> Requirements would need to be well scoped to make this feasible I would imagine
This depends on the client.
And JFYI - while there definitely are good clients on Upwork, you'd have to sieve through a lot of garbage posts, so you'll have to spend quite some time finding the good ones.
I also heard people saying that local US marketplaces (even Craigslist) might bring a higher hourly rate. Can't vouch for it, though. On Upwork, there's a lot of work at $30-35 per hour - you can set higher rate for yourself, but that would naturally mean less clients reaching out to you.
I've been working with it for 9.5 years now, you're welcome to ask if you have questions.
Strong tradition of STEM education, back from the Soviet times. Military complex was very strong in the USSR, which resulted in quality education (again, just STEM, not so in humanities) - basically, you need to know physics and maths very well to build the bomb.
I guess that applies to other Eastern bloc countries to some extent (see Polish universities at ##5, 9 and 25, Ukraine at #11, Belarus at #17).
Remote jobs - Upwork (formerly oDesk, with Elance joining it shortly).
If you have some portfolio, you can try monthly "Who's hiring/Who wants to be hired/Seeking freelancer" threads here on HN, the next would be in just a few days:
You've got pretty impressive range of skills, and at least PHP/frontend are very remote-friendly, with enough demand on the resources I added above.
Since you're familiar with C++ and competitive programming, you might also try things like TopCoder/CodeEval; it's more about competition, but the corporate sponsors are watching competitors and might hire the best.
My email is in my profile, feel free to get in touch if you have more questions. Best of luck!
This was the premise of some sci-fi novel I read long ago: two countries at war switched to using robots, and as robo-armies became more interconnected and thus more intellectually powerful, they understood the pointlessness of destruction and refused to fight. IIRC they went to pick flowers on the battlefield instead of singing, though.
I thought it was one of Stanislaw Lem's novels, but can't find the name now; I might be wrong about that.
Average level of HN audience is pretty high, and for people with decent programming skill and good English remote is an option - with liveable wage, if you live anywhere outside SFBA/NY/London; and if you live in SFBA/NY/London, you have plenty of options as a developer.
I'm using an extension for that: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/middle-button-scrol...
There used to be a more popular one, but it got dumped by Chrome recently, guess it wasn't up-to-date.
This one isn't perfect (eg sometimes it pastes clipboard on middle-click), but still it mostly works.