Thank you; for me, it's an ethical issue to use something like this. Some old lady who's not tech-savvy would "lose her spot" to me. I'd like to understand why the ecommerce giants can't institute a "fair for all" system.
I'd be ok with the changing prices--I use Amazon's subscribe and save, and the price fluctuations are reasonable. If memory serves, if the price is totally out of whack or the item is out of stock, I get a notification about it.
I've also never had to return a subscribe and save item, but I imagine if the policy was the same with these "pre-orders," there wouldn't be an issue, since subscribe and save has been in place for decades.
I should be able to purchase a quantity of 1-2, even if it's out of stock. I'm completely fine with being number 527,374 in line, but I want to be sure I will get it and only have to do this once. Instead of refreshing this page 20 times a day for a week, in hopes of hitting the several minutes when it becomes available and then inevitably sells out.
This is especially true for masks--impossible to be a good citizen and buy them, when there is no sane way of buying them and you have to jump through the hoops above.
I really don't want to write a scraper because it seems unethical, to get a "leg up" on the non-tech savvy people.
Normally, when a company lays off workers, the market cheers, and the stock price goes up. Investors get to keep more of their money, and no longer have to pay out in expensive labor.
But this situation is quite different, in that the economy just came to a stop, for practically everyone. At some point, this has got to trickle up, and affect the larger corporations. People won’t fly, so airlines go bankrupt. Hotels go bankrupt. Travel Agencies go bankrupt. And on and on.
But of course, maybe Wall Street is expecting a bailout of the airlines, and other big businesses, so maybe that explains the optimism.
No idea! It’s like everyone is looking at this as a “money problem” and throwing a bunch of stimulus at it, instead of taking it for what it actually is—an unprecedented health issue in a completely unprepared country.
My trouble has been that I automate everything and document it so well, that I basically "code myself out of a job."
I also strive for instant response time (my wife hates that) and often, I'll already be working on a client issue that the servers emailed/paged me about by the time the client gets in touch (that definitely impresses them).
So, the typical pattern is this: I meet a new client, understand their needs, build a RESTful API back-end (Python, Django, Terraform, AWS), automate any internal processes and/or build internal tools, and then support their front-end team in building their web/mobile apps that consume the API.
Usually, it's a few days to a couple of weeks of full-time work, and then my hours drop off a cliff: either 1) the client's team takes over completely, or 2) if I stay on, any subsequent feature or issue takes just minutes for me to do, so then I'm back to square one, looking for the next client. So far, I've been lucky enough to make all the clients happy and have them become "clients for life," but that "life," added up between all the existing clients, is just a few billable hours a week.
It sounds like you are doing $10k-$20k jobs in a few days or weeks.
Charge way more than you're charging. If you're successfully building our their entire backend, their internal tools and their automation in a few weeks, you should be charging for a few months instead of a few weeks.
In your case, it sounds like project work is better for you. I wouldn't recommend that you work hourly since that's probably where you're being burned. If you quote a REST API, automation system and internal tools for $10k-$30k and you finish it in 2 weeks, then you're golden and so is the startup since they just saved a lot of time.
I would highly recommend that you get on retainers with your clients. If they appreciate your work, and need help from time-to-time, you shouldn't be charged for 1 hour whenever they need you. They should pay for you to be available for them, so perhaps try to get on $500 - $1000 / month retainers. They may only need you a few times a month, but you're not billing them for $100-$200 for 1 hour of work, what a bad deal for you (and a great deal for them!)
Just wanted to share some thoughts about my recent interview experience at Amazon (East Coast). I haven't been looking for a job, but two friends work there and recommended I interview, so I thought, why not. Since I haven't interviewed in many years, I figured at the very least it'd be good to see where I/the industry stand in 2019. I interviewed for a L6 SDE, a relatively senior role when you're an outsider, from what I understand.
I have a CS degree from a top school and 20 years of experience. I code every day and have had a good career, full of learning and working on completely different things.
I had 6 onsite interviews, two of which didn't count (lunch and the one with the 50-person group overall leader, who I had no idea I'd be meeting with and was floored to have been given the time to do so).
While I aced the leadership principle and system design questions, I definitely struggled through two difficult CS whiteboard questions. Unfortunately, my worst interview was with the bar raiser, so I wasn't surprised when I got rejected.
As practice, I solved about 3 dozen practice questions on HackerRank/LeetCode, but in hindsight, I should have solved 300. Rust definitely plays a role... I would have done much better on these questions had I been I was fresh out of school, but then I wouldn't have done well on the leadership principles, so take your pick ;)
As much as I dislike whiteboarding, I understand the top companies' point of view. They have a handful of hour-long interviews to see if you can do the work, so it was up to me to use this time wisely and impress them. I did my best on that day, but it wasn't good enough. Let's say it wasn't a good day for me and I can do better. They don't know that--they can only judge what they've seen, so the decision is fair on their part.
I'm surprised at all the pushback from a sizable portion of software engineers on HN who feel "disrespected" by these interviews. I think about it this way--if you're a building contractor with some years of experience, shouldn't you be able to whiteboard the plumbing design of a multi-story building, the gauge of several electrical circuits that run devices with different loads, or diagram exactly where the fire/CO2 alarms are placed throughout a townhouse? You absolutely should, and if homeowners "interviewed" potential contractors like these companies interview us, there wouldn't be riff-raff doing shoddy construction work. The same way there shouldn't be shoddy civil engineers building bridges, etc. So, I believe fair is fair and even if I think I'm a "false negative," that's much better from Amazon's point of view than a "false positive."
I remember my high school track coach telling me "you have the right to train harder than your opponent," and that still resonates with me. If you really want the job, study harder and go get it. That's what I will do if I decide to interview at a top company again in the future. And I am married, with a young child, so I do understand that it is hard. But a top job should not be easy to get. Because then it would be a common job.
Alternate view that's worked well for me: not only do I not charge by the day, I don't even charge by the hour. I charge by the minute and tell them exactly what I did in the time I worked. Even when something takes me a paltry couple of minutes because I may have recently spent an hour on it for another client and I could easily charge more money for it. This level of transparency earns me an incredible amount of trust with my clients, who, so far, have each become "client for life." And the overhead isn't bad--a simple spreadsheet--complete a task, describe it in several words, enter the number of minutes spent, and everything gets summed up to the total amount due at the bottom.
EDIT: for clarity, I build RESTful API back-ends on AWS and support them with DevOps; I can see how my method may not work for other industries.
I once worked at a company in London who called an emergency plumber out who charged £5 per minute. It cost ten quid just to get him in through the front door and up the lift.
How do you know you're not leaving money on the table? It sounds as though people get a lot of value from your work, and they trust you, and want to continue working with you... So probably they'd be willing to pay more?
You're right, I don't know. I figure, if they are happy, I will get repeat business and referrals. If I'm charging too little, then they should be extremely happy and are even better champions of my work/name. That seems worth more than higher pay, long-term.
I've never actually asked or gotten questions about my invoices. So, either everything is crystal clear, or you're right, they don't look at them. I suspect every client probably looks at the first couple to get to know me and establish trust, and then just skims them thereafter. But it's nice for both of us--we can each review and see exactly what I did and how long it took.
Thank you. Yeah, I try to do the same with my invoices. My experience is about the same as yours. My current clients don't complain and they pay on time. It works well enough, but it takes longer for me to create each invoice.
OTOH, a while back I had a client that told me to stop detailing everything on my invoices. They just wanted a total number of hours. I think maybe it had to do with the review process upstream. Fewer details gave the higher ups less to scrutinize and complain about, I guess. And none of the other contractors were providing such detail.
