[nikolak]

I compete with people who are willing to work for $1/hr, on freelance sites like oDesk - occasionally someone picks me so I earn few bucks to get by. If I try to charge more people usually accept workers who charge the same amount as me but are from more western countries.

Ideally I'd settle for some junior dev type of position with reasonable(read: low/acceptable) salary, but without college degree and living in Europe, but not EU (thus no work permits for those), there's small chance of that happening - I've tried and eventually gave up on that...

Oh and today I got sued by govt for failing to send in (literally) an empty paper for my previous company and I'll (most likely) have to pay an equivalent of one month american-level-salary fine. So I've got that going on in my life too, which isn't really the best situation you want to be in if you earn your money like I do...

I don't even know why I'm writing this, I don't have any tips or suggestions for you, and even if I had you can see from the above that I'm probably not the best person to give out advice. And I understand what you're saying but... things could be worse.

You at least have options: build dreams for yourself, or for others. There's nothing stopping you (as far as I can tell) from working on both your projects and/or for someone else.

[ludwigz]

can I ask you where you're from? There's plenty of work for good coders, you seem very delusional. Try to send some resume

[nikolak]

Sorry, delusional about which part?

In my experience, people are more likely to hire US/UK based workers for higher paying jobs than for example Indians or people from countries. Does that happen always? No, of course not. I've had clients from a bunch of different countries. Hell, maybe I'm completely wrong - but that's how it seems to me. Maybe it's just me. I'm not excellent programmer, nor do I claim to be, maybe that's it.

As far as the part about finding work in EU goes, the biggest hurdle (that I've been told) is getting paperwork for someone without college degree.

Maybe I'm delusional, maybe I'm a shitty coder, maybe I just had bad experiences, maybe you're right. I don't know.

Oh and I'm from Bosna/Serbia - don't even get me started about getting a job that pays acceptably in those countries....

[velniukas]

For my startup, I hired the whole team through ODesk and Elance. I'm based in Hong Kong, and the rest: Ukraine, Moscow, Prague, Chicago, India, San Francisco. A really first rate team as well - will definitely hire like this again. It takes a long time to get rid of the time wasters on these sites (fire fast) but very good people can be found, who just want to work from home.

[tluyben2]

I would hire, for good money, a person from any country who has the right skills to work remotely. Unfortunately it usually falls flat on skills or greed. I work with a guy from Bosnia since two months and it has been good for both!

[zaporozhets]

I work in an awesome environment where we have half a web dev team in the office and half in France and Poland. We actually prefer it that way.

[zequel]

I think he may have meant disillusioned not delusional.

[t0mislav]

So many folks here from ex Yugoslavia (author from Slovenia, me from Croatia).