[iM8t]

This will be quite useful for me, thanks!

If I apply to work at a company remotely - how do I know that I'm not getting screwed over (not paid)? I'm 19 and some of my friends have gotten screwed over by a few foreign employers whilst working remotely. Do You have any tips to find a good place?

[Spoom]

If you're a contractor / freelancer rather than an employee, you can do at least two things:

- Get paid some percentage up front

- Set out milestones throughout the project where you get paid an additional percentage

If they don't pay when a milestone is completed, development stops. This limits your risk exposure to a percentage of the project rather than the whole thing.

If you are in fact applying to be a remote full time employee, I would do my research on the company before applying. Has anyone else had payroll problems with this company? The same freelancer rules above apply though; if they start to miss paychecks, you start looking for a new job.

[mootothemax]

Get paid some percentage up front

To add to this, I would ask new clients for a few days pay up-front as a sign of good faith.

There were several clients who ran away, absolutely outraged, they'd never heard of anyone asking something so ridiculous in all their life!

Running away screaming was very rare though, and by some good fortune, all of my regular clients were an utter delight to work with.

Stick to your guns though: get paid up-front, and invoice as often as you can. (Weekly in my case).

Offering clients a small discount for paying for a good chunk amount of development time in advance also worked well for me. (Lowest I'd typically go was 2 months with a 5% discount).

[scardine]

Use a marketplace that ensures payment like Elance or Odesk (I'm able to make a few k/month freelancing there).

[infecto]

Do you have any tips on how to get started? I have been wanting to try some freelance gigs on the side but there seems to be a lot of friction to get started.

[kenCode]

you've gotta build a rep as a hacker on elance. keep your bio short and to the point, talk about typical holes like cross-site scripting, sql-injection, db hardening, full stack exp etc. if you know how to crack node.js sites we might even hire you too depending on your js experience.

[kenCode]

agreed. i've hired pro hackers on elance before too, the ratings on there are invaluable. matter of fact, i'll need more help in a couple of weeks once our next #ePlug web gui is ready for qa/qc/hacking. i'll probably post that job on coinality too.