use Perl

It was announced to us at Questions on Tuesday, that the company was having money troubles and the expected promise of cash from a Venture Capitalist never materialised. However, seeing as we are down to a skeleton staff after the last round of redundacies, any further losses are likely to destroy the company. So they've proposed we take 50/50 split of pay/holiday or pay/shares. I opted for the pay/holiday split, in the hope that I might find the odd quick website to do to keep the money rolling in. Little did I realise how desperate people were.

Over the weekend I put forward 5 proposals to projects advertised on a freelance site. Until today no-one had replied. The reply I did get was both a disappointment and an eye opener. One of the jobs I had pitched for was a fictious job, posted by a designer who was beginning to wonder if anybody was using the site. He'd been pitching for jobs for 3 months and heard nothing. Was he pitching right, too much money, not enough, were his sites too bad or too good? So as an experiment he posted a job to see what kind of response he got. Within the space of a few hours the pitches started rolling in. After 250 in 24 hours he stopped counting, but he did send a report out to everyone, apologising for time wasting, but also giving a valuable guide as to what everyone was pitching for a basic 5-8 page site.

Many are students or have read a book and think they can do it for £50 or even free. I pitched quite high, but certainly not the highest, based on about half my current rate. If that's the state of the market then perhaps I should start thinking about going back to embedded C, where I can earn stupid money without too much effort!