References
If ...
You are considering me for work with a nominal hourly wage rate of $100 or €70 or thereabouts¹, please ignore the below and send a message to juan@acm.org and I will put you in contact with current and recent clients.
In general ...
My typical working relationship lasts about a year or two, some are a matter of days or weeks and I worked as a contractor with IBM over about a 7 or 8 year period. Having prior clients and coworkers constantly contacted by possible new ones would not make sense. In a spirit of reason and reciprocity I ask that if you are not willing to act as a reference for a period of a year after satisfactory completion, receiving calls like the ones you intend to make, and are not offering a market wage for my skill and experience level¹,², then please DIY:
- There is an older references Word doc in http://ai-integration.biz/pub/references.doc .
- More recent references can be supplied, at the appropriate time.
Otherwise ...
- You are welcome to use the Word doc above or do any other independent checking.
- I find the whole references thing unenlightened:
- It's demeaning for the worker and unequal. Do you provide references from former co-workers in your enterprise(s)?
- Doesn't really prove anything, "past performance is no guarantee of future success".
- There are superior means for reducing your risk such as deferring full delivery of sources and payment until function has been demonstrated thru the web, delivery of binary with expiry, ordinary liability insurance³, etc.
This is an area of interest for me in regards to automated IT labor markets so may be developing further in the context of these domains. - It's like the testing thing, if you don't have whatever it takes to make this judgment on your own, structure an appropriate deal logistics, I'd rather you just pass to another worker.
¹ Offsite rate $40-60 USD/hr. before 2008-11, Sr. SW/Systems Engineer would be the relevant job description except that I'm usually performing other functions as well and the BLS statistics are for employees not contractors, so I don't go below this floor.
² A uniform nominal €50 per hour after 2009-11-02.
³ At standard current commercial rate per $1 M liability.
