Consider another aspect- agency costs. I recently asked for a quotation for some custom work in php. To generate pdf and zip files from database with a dashboard. Agencies quoted it as roughly US$ 340. That is steep.
So its good that a lot of help is available at sites like stackexchange. We completed the stuff ourselves.
I suppose you paid the salaries for the person(s) doing that work in-house. Assuming your programmer's salary cost (~1.3x their gross salary) is $5000 per month and the median month having 20 work days, that price is about the equivalent of 1 day of work for your in-house programmer.
So that price needs to pay for 1 work day for the outsourced freelance programmer+overhead/profit margin for the company itself...Sounds reasonable to me.
Below a certain threshold it doesn't make sense to put in the time/effort to get a new client.
Actually, a 340$ quote from a US (or similar economies, like EU, Canada, AU, NZ) is a big red flag. No consulting business can really thrive charging that low, especially for non-recurring work.
It is quite literally not worth my time to get out of bed for less than 500$ unless the client is a frequently recurring client.
true i agree on the threshold principle. A minimum time slot or billing is reasonable. But as a client let's say thats just a slice of the entire web-project. And if this simple stuff takes $10/hour x 34 hours. It is steep.
Which programmer rates at $10/hour in salary cost? Here (Germany), this is just about minimum wage.
So even a cashier in the supermarket or a street cleaner earns about that or more.
EDIT: I guess the situation is different in India (just saw you're based there from your comment history), although I remember reading that even there developer salaries are slowly closing the gap with their western counterparts.
Like i said, I am not disputing the wage or salary as such. However with respect to a custom project it makes it costly. Again compared to having your own people do it using help from the net. As they may not be experts themselves.
Some development jobs are too small to be worth doing professionally. Assuming that wasn't a typo, I'm surprised any agency gave you a quote for a $340 job. Even my little consultancy business would need an extra zero before it was worth doing the paperwork to set up a new client in most cases, and our overheads are significantly lower than a lot of agencies would have.
This makes me think of the usefulness of interns, especially in niche areas.
Take a few per year. They'll enjoy the experience. And when mentioning niche areas, take them in skill-sets the team don't have, and have them teach the team. Example, for an engineering team: Graphic design, marketing, languages, etc..
Secondly we never could get anyone to do cURL stuff. In house we did a splendid job using online help and tech blogs. So my point is also there are gaps in web design agencies. Either they provide something with a premium cost. Or there is no one to take up custom projects.
That's a very good point. Facebook, google+ and twitter, Whatsapp groups to an extent have made a mass market for small business websites. There is a creche (children study/play school) next door and the lady simply encourages ever parent to visit her facebook page which has all photos and information.
Consider that it is so easy and fun to create a facebook page for your firm. So convenient to maintain it. On the other hand every time a change is required the firm will have to go through the agency route to update its website. Also if you look at the supply side there wont be as many agencies to take up the work for mass markets considering also the delivery and cost parameters.
Firstly, the two best investments you could start with are Mutual funds and Bank Term Deposits. With mutual funds choose the fund house first and then their scheme.
As far as books are concerned I'd always fall back on 'The Intelligent Investor' by Ben Graham. Another handy book is 'One up on wall street' Peter Lynch.
Although investment runs concurrently with tax breaks. So if you find a good book informing on where the income tax credits and breaks are allowed etc. it would be handy.
The important thing in spending is to be unrestrained when it comes to a subject close to your heart. The best things come with a price to pay.
Working in the financial industry from 2007 to 2009 the time when recession was at its deepest, i can tell you consumers had their hands burnt and fried to ashes after the markets tanked. So much that talking about investments would get their eyes wet and they would swear never to put money in the markets.
But just as markets revived post 2010 people again blindly started writing checks as per what their consultant advised. Although by this time I had moved out of the industry.
The malady is that individuals never show interest in actually learning how to make investments. And they go by heresay and greed.
I got offers to set up a financial trading terminal but as i fundamentally don't believe in trading as opposed to investments, I refused and preferred to relinquish my consultancy job.
But did you actually read beyond the first few lines: 'On 2 February 2012, the Supreme Court of India ruled on a public interest litigation (PIL) related to the 2G spectrum scam. The court declared the allotment of spectrum "unconstitutional and arbitrary", cancelling the 122 licenses..'
In short the malpractice was arrested and licences of telcos cancelled.
My personal experience (India) has been good as far as the telco regulator is concerned. They take personal interest in ensuring that telcos behave as per requirements and mandates as far as consumers are concerned.
Windows XP and its search feature- Win7 above does not have it.
Yahoo Geocities- simply miss it. and also Yahoo in general. My current yahoo mail is chock a block with spam mails. plus their ads.
Xerox Ventura desktop publishing software- that was cool when book publishing was required.
Motorola T90/91 basic mobile phone. superb and handiest phone used. Current Moto is smart but not unbeatable.
Most importantly old BSNL (India) Landline tariffs- you could talk for hours and still the billing would come per call-wise. Simple unbeatable !!
Non- Microsoft Keyboards- here they are out of market. THe MS keyboards go out of tune/get stuck over time.
Softwares that would never needed to update- These days it is a harassment to see every software on my PC requiring to update. Now its gone to mobile phones. God knows what is it that they do in updates.
Tap water- 2 decades ago we would drink water straight from the tap or just plain filtered. Its impossible now. The water is too contaminated and needs added filtration devices at home/work. or bottled water.
Paper bags at the grocery shop. They've vanished giving place to cheap plastic bags. And many products are now using plastic wrappings that would come with paper ones.
A more silent neighbourhood- these days its high intensity horn blaring.
What's wrong with your tap water? Don't they have the same safety standards to meet?
UK tap water is great (Well, outside of Greater London where it's basically limestone slurry). I've never bought bottled or filtered aside from the brief time I was in London.
At least two brands of UK bottled water were bottling northern tap water and selling it. Business idea I wish I had thought of!
Indeed its India, Calcutta I'm talking about. True 20 years back (1996 and before.. vaguely) that's when we were children the Ganges water was clean. It is too polluted now to drink it straight away. And nobody really drinks it taking it straight from the tap. There were times when NGOs offered large earthen pots of cool water free on the streets. In my home we have a non-electric Ceramic water filter. But the current norm is electric RO +UV filters.
Arsenic is present in ground water in south Calcutta and is a health problem. Municipal water is arsenic free. It is treated with Chlorine.
Much/All of this pollution is self created by polluting the rivers. Individually, industrially and socially.
I believe that using bottled water should be an exception and availability of tap/filtered water at public places should be a norm. But bottled water has become a necessity and a fad today.
I do admire the places mentioned where you enjoy pure water still. I know that in New York the water comes from upstate reservoirs. I also think many places water fountain is available at public places/streets for drinking. If you know the cities you've seen this let me know I'll make a note of it.
Tap water in the UK is heavily chlorinated. If you go to a country which doesn't chlorinate tap water it's like night and day.
(I live in Zurich. The water company here say that comparing Zurich tap water with bottled mineral water is unfair --- their tap water is considerably better.)
Not sure if it's down to how hard the water is in each area, but here (NW England), a fairly soft water area, you never notice the chlorination. You notice the chlorine quite a bit in London, along with the free limestone in every glass.
Tap water in the UK varies greatly around the country. The water in Edinburgh seems pretty good, some other parts of the country taste surprisingly different.
India, Calcutta. But now all over India hardly one will be drinking tap water straight away. Some filter process is always done at point of drinking.
These days its so sad to find every shop ordering a container of filtered drinking water. Earlier it was available through taps. Now no one trusts tap water.
Are your fellow citizens not pissed about this? Is there similar environmental movements as in the US 60 years ago? (And don't be too discouraged; Silent Spring was published in the early 60s and Love Canal occurred in the late 70s I think. The Cuyahoga River caught on fire multiple times, the last spurring the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.)
It still is, We don't drink tap water in Bangalore either.
Very very rare to see folks drinking water straight out of the tap - the water supply isn't potable.
Most urban households have some kind of filtration system in place. The water supply infra is quite bad, with frequent contamination due to leakage.
> What's wrong with your tap water? Don't they have the same safety standards to meet?
Tap water quality varies from place to place. For example, in SV (at least Sunnyvale, Santa Clara) it stinks so badly that I barely care whether it meets safety standards or not. OTOH, in my home city it's pretty fine and at some other place I lived it was halfway between.
Yes! Agent Ransack has become an indispensable tool in my daily work. With SSD and Agent Ransack i can do searches over ludicrous number of gigabytes within a heartbeat and usually find whatever it was. Yes, there are gnu tools for windows but from usability point of view Agent Ransack is way better (if we presume the tragick default cmd.exe as the command line, at least)
Tap water varies greatly even over a small area. New York City, for example, is extremely proud of the quality of its water, which comes from reservoirs upstate. I noticed it was good before I ever found out that it's something they like to boast about.
In DC, however, the chlorine is over the top, especially at times when they're flushing the lines.
I find that most places are somewhere in between these two extremes, even just outside the cities, where different municipalities have their own reservoirs and sources.
As for paper bags, why not just use a reusable bag. In many places in the US, plastic bags are taxed (5¢ or so), with the funds going to clean up rivers. It's led to a major change in behavior.
True in states near the Himalayas like Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh the water is drinkable and pure. Down below at the plains it gets contaminated.
Organized shops charge here an extra for the plastic bag. Majority of grocery shops hand out ultra thin plastic bags which will choke the rivers and environment. But important thing is public attitude. The attitude now is to collect as many of these bags as one can. So there you go. If the municipal corporation enforces a separate charge or ban, things will shape up. I do use a reusable bag. I've stopped using plastic bags.
Per-call billing sounds crazy - there should never have been a time in circuit switched or packet switched networks when that would have correctly captured costs.
I don't know about the OP's situation, but at one time most phone calls were completed by a human operator looking up circuit numbers and physically connecting the two customers using a patch cord.
I suspect that under that model, the operator's time was the dominant cost involved in placing the call.
1) The customer paid a fixed monthly charge for having phone service at all. This covered the capital costs of the wiring to the customer's premises.
2) On top of that, the customer paid a per-call fee. This covered the cost of having a woman (usually) ask what number you wanted, locate the proper jack, and physically plug your circuit in to the circuit of the person you wanted to reach.
It's probably no coincidence that the local service operator was one of the first parts of the phone system to be automated away (nor is it surprising that phone companies continued the per-call charge long after its justification went away :-)).
I've always wondered at the real value of a person's earnings. Is earnings an end in itself ? No, it is a means to obtain the worth of money one has with himself.
Be it financial or mental satisfaction, material acquisitions, name and fame, respect and prestige.
Keeping this in mind, I don't think Mr. L.T. is any less in his possessions than a star IT billionaire. Although he would far outdo everyone else when it comes to winning respect and a name for himself. He does not need to declare his life's earnings will go to philanthropy to win people's respect. He already has it. Something for which billionaires are willing to spend their entire fortunes.
> He does not need to declare his life's earnings will go to philanthropy to win people's respect.
I know you don't mention him by name but Bill Gates didn't need to give billions to charity to be respected, many already did so he could've just retired, hit the speech circuit and maybe written a couple of books and leave it at that. Philanthropy did make him a less divisive figure though.
i'm using papaly.com. its a bookmarking app. Categories within topics and then the link. The link allows you to add a note also. best is the developers take in all feedback and come out with better options.
But i rely on the chrome bookmarks also. And organize folders as and how my work or line of thinking moves.
But i guess many of us want much better bookmarking services than perhaps available presently.
I do meditation in the morning and go for work. Which is lot of concentration on the computer. Mid day sometimes I see articles on HN, ma.tt etc. To relax. In late evening look at these news sometimes on my tab.
I do have an issue with organizing imp websites for future reading, and am looking for a good bookmarking app that syncs with all my computers!
So its good that a lot of help is available at sites like stackexchange. We completed the stuff ourselves.