Without giving away any secrets, how to find loads

I've seen that. I remember hiring a fella and thinking "I'll probably work for him some day". He was sharp as a tack. His one negative was that he was extremely lazy. I had the "I'm not leaving till it's done, and that includes the dirty work" mentality. He would just bounce even though the department was swamped. I never worked for him. LOL

 

Man 'o man have I?

I remember one place interviewed and they had one of those test and they gave me an hour....I knocked it out in 20mins....and the lady came in saying ..."this is very impressive"....I'm thinking..."I've been doing this for 5yrs...did y'all expect a noob?"

One that killed it for me was when they sent me "sample" data and asked me to show how I would create complex querries to answer their business questions. I WILL NEVER, EVER do that again...once it dawned on me that they were just farming out their challenges to candidates, to help resolve their challenging tech stuff. This was a small consulting firm of 3 people, so, I bet they did not have enuff manpower to get the job done.

I had one bank (shall remain un-named) ask me to email them some of my projects, used in risk analysis and strategy development....I had worked in credit card risk scoring. I declined, citing potential violations, should I disclose such details....but, was willing to bring what I had in my head for $120K/yr. LOL. That response bumped my salary by 20%.

 

Wow! You must have made quite some money prior to Y2K bug.

 

Not really, I was on a fix salary, we all were. We were charging the customer flat rate so it was easy on their pocket book.

I made more money in consulting in health care and HCIT than I did in anything else.

 

Are you avoiding clarifying your statement?

I got to tell you that if you are being tested of your knowledge as a programmer, the job isn't worth it. That means you don't have the reputation or the portfolio to back your knowledge up.

Even when I was doing ad hoc work, I never was tested, I bid on a contract and if I got it, I worked it till finished.

This was my fall back work to make ends meet.

 

@Ridgeline ... well, don't know what to tell ya, but some of us are not, well, what you would call "All American", so we don't always get the EZpass....lol

We gotta "prove" our mettle coz there's implicit bias in the process.

Kinda hard to see, if you're never been on the receiving end...

 

And the TOPIC was? Talk about going off on a tangent...

I've actually enjoyed this sojourn into "what I used to do / be", my experiences in this area could dwarf all of the responses here. But I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say, once you get diesel running through your veins, there is no known successful detoxification. Unfortunately my Dad, allowed me to be exposed at a very young impressionable age. I have almost forgiven him, he just didn't know better. I witnessed the transition from gas, in old White Mustangs, and V-8 Internationals, to Mack B models. My exposure to the first long hood was an Autocar and a Brown! With suicide sleepers, no air conditioning, barely any heat in the winter, with a Cummings 190 / 220. And the scream of a Jimmy, just sealed my fate. And being named after my grandfather, whose name was on all the trucks in the fleet, made me think I owned them all as a 7 year old!

LOL - I'm not immune to "used to do / be" either. And my going off on tangents, I'll save that for another day.

Oh well, I continue to have an interesting life.

 

Find an independent broker! They work on commission so if you don't work they don't work! I've been with my broker for 9 years and she's great!

 

I think it isn't a tangent but an affirmation of skills, the OP says he was important, big coder and some company owner asked him to code for them so I and others posted what our skills are, and I asked if those names mean anything to his claim to be a super coder.