| You're assuming that I don't have other clients. That's the #1 difference between someone who makes money, and someone who works at the mercy of their employers. > 1. Sure, but bartenders have people skills No they don't. They serve drinks in very loud, noisy bars where everyone is drunk. That's the kind of bartender that makes $75k+ Furthermore, so do I. That's how I charge $150/hr. > 2. According to last month's data, our pool of potential employees has 10.5% unemployment, and you can afford to live on food stamps? That's begging the question whether or not I am employed. I am employed. I have other clients. I do not live on food stamps. I am currently making my asking rate on a regular basis and have been for nearly a decade, or else I would not be asking for it. If I were not able to make this rate, I would lower it. This is very simple logic, although it may not be if you are viewing it through the prism of desperation. REJECT the prism of desperation. It will handicap you for the rest of your professional life. > 3. There are many talented and desperate ways to reject your application, but you've probably heard them all. Really? The only one I've heard is "we can't afford you.", or "we found someone cheaper", which really is not my problem at ALL. You need to get those cojones, or you will be continue to be taken advantage of. Business people actively LOOK for weak willed developers. But - believe it or not - they respond positively to developers with balls, because they are so unaccustomed to hearing it. This is a basic tenet of human nature that many developers do not realize because they are too busy preoccupying themselves with machine logic. At some point, you need to tell yourself that you've learned enough fucking machine logic. You're not going to be writing assembly language for these people. You're building applications (dev and integration work, basically) that will make them money. That frees up your brain to think of other things like human interaction and how to sell yourself. Humans are not machines. Business is not a logical process. It's human interaction. When money changes hands, it's from one human (or group of humans) to another, no matter how deep the abstracted technical logic has been built to be. |