If I was a seasoned PHP/MySQL/programmer I'd be making money...without having to pay coders an arm and a leg for customized solutions. Maybe you should just become my employee...
:cool2:
Well, I don't live in India. My day job salary used to be $120K during the dot com era, but then that all crashed and now I only make $60K with a slight hint I might make a marginal raise. I'm overworked during the day, got about $20K in debt besides cars and house, and I moonlight on an opensource, Linux/PHP/PostgreSQL based CRM project right now, hoping that will make it big. (I work so hard that I stay up too late and show up late at the office.) So what I'm saying is, "Do you think I cost too much?" I probably do. You can pay Indian programmers about half my salary.
While working on the CRM project for about 3 years now, trying to make it as slim and yet remarkably intuitive and yet functional as possible, I stumbled across reddit.com one day and that's when I found a link to read about Jeremy Shoemoney. I then said, "Hey, I can do that!" and started scribbling it out on paper. But then I thought, "Wait a minute. How does he scale? How did he take it from shared hosting to dedicated to self-hosted on his own site? What kind of content draws that much Google AdSense across thousands of sites?"
Some more background...
* My Linux/PHP/PostgreSQL/MySQL programming job got outsourced to Brazil. I was told I could hit the streets or take a lousy sysop job that involved a little programming here or there on the side. I couldn't move away this time, though -- my kids are set for some scholarships if we stay where we live, and my wife was at the pinnacle of her career. So I remained. When I got into this new job, I noticed the boss didn't have a tracking system for trouble tickets. There was a lot of confusion and frustration with the staff I was to manage for him. So, at home, I wrote a ticketing system in PHP/PostgreSQL. I brought it into the office and the boss liked it. He said it was simple, intuitive, and had a lot of potential to grow. So we implemented a fork of it and grew that. Then, it caught on like an idea-virus (to quote Seth Godin). It took off. Now 400 employees in a global company use it. Seven departments rely on it daily. One department is the Brazil programmers that took my old job. All of us use it to track work, request IT help (from my dept), and do business web app bug reports in it.
* The stupid global company then caught on and said, "Gosh, I guess our departments need something like this. Let's go out and spend big bucks to replace it with something professional and with great tech support." So they spent $200K and got practically the worst app on the planet. That project collapsed bigtime and now they're back to looking at my app, collecting business analysis on it. Perhaps this might mean it becomes its own department -- I don't know. That would be nice income for me.
* Back at home, I took the original parent project of this fork and incorporated ideas that worked at my office, and dropped ideas that didn't work well. I then rewrote the backend at least 3 times, making it leaner and meaner, and adding in new concepts as I read about something that worked well on the web. Now there is no code at my office that exists in this parent app. I also wanted a little OOP, but not so much OOP I wasn't getting anything done and the thing ran too slow. Anyway, I hope to finish this project near the end of the year, get it out there, and then while it's hopefully stirring up interest, I was going to jump on hundreds of content/forum sites that get all their cash from Google AdSense.
