as it does about anything to do with the painting.<p>So get used to bargaining. There's a bunch of negotiating tips you can use to get better compensated, they're scattered all over the web. A big one is to never drop your price. Have the chutzpah to stand firm. People will use dirty tricks to get you to drop your price. You have to get wise to them, or you'll never be able to really do well.
The number you're looking for exists in some theoretical sense, but I don't think knowing it will do you any good.<p>The price appropriate for you is the one that when you charge it to the market you can reach, you'll sell the number of hours you want to sell.<p>This depends on your skills both as a programmer and as a marketer. Your skills, the market you can reach, and the broader market are all changing. Indeed, it's your job to expand the first two.<p>Treat this as a set of experiments. Try setting your price at $15/hour. Can you sell all the hours you want? Great, then tell the next client who asks that your price is $25/hr. Eventually you will discover a level that keeps you as busy as you want.<p>At that point you may, if you like, start asking how you can bill even more. New skills? Better marketing? Different clients? Building a team? Alternatively, you can just keep plugging away.
You should charge as much as you can charge while still getting work. For fully remote work as a programmer, honestly, it tends to top out at $45/hour for experienced people. If you aren't experienced yet, you can't charge as much. This is because there's basically infinite workers willing to work in Europe on programming at that price.<p>For someone who can meet in person in the US, on site, with a legal ability to work and then works remotely you can do double that. For someone on site rates easily reach $200/hour and above. My Dad used to bill $213/hour doing neural network programming for credit card companies. Generally you spend Monday-Thursday on site consulting, often expensing a hotel, then head home for the weekend.
One 'trick' that has worked for very well for me on several occasions is to offer a fixed price rather than an hourly rate. This does however require that the job has very clear deliverables and the you have a very good feel for how much work the job actually is. It's especially helpful if you've already done something very similar in the past and already solved all the hard problems once.<p>In my experience many clients prefer knowing up front how much a job will cost rather than having to worry about arguing about hours as a project drags on. I've managed to essentially get double and triple my normal hourly rate this way, while the client still walked away feeling like he got a very good deal.
Hi,<p>Thank you for your courage in making this post. I am from the Philippines too. Like you, I did not finish college. Yeah, it's really hard in this country to get a corporate programmer job if you don't have that piece of paper.<p>I am solely a freelancer for about 4 years now (not full time though, as I don't get to work 8 hours a day). I get mixed results with my career as a freelancer (oDesk, Elance, etc.). Sometimes the monthly income is so high I can take a vacation for three months. Sometimes, it's very low or nothing at all. At times I had to borrow from my girlfriend or some friends just to keep things going. Here are some things that I have learned in my journey:<p>1. Make sure that you have winter savings, or it would be hard to raise your rate even if you are qualified to do so. Before I resigned from my BPO job, I made sure to have some savings before working freelance full-time. Unfortunately, TY Ketsana hit, and my house went underwater. I lost my initial savings, but still I was able to thrive with some projects.<p>2. Start with small projects first. Your priority at this time is feedback. When starting out, my mistake was that I aimed at larger projects first. In the eyes of most clients, size does not really matter. Your ability to accept and finish work with good results is more important.<p>3. Personalize your cover letter, but keep it short. In my experience, clients don't like reading lengthy messages. But they take effort in writing jobs descriptions. Every freelancer should respect that.<p>4. Higher-paying clients are generally easier to work with.<p>5. As much as possible, charge a fixed-rate for projects. Clients can limit their risks while you can save yourself from time trackers. If it's going to be a job for at least six months, it's usually OK. If not, it's often wiser to give a fixed price. I have seen some bids where their hourly bid is equal to the fixed-price, and get accepted.<p>About your employment, I think you can sue your employer for lowering your rate (if it's at least an established business entity). That's against the law.
I'm from the Philippines, too.<p>From my experience, you have better chances of getting a better pay AND work-life balance at a full-time job than in freelance sites (Elance, oDesk, Freelancer.com). There's barely any decent clients there who are willing to pay us $30/hr. However, you have the experience, and I'm very well aware that RoR developers here can easily command a salary of PHP150k-200k every month... perhaps even more. All you have to do is find the right company, and ask.<p>If you check out Jobstreet and JobsDB and set the salary filter to a minimum of 100k, you'll still find plenty of openings for Ruby devs.
It is pretty simple:<p>1. Determine how much time are you willing to allocate for work.<p>2. Set whatever the price that will fill up that time with client work.<p>3. Once you have more clients than allocated time, increase your price.<p>(bonus) 4. Client pool and time permitting, target projects that will further evolution/creation of skills you want to improve/develop, not the ones that you've already good enough at.<p>To be able to do that, you should have some form of rudimentary tracking of your time/price/value performance. No need for overkill here, a simple regulary updated spreadsheet or even just a text file will do. The accent is on "regulary updated".
Back when I was freelancing the single best piece of advice I got was to keep on raising my rates until no one would hire me. It's a very simple way of finding out the price the market will bear for your skills.
If you plan to work remote, don't charge Phillipines rates just because you live there. People in the US will easily pay you 5-6x as much for the same work, and all you have to do is <i>not say where you live</i>.<p>On that note, I second the suggestion to improve your English. Most of your clients will know absolutely nothing to very little about technology and your ability to convince them will end up being a function of your command of English in your email exchanges, Skype chats, cover letters, etc.
Start with a "Salary" that you would like to earn. Where I am at Software Engineers go for around 100k + Benefits. If you conservatively figure 20% of salary for benefits then the total number is about 120k. Still tracking with me? Now divide that number by the number of man hours in a year (1928) or the number of hours you are willing to work. In my example you would have to charge 62.24/Hr to cover that cost.
Try checking other freelancers on sites such as odesk and elance.Compare their expertise and experience with your as a measure in molding your own rate.
It's not entirely clear if you want a regular job or to freelance/consult. Lots of good advice on here re: freelance. If you want a salaried job checkout weworkremotely.com for finding 'western' priced remote working jobs.<p>You're in quite an enviable position - your in a location where your cost of living is relatively quite cheap to the west, but the potential to earn western type wages - enjoy :)
Thank you all for your feedback. I have learned more not just about pricing here. I'll do my research on developing my communication skills.<p>I'm not from marketing and sales. We are managing college school data. I have build from enrollment to accounting. Our boss just discuss about our sales and market that is why I know how the company works.<p>Here is link to my projects if anyone is wondering:
arcibalio.com/works
I work with a number of staff in the same spot you are.
A year is unlikely to cut it re overseas clients. With hiring one of the most impressive things is open source work or blogging about how to do things: seniors do this from frustration, but they're are plenty of early lessons that go forgotten. I would encourage that if you are targeting au companies with existing tech teams
Price is relative to how available, responsive and bug-free your work is, and how good your attention to detail is before you ever write a line of code.<p>A key thing you can do is maintain a public github account and show the quality of your problem solving skills and work. The people who pay more find these types of insights useful.
I view the way to bill yourself as "What's the difference between me and the next best person for the role?"<p>This means a talented engineering manager will pay you more than an HR person, and any way into a company that involves HR will underpay you. Just my 2 cents.
1. Are you really good at what you do? This is important. Find out - what a person charging $100 per hour can do in one hour or few hours. How much time would you take to complete the same work (with similar quality)? This should include reworks and the time spent on communication and clarifying stuff.<p>For a minimum rate in Philippines, I would say you should target 1/2 (or 1/3 if cost of living is really low) of the rates a similarly-productive person would earn in the US. If you are unable to get even 1/3rd within the first 3-4 months, you should take up a job and improve your overall skills in parallel. You may find clients and people telling you 1/4th or even 1/6th is good enough - its a no no, not sustainable.<p>I work as a consultant and have also hired freelancers occasionally. Your expected rate is certainly doable. Even if you start with Elance/ODesk you can easily achieve $25ph pretty quickly if you can communicate well, and ask important questions. Also try to get long-term work at your expected rate and charge higher for short term work. I find it easier to get a fixed-cost projects at a better rate compared to getting a higher hourly rate.<p>2. When working remotely you have lesser chances of charging more than half the rate of a similar person living and working in the US (and with rest of the western world). Even if you charge half of that say $50ph, you are doing really good. Beyond that, try starting a firm and build local presence.<p>3. For money, focus on a particular type of work you can get good at pretty quickly. If you are an RoR person - stick to it. Allocate few hours if you want to do something like PHP or some strange new tech - just to learn.<p>4. Once you are set and earn a minimum rate comfortably, target not to work above 20 hours per week. Typically many people have degraded productivity above 24-25 hours per week. Focus on efficiency and improving it consistently. Leave the rest of 20 hours for reading, educating yourself, increasing domain knowledge, for hobby stuff and figuring out ways on how to charge higher :)<p>5. Write blogs, contribute to open-source, answer questions on stack-overflow, take up learning some bleeding edge stuff. I usually get a lot of work just because of these.<p>Market economics, opportunities, education, language and culture for North American region and Asian region is quite different and sometimes counter-intuitive. So when a US-based-person says "I can get $100ph fairly easily" - you should always introspect what/how they are doing differently.
sorry for hijacking the topic. I started learning programming recently and I have been programming since past 1.5 years and I consider my skill to be somewhat between beginner to intermediate. I know Tornado, Flask and Django.<p>My question is, is it okay for a beginner like me to work remotely? For some reasons I will be leaving my current job soon and move to a small city where are jobs. So my only option is remote jobs. However some friends/colleagues suggested me that it would be a bad idea cos in a real job I could be learning under an expert which is not possible in remote situation and so, I should move out to city.<p>Any advice? Thank you.
I am form India, started working $5/hrs and now I charge $20-22/hr.<p>Odesk and Freelance.com are good places to start looking for remote work.
In the US people will typically not respond to a job posting unless it is 40/hr. 30/hr is too low for most knowledgable developers, who could go another place and get 50 or 75/hr.<p>cheers.