http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HndUHLSMTC8

Winkler is the author of Spies Among Us, Zen and the Art of Information Security, Corporate Espionage, and co-author of Through the Eyes of the Enemy. He has been quoted in Forbes, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Planet Internet, and Business 2.0. He knows what he’s talking about. You can’t go wrong following his advice.

The sun never set on our empire — which sounds like a joke, but was a true statement.

MySQL had an even larger and farther-flung empire. MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos and I talked about tactics for hiring, training, and motivating remote workers whenever we ran into each other at software conferences and IT trade shows. And our consensus opinion was that hiring was all-important when it came to managing a virtual workforce. Basically, if we brought people on board who thought of their work as a paid hobby rather than as drudgery, we had no problem making sure they were doing what they were supposed to do. They were self-managed, and our job was to make sure they had well-defined tasks and that they stopped working now and then to eat, sleep, kiss their spouses, and that sort of thing, rather than standing behind them with a whip, urging them to work.

In his book, Kevin Sheridan imparts a lot of the lessons Mårten and I had to learn on our own because there were no good books around back then to teach us how to do what we were doing. We were in the leading wave of the open source movement, not followers. We knew and often exchanged information with academics and analysts, but they were picking our brains at least as much as we were picking theirs.

• An aside about picking remote workers: I once had a neighbor who got laid off from his job as a local newspaper reporter. I needed someone to cover politics (as they related to FOSS), which I believed he was capable of doing. But my neighbor said, “Thanks for thinking of me, but if I don’t have an office to go to and someone to give me assignments, I’m afraid I’ll just drink beer and play video games all day.”

If you’re on the applicant side of the equation, you need to be as honest with yourself as my neighbor was. Otherwise you are setting yourself up for failure. (As it happens, my neighbor, Tim McCann, soon became the public information officer for the City of Bradenton, a job for which he was eminently suited — and still holds.)

If you’re on the employer side, honesty is still important. Years ago, when I worked briefly for an employment agency in Baltimore, I found that employers lied more about the jobs they were offering than applicants lied about their skills and training. Maybe an exceptionally nasty employer might say to himself, “Time are tight right now, so once I get them on the payroll, they probably won’t leave even if I ask them to do more work for less money than I originally promised.”

Of course, the better employees will leave if you pull this sort of thing on them; they can always take a temp job while they look for a real one or have savings they can rely on. In the end, lying to job applicants gets you a low-quality work force.

if you want low-quality workers, that’s the way it goes. But if you’re interested in high-quality people who can work from home across town or halfway around the world, read The Virtual Manager. It’s well worth your time.

About halfway down the page in the second article we find these words:

Question: How do you decide how much to charge?

David: Randomly… mostly based on how much I thought the client would pay. I had one client tell me to raise my rate, that is an advantage of having good clients, they want to help you as much as you help them. I usually ended up undercharging which put the client and myself in a bad position. Undercharging is worse than overcharging. With undercharging, the client becomes dependent on you (and they can’t afford to go to anyone else) — it’s just not sustainable. Eventually you need to raise the rate or drop the client; it’s a difficult choice and a hard conversation, either way.

There’s more on this subject in the article, which I strongly advise you to read if you are or plan to become self-employed.

The thing is, pricing decisions are some of the most important ones you make as the owner of a service business. Charge too much and you have no customers — and even if you get some who are awed by your wonderfulness or have unlimited budgets, sooner or later they’ll wise up and find someone else who will do the same work for less.

But as you see, David warns more about undercharging than overcharging. He’s right, too. I have a video production client I started working for a while back at a cut-rate price. Now I can’t afford to continue at the original rate, and I am going to cut her loose. She’s been a troublesome (although nice) client from day one. If I had quoted her a higher hourly rate at the start, I might have scared her off. Or at least I would have earned more for the aggravation she’s caused me, and it would be easier to tell her to take her business elsewhere.

The thing is, there is no one “right price” when you’re pricing a service — or many physical sales, including the real estate in which Trump deals. Making a deal that is fair for both you and your client is an art, not a science. All you can do is read up on the idea, get expert advice (SCORE is a good place to go, and it’s free), and learn as you go along.

Google negotiating with clients and you’ll find enough useful reading matter to fill up many months of eat-at-your-desk lunches.

Perhaps, if you learn enough about selling your services and — possibly more important — how to price them right, one day you, too, will be able to live on a comfortable boat in a warm climate and only work a few hours a week.

• Tal Guest, Network Product Engineer at Bomgar, replied that Jackson, MS is a great place for programmers because, “There is less competition for great jobs, and an extremely low cost of living. Plus Jackson is a great place to live: southern hospitality, plentiful activities for the outdoor sportsman, and a central location for weekend excursions to New Orleans, Memphis, or the beach.”

In case you were wondering, Bomgar is actively recruiting.

• Robert Pease, at Gist (located in Seattle), thinks Seattle is as good as it gets. He even published a blog post in early July about Seattle’s startup culture. He says, “Startups can’t happen without a few important ingredients, including innovative and inspired people living and working nearby each other; a community that values collaboration and cooperation; and a local government and population that support new businesses (large and small).”

Okay, I’m sold. We’ll start loading the car tonight, and try to head out the day after tomorrow.

John Simpson, Vice President of Marketing at Jama Software, disagrees with Mr. Pease. His take:

• It has to be Portland, Oregon, hands down.

  There are giants like Intel, HP and Nike in our backyard, but there is a new wave of start-ups like Jive, Jama Software, ShopIgniter, Janrain, Urban Airship to name a few that are exploding and doing creative, social, distributive technologies. The beaches are an hour west and Mt. Hood w/ year round skiing is an hour East.

  We’re the greenest city in America, bike-friendly, dog-friendly and tech-geek-friendly. The music, art and food scenes are world-class. Housing is affordable relative to our neighbors on the West Coast such as Seattle or San Francisco. Traffic isn’t bad. What else would you want? If you can tolerate the rain for half the year, then you’re golden! Welcome to Portlandia baby, we’re hiring!

Did I say my wife and I were going to Seattle? Slight change of plans. Portland is obviously the place to be.

Sarah Welle of Rocware says:

• The best place to be a programmer in the US is Longmont, Colorado or any of the small towns outside of Boulder. Huge per capita IT Industry with lots of investment money floating around in Boulder. Easy access to it all from the rural-feeling cities at the base of the Rockies that surround Boulder. Best place in the US to have backyard chickens, keep bees, and have your own “urban homestead” – all while making a good living in the IT industry. I live in Longmont and love it

Greg Starling, Technology VP for MTM Recognition in Oklahoma City says:

• In OKC, energys booming, everyones hiring, and companies are offering perks on top of perks to come, hang out, and enjoy big city life – country style.

And let’s not rule out our nation’s capital. Josh Jeffryes, Lead UI Engineer at The College Board, says,

• I think the DC Metro area is one of the best in the nation for any tech professional. I chose it over Boulder and San Francisco, because Boulder paid half as much and San Francisco paid the same with twice the cost and worse quality of life.

Also, he adds:

• The DC Metro area gives you a Silicon Valley salary, but you can raise your kids here. The best schools in the nation, progressive, friendly communities and homes you can actually afford make this a no-brainer when you’re done living with your 3 buddies in a tiny apartment.

Not a single response mentioned Silicon Valley or San Francisco as a good place to be a programmer and live a decent life. Interesting.

I got more excellent “Where’s the best place for a programmer to live and work?” responses to share with you than I have room for today. I’ll post the rest Wednesday or Thursday.

As an American himself, at first he did his own English training. But when he got beyond 25 employees, and had enough work coming in that he could add at least five new people (typically programmers) every month, he started talking to American friends about doing three month “paid sabbaticals” during which they’d spend four or five hours every day teaching his employees, and the rest of their time touring or hanging out or whatever they wanted.

In this case, we’re talking about personal contacts on both the job-seeking and recruiting sides of the coin, and there’s no doubt: “who you know” is still an important job-finding ingredient, even if you’re looking for a job (or an employee) halfway around the world. But what if you don’t know anyone in India?

G. Michael Schneider has written a book titled On The Other Guy’s Dime – A Professional’s Guide to Traveling Without Paying. His OtherGuy’sDime Blog is also a great resource for finding jobs hither and yon, and has lots of practical tips on how to arrange a short-term emplyoment trip, including notes on how to rent out your U.S. house, assuming you own one, while you’re gone.

Schneider is a computer science professor, but most of his advice is just as useful for a programmer or marketing person as for an academic. And he talks about opportunities far beyond India and China. Who would think about short-term job opportunities in Zimbabwe? Schneider did — and spent some time there and got paid for it. He says it’s easier to find work in places like Zimbabwe and Mongolia than in, say, Switzerland, because if you have hard-to-find skills — like in IT, for instance — there my not be another person in the whole world looking for a job in the less-traveled countries.

He’s also big on cold-calling. It costs nothing but a moment of your time to email a company or government ministry in a country that interests you to ask if they know of any openings for someone with your skills.

A Google search for “working overseas” brings up over 900,000 responses.

This is why I am going to end this article here; there is simply too much information to fit in a single column, so you might as well hit that Google link and look at the websites you find that speak most closely to your interests — including the part of the world that most interests you.

But before I go, I am going to leave you with one thought from Nicolia L. Wiles, a principal with Technisource in Austin, TX, who says her company, “…one of the largest US tech staffing and solutions firms, is seeing more jobs open in the US than actually going overseas. In fact, there are so many open job reqs right now that they firm is tirelessly seeking out top IT talent to fill their clients’ IT staff needs.”

In other words, the hiring worm seems to have turned, at least in IT. There are lots more IT jobs open in the U.S. (and elsewhere in the world) than there were last year or the year before. But if you want one of them, you’re going to have to go get it.

Google News picks up stuff like this. If you’re seriously looking for a new job, you might want to consider setting up a Google News alert containing keywords for the kind of work you want to do.

The Biznik motto is “Going it alone. Together.” The whole point of the site is to hook you up with fellow entrepreneurs and other people who may have similar goals to yours so you can help each other succeed.

I don’t have a site review/rating scheme, but if I did, and it used a 1 – 5 scale, Biznik would score between 4.5 and 5.

1. Electric Vehicle Mechanics: According to SBI Energy and J.D. Power & Associates, the electric vehicle market in the U.S. will double by 2020. As automakers upgrade the features in electric cars, the amount of software code in each vehicle will grow. Students with knowledge and fundamentals on electric vehicles will be in better position than either traditional programmers or traditional car designers and mechanics to create complex battery systems, electric drive units, and cabin electronics.
2. Probability and Statistics: Collecting, processing, analyzing and interpreting numerical data is key. These skills can be used to calculate the average downtime of a computer, evaluating the effectiveness of commercial products, predicting the reliability of a rocket or studying the vibrations of airplane wings.
3. Environmental Engineering: The green movement will remain a hot button issue for future engineers. Finding new ways to improve the environment, provide healthy water, air, and land for human habitation, and to remediate polluted sites are all important areas of expertise for students.
4. Engineering Economics: This skill is for any student with aspirations of one day managing a project. It is used to answer many likely scenarios, like: Which engineering projects are worthwhile? Which engineering projects should have a higher priority? How should the engineering project be designed? Etc.
5. Ethics: This skill goes along with well-established fields such as medical, business and legal ethics. Amid pressure from recent events like the levees failing in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, universities are putting a higher emphasis on students having a better uve nderstanding of ethical and quantitative concepts, as opposed to solely focusing on date and numbers.

I have mentioned Health IT before; as a good field for future career growth, and I’m sure I’ll mention it again. But there are obviously many other IT areas where a smart person (that would be you) can find both challenges and rewards.

Thanks, Bruce Douglass, for sharing these thoughts with us. You can follow Bruce on Twitter and Facebook.

I know the CEO, Larry Augustin, pretty well. In fact, I found out about these jobs because he and I are Facebook friends and he posted SugarCRM’s hiring needs on Facebook.

When you apply, you can tell them I know Larry and that I sent you. It probably won’t do any good, but hey! It’s worth a try, right?