Tag: Pakistan

Freelancers and Consultants Must Read This

Sohaib Athar7 Comments

FreelanceSwitch.com is a blog full of insights and resources for the freelancers and consultants of the world (For those wondering about what's the difference between the two, this link provides a good explanation). They conducted a survey last year, and published the results of the survey today. You can download the survey results here. 

A few statistics in the 50+ page report that I found very interesting are:

  •  32.6% of freelancers earn less than they can from full-time employment.
  • 80% freelancers would prefer more money.
  • Only 22% of the freelancers work less and earn more compared to their prior job-oriented careers… and yet
  • 88.9% of the freelancer are happier now that they are freelancing.

Some more interesting statistics, particularly for the Pakistani Freelancers

  • Referrals account for 89% of new work (so keep your clients happy)
  • 15% work comes through blogs (start a blog duh)
  • The hourly average rate for softwre developers is around 73$ (stop charging 13$ per hour Pakis, its the lowest rate in the world (besides Bulgaria and Indonesia) in the survey.
  • UK freelance programmers charge the highest rate (158$)
  • Of the industries categorized in the survey, software designers and programmers earn the most.

Let me know if you find anything else of interest in the survey pdf.

Oh, and do join the Pakistani Freelancers group on Facebook if you are one. 

On the Clueless Ministry of Information Technology Pakistan

Sohaib Athar6 Comments

I originally started this post to share this spanking brand spanking new report on Broadband penetration in Pakistan by our Ministry of Information Technology titled "Is Entire Pakistan Underserved?", and was just going to write something weakly funny about it like "Yes, you bet it is, you could have asked me instead of wasting money on publishing a 39 page report about it"… but here's what went wrong….

Read more “On the Clueless Ministry of Information Technology Pakistan”

PTCL Triple Play Project

ReallyVirtual13 Comments

LESCO, teamed with my local ISP (who gives bandwidth on LAN, and therefore, dies with every one hour power failure) finally made me bite the bullet and move to the PTCL Triple Play Project aka Broadband Pakistan today. The PTCL techs just left after installing the connection (in 10 minutes) and the speed tests so far are not bad at all.

PTCL speed

Contrary to my expectations, I have had a very smooth customer service experience till now. One of the few good things about Broadband Pakistan is that you can get it upgraded and downgraded for free with one phone call, and you will be charged according to your usage. They didn't give me a wifi modem though (they save them for the 1Mbps lines, discriminating 8@$tards!), but told me to call their office after 4-5 days and they will change the modem (I hope they are true to their words). Now I just need to test the one dozen UPSes lying around to find a working one and I'll be a bit less dependent on LESCO.

Election Commission of Pakistan – Live Voter Search

Sohaib Athar

The Election Commision of Pakistan has released their cutting-edge website that allows anyone who can read and type Urdu to search for any 'Live' (and I presume, dead as well) voters in Pakistan. It is no mean feat to develop an Urdu website in Canada (handling a character-set twice the size of the English alphabet is surely twice as hard), especially a completely secure one that lets you search 80 Million (*gasp*) records!

Even though I still don't understand the need for the website (though it can be fun to search for the people you know to get their exact age and/or who they are married to), and even though its on-screen keyboard thinks 'undefined' is an Urdu character, and even though it does not know me, though I have tried both versions of 'hay' in my name along with my old and new NID numbers (which probably means I can't vote – (Yay!)), but I feel I should still congratulate the CEO of Mehndi.com for an excellent 'gift' back to the nation (in all its waving flag animated gif glory that messes up in Firefox), and for showing us backwards Pakistanis that "nothing is impossible if you go for it." (which translates loosely into "you can create projects out of thin air if you know the right people").

Now, can somebody lend me around 50 shell accounts or zombie machines so that I can scrape that database in a couple of days please? I promise to return them.