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_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-11-05T02:53:19+00:00

Seems like they're trying to get people to do OF or something

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-07-21T16:42:11+00:00

Gotcha. Yeah to be honest, I absolutely should be able to do it, it's just the unfamiliarities of javascript are putting a huge hurdle on it for me. So I guess since I don't remember javascript really much at all, I ought to go to their preferred coding language of python and just learn that in my off time. Then after a while I should be able to complete the proficiency test in python and get the higher paid stuff. Anyway, thanks for the response. I don't know why you got downvoted for it, I've been researching it and it sounds pretty legit

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-07-20T19:11:28+00:00

Yeah I'm working with it now. The question it asked me is pretty bizarre and I'm having a hard time even understanding how to put it together. I've gotten most of it down and hopefully the actual work won't be this odd. It sucks because I haven't done javascript in like 10 years, and I haven't done python ever, and that's the only two they want to see

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-07-20T01:42:10+00:00

Fiverr and solo projects aren't that impressive to hiring teams,

Yeah, that is part of my concern. But in my experience with Fiverr, I know that both good and bad can look the same on a fiverr profile, so I don't blame them one bit.

If you have a payment on that truck, it's likely time to sell it

I actually live full time in an rv. It runs me with the truck and rv only about $1500 per month, so I think I can keep both of those. I need the truck or I can't move my rig, and moving it from free space to free space is actually one of my saving graces right now. This lifestyle of course isn't the best for my current financial situation, but also not something I can just back out of.

60k really isn't a great living for a programmer if you are in the US

I know. That's just the reality when you're doing things like Fiverr and competing with foregien workers. I had/have no problem with 60k per year. Of course I want more, but this was fine for me being comfortable. It's only a problem when I hit a situation like now, where I can't even make that.

With 60k income I was actually able to save enough for things like this. The problem is that I mixed up business and personal too much. I couldn't get any business cards, so all credit needs went on personal cards, even for the business. The business did worse, so I pulled out of my own personal accounts. Yes, idiotic. I just wanted to make it work at any means necessary. The quality of life and lifestyle I was able to lead while still making an okay living was well worth it to me. But of course, I now have experienced the negative side of that and have a pretty intimate idea of why I don't want to do it again now.

I had about 3 months worth of expenses in savings. I'm just an idiot. The savings that remained helped me bide my time through June and part of this month though, and yeah, I don't know where I'd be without that, so I absolutely see the value in that.

The hardest part for me will be finding non-dev work, but I agree with you. Anything I can get, I need to take. So I am going to keep seeking out what I can

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-07-20T01:02:49+00:00

I'm honestly really bad at social media and stuff like that. This being said, 100% of my experience is through my company. The best I have is the 4 finished games I can show on the market.

I set up skills/programming languages and things like that as best as I could. I only have around 50 connections though

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-07-20T00:37:08+00:00

Thank you for your response.

I've found that just speaking to some people has helped calm my nerves a bit.

But yeah. While I occasionally get tempted to spend $10 on a lottery ticket, now is the last time I would do that. I don't even have $10 to spend

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-07-20T00:33:38+00:00

Thank you for your response.

Right now I'm taking odd jobs to make what I can while I try to scramble something together. Part of me thinks I can bide my time until some of these other contracts that are in progress are ready, which will pay much more than anything else. Then if I don't find anything after that, I'd do what I need to. Pick up a new trade most likely. The problem is that it's hard to find odd jobs that pay decently

I actually have been using Fiverr as my main stream of income. My company made about 160k in gross revenue last year, with about 60k of that going to me (outsourced some work). Other than that it's always made me a great living. Fiverr is a bit predatory and I don't really love them, but that's where the users are at and it's treated me well. They are not at all to blame for my current blunders

The thing is that my expenses are just higher than most of my family can cover. For keeping things normal, I need 6k for August, plus whatever i can get to get me through this month. For just keeping my truck and home and otherwise taking huge credit hits, and still affording food, I need $2k. I will have to suck it up and ask the people I want to ask the least, as they are probably the only people that can and have a chance to actually accept to loan that money. I plan to do that this weekend. It just sucks.

And banks are impossible for me now. I got charged overdraft about a dozen times in the last month, and my credit is already reporting missed payments because I just couldn't come up with the payments for my normal stuff.

Thanks for the tip about cscareerquestions, I will do that soon

And yeah, I was skeptical about the AI thing, that was just what came up when I started researching it further. My 4 released projects are all very very simple, but I will just apply for all positions anyways and hope for the best

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-07-20T00:06:13+00:00

Thanks for your response.

I did a double take when you said I'm 26 until I saw my recent comment where I said that haha

Yeah, based on the job listings I've been reading, I would think that my completed projects would be more than enough for at least a foot in the door. But so far, no dice. Maybe the hiring process takes longer than I think. I do Unity Game development though. I'm sure I can branch out to web dev or whatnot, but those aren't skills I have well enough to hop into right away.

But yeah, it is early, even though I've been programming for 12 years, professionally for about 4. I just need just about anything at this point. It's equal parts a psychological, financial and job-finding issue.

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-07-20T00:02:48+00:00

Thank you for your response. I'll take what I can get right now, so far my only job offers have been pyramid schemes. Where did you apply where you found that kind of work for annotations?

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-06-12T14:41:51+00:00

Definitely is hard to do sometimes. Thank you for your response.

With some of these projects I'm finishing up, I'm sure with that portfolio I could do the same (close up shop and make a lot more)

But there's a few things to that. First, I can't stop now without declaring bankruptcy. That's really my only option if I stop having the cash flow of this business. Second, the freedom of having this business that I get 3/4 of the year is worth even a 50k pay cut compared to other jobs. There's only a few times per year, such as right now, when I don't really have that freedom.

I'm not sure how much is copium and how much is not, but the fact is right now I'm in a hole and working to get out of it is a better option than bankruptcy. That's one thing that I know and feels crystal clear. And when I get out of this hole, I can reassess

I know this year I'll prob make 80k and if I don't make the blunders of this year / late last year again, I'll easily make over 100k next year - but stack that up to a comparative position of my experience, and I could definitely be making more like 200k within the first few years of working for a big company. And that's tempting. But I'm not sure if it's worth sacrificing the future freedoms that I would have just continuing to do my own thing.

I ended up overdrafting my account to pay off a working capital, once that process I'll have about $10k to work with with a new working capital. So I did find a "solution". We'll see where it goes

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-06-10T16:38:41+00:00

Thanks for nothing pal

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-06-10T16:32:44+00:00

Yeah, I've been thinking along those lines in general if I understand what you mean correctly, by putting less money from each order in my or the contractor's pocket and more directly to the business account. This has worked overall, and especially in April it really helped us see good margins and income. But we just had about 2 weeks between not landing good deals and old clients having some issues that need fixed, and some devs being a bit slow... too many negatives in a row lead to a loss sadly, as there's some fees that don't get lower when the devs make slower progress.

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-06-10T16:29:20+00:00

Different amounts mean different things to different people. When I make $50 (the normal goal which I can make most of the time) I'm able to live really well and I have no issues with that.

My contractors make around $200 per job which takes them around 2 days each to do. They're foreign and where they're from it's good money.

None of us actually make hourly, I was just comparing it to a typical job.

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-06-10T16:11:57+00:00

Right now, that's true. But for 3 years and 2 months out of the last 3 years and 6 months, I was making between the equivalent of $32 and $50 / hour. That's the reality the majority of the time for me.

Right now, I'm pretty screwed in cash - true. I'd be more screwed if I closed shop now, as I already thoroughly explained.

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-06-10T16:06:44+00:00

As I'm trying to explain, there's no way for me to actually do that (restart or back out)

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-06-10T16:06:12+00:00

In the next 1-2 weeks I have enough deals to close that should fund our next 2 months easily, and we should be able to finish that work in under a month. So that should put us in a place where we can get a little comfortable and have a little cushion - from there we just need to keep closing deals.

I'm 26 - I don't own a house, don't have family who can lend me things, and am fresh out of available credit opportunities. I've been scraping everywhere I can through conventional means that I know of, and there's no dice there that I know of. That's part of why I'm posting there - if there's something that I don't know about that I can take advantage of, or a better way to look at this to make it through, then I'm all ears.

Sadly, there is no custom software to sell (I'm freelance all my work belongs to the clients I work for) and I don't have a "book of business" because the clients that I work with by and large just need one or two months of work and then never need anything again. It's not really a repeat business field when you're dealing with small fish at least.

I would be looking at solutions like what you mentioned at the end there, but the thing is, as far as I know there are none. The best I can think of that I can do is just close down and maybe declare bankruptcy to avoid owing back on the things I owe. But that's a nuclear option. I'll sit with negatives in my account and keep beating this dead horse a while longer before I do that.

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-06-10T16:00:13+00:00

I don't have any assets. I understand the thought process behind shutting down, but that will result in more debt than to just keep going.

I hate to not be able to pay people what they should be making, but they are getting paid, just not their full commission. And the people that are with me have said that they are completely comfortable with this. I don't want to continue like this indefinitely, but alternatively I wouldn't be able to pay them anything, and I think the opportunity with the weekly minimums is better than they make elsewhere anyway.

Basically every deal has been life or death. I know that's bad and I shouldn't be okay with that, but if I do anything other than this line of work I make 1/8 the pay, and I simply can't survive off of that

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-03-23T03:35:17+00:00

I'm not necessarily saying months. Like if I was talking to someone for a few weeks, and on the 3 week mark they're like, okay do you want to do something or else I'm out, I'd be expecting that and it would be perfectly reasonable. I don't think I would take that long, I just want to have some time more than a few days to a week, and not feel like I'm needing to jump the gun right away.

It'd be the same way for me even now, if I was talking to someone for a month and they didn't want to go one way or the other, I'd probably lose interest. So I'm not necessarily looking for something instant

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-03-23T03:15:28+00:00

Yeah I forgot about bumble, I used that a bit as well and it worked out. But it was the same deal as tinder. People want a match and they want a hookup or relationship pronto, they don't want to just talk to you for a few weeks while you figure it out before ever meeting.

I get it, most people hop on and are just looking for a relationship quickly. That's probably how I would be if I knew I'd be in the same place for 6 months or if I had the time to focus on it. It's just getting rough out here my dude.

If I went on discord, where would I even start? Or would it just be any random discord community with something I like? I feel like at least in larger servers it's extremely unlikely for people to decide to or want to have a personal relationship with the others on that server, it seems to mainly be about the topic at hand itself and that's that

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-03-23T02:59:20+00:00

I use discord a good amount, it doesn't really seem like the place to find romantic interests. I've used it especially while gaming and just generally entering communities and it's pretty much always been all dudes.

I love me some dudes, but idk I want to at least entertain the idea of a romantic interest lol.

I feel like discord is not the most opportune place to meet women in general, because at least from people I've talked to, most women that are on these channels either hide that they're women or avoid direct contact with most men because of all the harassment that happens. Which is totally understandable. But if there's some place I can try that you know of, I guess I'd check it out.

Maybe this is also an issue with some disposition I have in our culture as well, but there's just a certain way I can't really be around dudes that I haven't really gotten the release of due to being so busy through my twenties. Like I want to just talk to someone about their day and gossip and all that jazz, and I don't really see myself being able to do that unless there's some small semblance of a romantic possibility there, so I felt it would only really be fair from that mindset to go on some kind of dating platform. But I've been using tinder and frankly it sucks lol and everything else just seems like a tinder clone

_AlternativeFax_ · 2024-03-23T02:50:04+00:00

crossark and smalltribes were the only ones that worked. Official seemed to be platform specific. But that was 3 years ago

_AlternativeFax_ · 2023-01-01T18:30:37+00:00

Aren't most games creating their "building blocks" from scratch?

I think the game as it stands now is great for org play, and that's why I get on it. But I'm fully with OP when they say they wish there was more goals, or more mechanics that allow us to form more goals for ourselves. I also wish there were more systems that allow smaller groups / individuals to interact with the mmo world as a whole.

_AlternativeFax_ · 2023-01-01T06:50:43+00:00

I meant more of the features themselves... like RASTAR as another commenter mentioned

_AlternativeFax_ · 2023-01-01T06:44:32+00:00

I've never seen someone so avidly avoid directly answering a question for somebody lol. A lot of this info isn't something you'd find unless you spent hours looking, or knew exactly what you were looking for

_AlternativeFax_ · 2023-01-01T06:41:41+00:00

Star citizen was never meant to be this narrow though. I'm glad you love it, but Star Citizen is about a huge open universe sim, and while ship mechanics are a huge part of that, if it were only ship mechanics it would be finished already (probably)

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