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Discussion on: How to not be a dinosaur.

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opie profile image
Jason 'Opie' Babo • Edited

Great post. I can relate, for sure. I’m about to turn 36. Except in my case, I went from a full time “webmaster” at the time (full stack dev) & “system administrator” and transitioned more to a ”people role” in the gaming industry. Of the 2 decades of my career, over half of that was spent now working in roles such as community manager, support, partnerships management, account management, talent development, etc.

I’ve recently been wanting to return to a full time web dev or system administration role again, so I thought, “I’ll do some freelancing to get myself back into it and rebuild my profile.”

Since my old portfolio of hundreds of websites created over my career as a web dev were many years old, I thought the best thing to do would be to create a new portfolio with new work. Boy, did I get a slap on the face when reaching out to potential clients. Not only did most clients frown upon the prices I’d give them (almost giving away my work for free just so I could build out my portfolio), they would frown upon the fact they had to pay at all outside of hosting and a domain name.

With services such as Wix and Squarespace, or the free access to the web site designer that comes included with most cPanel hosting packages, it became nearly impossible to convince a client to pay for something. Not to mention the free plugins for Wordpress to easily design a great looking site. It seemed time wasn’t valuable anymore. And with that, neither was experience. People don’t understand that you aren’t paying for the time I’m spending on their project, they’re paying for the time I’ve spent learning to be able to create their project. But even lowering the price as low as possible didn’t spark interest.

The other options were Freelancer.com and similar sites. It had been a long time since I visited those services. Holy hell, what happened to the prices?! There were actual people offering things that I remember would cost dozens of $ an hour at least for just a few cents... this isn’t going to work.

So I gave up, sadly. I applied for over 100 remote job openings over the last 6 months with no luck. I had to give up. I have to provide for my family, so I’ve just stuck to what I can prove I’m good at. I stay connected to incredible communities such as Dev.to, I stay up to date in dev news, etc., I like to fiddle with frameworks I’m not familiar with in my free time when I’m not working on my hobby (I run a text-based game hosting service that includes full web hosting and email hosting options completely free for over 2 decades now.)

I stay connected because I loved it and will always love it. I made the decision to focus on a different career path. I now watch from the outside, wishing I was developing great things for people instead developing great people.

Anyway, thank you again for the great article!

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Johan van Tongeren

I am lucky that I work for a company that has one product that is being sold as a service, so there's always work for me. But I can imagine it being very hard in your situation. It's sad to read that you had to give up, but on the other hand, it's great to see that you still love it and try to keep up.

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Jason 'Opie' Babo

Thank you, Johan!