Olympic weightlifting is just the name for a discipline which incorporates a specific set of barbell excercises. It's injury rate is indeed extremely low (From Hamill, B. “Relative Safeety of Weightlifting and Weight Training”
Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 8(1):53-57, 1994 https://imgur.com/a/0jI0CzK).
Your typical gym-goer does all kinds of other stuff though, like crossfit and similar nonsense, which is highly injury prone.
The "classic" (i.e. Olympic) exercises, is a very safe sport.
How about just travelling a month's time first, before deciding on a year? Go to south America, SE Asia or something, check it out and relax. It'll cost a month extra of rent, but it doesn't sound like the financials is a problem. And if you decide you want to travel more, you just return after the first month, get your affairs sorted and off you go again :-)
Do you use a Google api or do you send http request and scrape the response html? As I understand the gogle search api got deprecated some years back. I am a few days from my laptop so can't properly read it for myself :-) thanks!
I googled it and found a PC Mag review from 1994 with a funny passage: "We did a direct import of a 1000 record database from both ACT! And Organizer, and the operation took only a minute on a 486 system" :-)
Fully agree. Nationality alone isn't a sure fire indicator of quality. I find that on average there is a higher success rate with eastern europe / russia vendors, especially when the onshore personnel are inexperienced with outsourcing. But of course there is hits and misses no matter what country you choose. Finding a good vendor in any location is a discipline in itself.
And yes, if a company decides to outsource with low price being the overshadowing priority, they are likely to end up with the amazingly low price and amazingly low quality vendors.
You should try other outsourcing destinations. Large timezone differences are indeed a hurdle, and culture differences is always underestimated. Add to that the general ineptitude of managing projects in large companies, and you have a recipe for disaster.
In Western Europe, the most compatible culture and therefore easiest place to start, is Eastern Europe and Russia. If you are in the US, I'd personally just outsource to US companies in the midwest. Some of my western European clients are actually doing this now, as for example NC hourly rates are lower than Moscow rates.
Managing projects where you have big cultural differences require many years of experience in that particular area. Even then, it requires a much higher project management effort.
If management of a project with a local team take on average 10% of total project time, a project with developers in a markedly different work culture will easily take 20-30% of time spend.
If you try again, try to see if you can get a client with a decent sized mailing list. Warming up is usually done with progressively larger sendouts. So you'd start with maybe 500 sendouts, then a thousand, then 3000 etc.
But anyway yeah the barrier to entry has risen really much. It's much harder these days than just a couple of years ago, and it probably won't get easier either!
Outsourcing has worked for me and my clients for 10 years or so. The main aspects of making it work is vendor selection, local manager with outsourcing experience and proper choice of engagement model.
The author, Yegor, is arguing outsourcing categorically does not work due to lower vendor margins from 2001 and today.
What he fails to mention is that while Eastern Europe has risen in cost, there's still plenty of locations with much lower cost and therefore much wider margins. In such locations, his main argument would no longer be valid.
Even in Ukraine, there's huge difference in cost of living and therefore average salary across the country. Kiev is very expensive. Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Donetsk, not so much. But nowhere are you going to find 300 USD a month developers. 2000-2500 maybe, but not 300.
Further, the vendors he describe are not good vendors. Good vendors will raise the price to provide a sufficient margin in order to provide a good quality service. Bad vendors will sell with low price being their only parameter, and yes, such companies will typically have the mindset of "milking the cow". Until they fold from one day to the other, that is.
Finally, the mismatch Yegor describes between client and vendor expectations could be entirely removed if he just chose a different engagement model. For product development, you shouldn't do a fixed-price project model. Rather, do a monthly retainer based model for the same employee(s), where you pay the vendor x amount of dollars for the full allocation of person x. This way there's no prioritizing from the vendor company that can influence your project (unless the vendor is straight up fraudulent). And with a cancellation notice of 3 months, the margin can be lower as there's no risk for the vendor.
OP, I don't know if you are reading the comments here but in case you do: Don't get discouraged so quickly.
The reason this is happening is as the blurb from the MS postmaster help page: Your IP doesn't have a reputation yet.
The reason these rules are in place aren't about email monopoly, it's about spam. If anybody could setup a SMTP server and start firing off large amounts of mail, spam would be even more endemic than today.
You can configure your server perfectly, but that doesn't mean much, since it's your IP that's the problem.
If you have legit objectives, it's a pain in the ass for sure. But you are not the only one having this problem, and there's a solution for it.
All the big email service providers (ESP's) like Neolane, Exact Target, Mailchimp, Campaign monitor etc share this problem when they onboard a new client, who requires their own IP.
Deliverability is a surprisingly deep, technical topic, and all major ESP's have entire teams of specialists working on this.
If you want to make such a service as Fastmail, you need to get really into deliverability. It's not a walk in the park, but it's not impossible either.
I'm not a specialist in this particular area myself, so I can't give you that much specific advice. I've just worked elbow to elbow with a lot of these guys, so I know what kind of challenges they work with.
One thing I know for sure is really important, is the "warming up" of IP's. Basically the IP you are sending from needs to accumulate some reputation over a period of time, typically a month or two.
If you send out reasonably small amounts of mail to email addresses that exists and the recipients does not explicitly report you for junk mail, your IP get whitelisted and you will get a much higher delivery rate.
There's no quick fix unfortunately, and email reputation is hard to gain and fast to lose.
But it certainly can be done. You sound very competent on the server side of things, so to get your fastmail-like service up, I think it's just a matter of a bit more persistence and studying deliverability as a technical subject.