U.S freelancers pretend to be from other countries to get jobs

http://blog.cubeofm.com/us-freelancers-are-pretending-to-be-from-phil

by noodle • 16 years ago

112 61 16 years ago

blog.cubeofm.com

If they can't get jobs for more than $200 they're either terrible programmers, or they need to look for work on places other than rentacoder. Probably both.

EDIT: To be clear, I meant to say that if they can't get jobs making more than $200 for two weeks of work, they're either terrible or need to look elsewhere for work. Further, I'll put my money where my mouth is: if you want to make $5 / hr and you can write good code, email me and I'll give you all the work you can handle. I'm guessing I won't have any takers.

pyre2• 16 years ago

Depends. Who says that these aren't side gigs to their main source of income?

markpercival• 16 years ago

Yeah I'm completely perplexed by this. I'm not questioning the guys article, but there's got to be more to it then we are reading. $200 for a two week project is $5 an hour if you only work on it 4 hours a day.

Even in the current economy any halfway decent programmer should be able to pull in more than minimum wage.

maxklein4• 16 years ago

They are doing this on the side in the night to make some extra cash, not their main job, from what I understand.

ThinkWriteMute• 16 years ago

For me, personally, I tend to low ball my costs because I'm just not that sure of my ability.

Where do you gauge something like that? There isn't anywhere.

keefe• 16 years ago

I'm questioning the guys article, I think it's either an anomaly or a fabrication.

datasink• 16 years ago

When asking for fairly straight-forward work, I believe a lot of contractors use generated code or repurposed code from other projects. At least this has been my experience from outsourcing application development.

It became especially apparent when I began requesting daily subversion commits for projects that lasted more than a day.

dangrossman2• 16 years ago

Maybe you haven't heard, but at least 1 in 10 people in the US can't find work right now. Unemployment figures always undercount by quite a bit. The official "discouraged workers" count is about 10 million, so let's put real unemployment closer to 16%.

We don't all live in Sunny California where tech jobs are seemingly always abundant -- unemployment wouldn't be so high if the jobs were available. If you can't find any work, then $200 is better than missing rent and living on the street.

If you think unemployed or underemployed coders are either terrible at what they do or aren't looking, well, you're not living in the same country as me.

iheartmemcache• 16 years ago

Underemployment is arguably worse than unemployment for a given person. It ends up moving the equilibrium S/D price to a drastically lower position in the short run, and ultimately somewhat a lower position than where it should be. Taking gigs like this is foolish for anyone in software who cares about a stable salary any time in the future.

ryanwaggoner5• 16 years ago

Maybe you haven't heard, but at least 1 in 10 people in the US can't find work right now.

How many of those 10% are unemployed coders who would be glad to take work for $2 / hr? I'm guessing zero.

Sorry, but $200 for two weeks of work is less than minimum wage. If that's all you can make as a programmer in the US, you're either not looking in the right places or you're not much of a programmer. I know enough programmers (myself included) who charge more than an order of magnitude more than that and turn down work constantly to think otherwise. And I'm no rockstar. A good friend of mine who does PHP web development landed a good telecommute software developer job last year making $80k / yr. He lives in the Midwest and has been coding for like 3 years.

So maybe I'm not living in the same country as you.

dschobel• 16 years ago

The 10% figure may be a bit of a red-herring as it applies to programmers. If you look at the data[1], people with college degrees are only at about ~4.5% unemployment.

Even if the intersection of the programmer set and college degree set isn't complete, it does hint that the nature of this recession has been affecting one class of worker a lot harder, namely, the unskilled & assembly-line workers.

So while Ryan's point may have seemed a little unsympathetic, I think there's probably _some_ truth to it.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/econo...

paulgb• 16 years ago

I wonder what the age of the developers is. When I was 15-17 I could do simple development jobs and would have rather taken $100/week doing stuff I enjoyed (and learned from) than minimum wage packing fast food.

wdewind• 16 years ago

Yeah, I'm 20 now but learned a ton doing crappy freelance work (not saying the stuff you need done is crappy max :P). I probably made less than minimum wage frequently, but I remember the first time I could charge $500 for a website (when I was like 15 or so - it was a huge amount for me at the time). It took about a week of work, but for a 15 year old $500 (or even $200) for a week of work is quite a lot of money.

rwhitman2• 16 years ago

You know what though? For a college kid in ohio who's used to working the counter at Starbucks $5/hr for coding is a dream come true...

I've worked with a lot of college kids who got into coding after the recession started who's minds were BLOWN that they could earn extra money writing code

When there's no service / labor jobs on the local college market kids start looking for other angles and will take coding work for peanuts

heresy• 16 years ago

I don't get it either. I'm doing contracting on the side (here in New Zealand), and two weeks worth of work is around US$3000, if I'm doing 8 hours a day at my contract rates.

I guess if they need the experience, but there really should be better ways to get it.

You can earn more flipping burgers.

pyre2• 16 years ago

I guess the real question is: Are these people really able to take enough projects at the cheaper price level to survive? How about thrive?

If they are only 'getting by' at the cheaper level, then it's a fair assumption that they will move on to bigger and better things if they ever come along. If they are able to thrive, then assumptions about the economics of taking these cheaper jobs is grossly misunderstood.

motters• 16 years ago

I suppose that if you're an unemployed programmer in the US doing something like this might at least keep you engaged and your skills up to date, even if the money isn't enough to pay the bills.

icefox• 16 years ago

And or learn something new while getting paid to do it.

imasr• 16 years ago

I live in Argentina, and here companies are crazy about hiring IT people, no matter what your skills are, and most of them do offshore work for the US, paying barely standard fees here and cashing big there. Don't think have to say who wins and who loses with this practice. Have been thinking lately about this and believe one solution would be to equalize developer fees 'round the world, rise the bar and compete on performance. I know it sounds crazy, but have some ideas on things we could try to work this out. I'll post them here if you think it worths anything.

maxklein4• 16 years ago

Why don't you start such a company then? Seems like an opportunity. You have access to a pool of people who need developers right here on this site.

GFischer• 16 years ago

I'm not the above poster, but I'm in Uruguay... and, to answer your question, I probably will :)

mark_l_watson• 16 years ago

I see the logic in taking a small job just to keep busy. I did the same thing right after the dot com bust 8 years ago: I took a task from an Indian company to do a Sharepoint clone in Java at a fairly low rate with the understanding that I could set their work aside for a few days at a time when better paying work came along. I never regretted that decision, partially because the guy who hired me was a one time McKinsey manager and he was cool to work with. I live in the mountains in Arizona, BTW, so I do a lot of remote work.

gexla• 16 years ago

These people should just move to the countries they are pretending to be from then. $200 goes a lot farther in the Philippines than it does in the U.S.

joshwa2• 16 years ago

That's one of the reasons I'm moving to southwestern China this fall. Making freelance/telecommute USD will enable me to live quite nicely in Kunming.

(PS if anyone needs an experienced Rails/Java/Python/whatever-you-need-me-to-learn coder and can deal with a 9-12hr time difference, my contact info is in my profile)

fortes• 16 years ago

Sounds like a fun adventure! Why Kunming? Do you speak Mandarin?

andrewljohnson2• 16 years ago

When you are selling yourself in the future, absolutely do not call out a negative in your ad.

The number one rule of advertising is be positive, always.

tectonic• 16 years ago

Sounds like fun! Kunming is a beautiful city. Be sure to take a train up to Dali sometime, and hike down Tiger Leaping Gorge. If you want suggestions on what to do, feel free to contact me.

mattm2• 16 years ago

I lived in Suzhou, China in 2008 and did freelance work through oDesk. I found it worthwhile to always mention that English was my native language. Other than an initial interview, none of my work required telephone (Skype) communication so the timezone was not a factor. My first job on oDesk was only $8/hr as I just wanted to try it out but after that my rate jumped to over $20/hr and I never really had a tough time getting work. I have found going above $30 to be tougher to find work but then I haven't actively been looking for freelance work since being back. It should be a great experience for you!

dennisgorelik• 16 years ago

May be these developers are able to re-package their pre-existing code in couple of hours? Then these $200 are turned into $100/hour which looks like a reasonable business model.

yummyfajitas• 16 years ago

That's very likely. It's also possible the jobs are easy enough that they just do it in fewer hours.

I was once offered a $3000 contract (at $20/hour) for a project that amounted to stringing together a few generic views and writing a python wrapper around some C++ code.

The job didn't work out for various reasons (I offered to build on spec, they wanted a low hourly rate). If I were telecommuting, I could have spent a day or two building it, wait 2 weeks before delivering it, and pocket $3000 for a days work.

rwhitman2• 16 years ago

We are looking at the beginning of the "World Wage".

In virtual labor, the effect of the recession is going to be a major fluctuation seeking equilibrium between the NYC/CA USA-based $100/hr coders and the Everywhere Else-based $15/hr coders. As people get better at virtual work and clients & employers become more conscious of the value deflation of quality code work people in the US will start fetching less and less and people outside the US will start fetching more and more, until they meet in value. Watch.

patio11• 16 years ago

This presupposes that you're selling the same hour in NYC and Bangalore. (i.e. that when you measure what is produced, it is equivalent.)

I do not live in either a $15/hr or $100/hr region, but I've managed people from both, and it has not been my experience that the hour sold is the same as the hour bought.

DavidMcLaughlin• 16 years ago

The beginning of the "World Wage?" I believe the concept you describe is outsourcing and people have been worrying about that for years. Amazing how predicting a little doom can garner head nodding though.

For me the market that is most open to being outsourced is web development. I happen to love developing web applications, always have. From the dynamic languages to the openness to just about every detail, I love it. I also happen to have a Computer Science degree. It's a lonely place being a Computer Scientist working in web development. Nearly everyone I've ever worked with has a career path like this:

1) Messed around with HTML. Copy and pasted some "DHTML" scripts and was blown away by how easy it was.

2) Picked up CSS. Became an overnight "separation of concerns" advocate and part of the dedicated few that "gets it"

3) Picked up PHP and MySQL in a week, built a dynamic web app. Became "multi-skilled," a "fast learner" and a "jack of all trades"

4) Became a professional developer, out-earning just about everyone they know, including people who have spent decades in their career

5) Years later, still does everything in the same LAMP stack and honestly believes that they should be working at Google if only they would be given a chance.

And the best part is that within 2 years of those people going through that, there will be someone with exactly the same background except update the technologies to the one dominating the blogosphere. I had to experience self-taught programmers come in and be all arrogant and condescending about Perl code simply because they picked up PHP or Ruby on Rails or Prototype in a weekend and it was much easier to grep. They all have the same stories about being frustrated that no one they work with seems to "get it," no clue that a Django/PostgrSQL/jQuery guy is coming right round the corner to make them a dinosaur.

The arrogance and delusion of these people, particularly self-taught people who have this mindset where they are superior because they didn't even NEED to go to college to learn what some guy with a CS degree did. Hell, the "head of software development" I used to work for used to tell a story about how he interviewed for Google and the first technical question they asked him was "what is 2 to the power 10?" and he didn't know and that was that. He told me this story like "look how random it is - that's not even related to coding, I mean who would know the answer to that off the top of their head?" and laughed it off like "google so crazy." When I replied instantly that 2 to the power 10 is a megabyte, he would neither tell that story nor confide in me again.

Point is, web development has been THAT easy to get into for years, and it still is. Even when it gets tough, generally the answer is "memcache" or throwing another server at it - luckily the places where quality is that little of a concern tend not to need more than two or three servers anyway. People talk about some Russian high school student outbidding them on odesk for a Wordpress installaton like it's some sign of things to come, but is that supposed to be a bad thing? Or should we be more concerned about the fact that people who know just enough to tinker with Wordpress for a living can earn more than doctors and nurses?

As for my job being outsourced, I left that web development company I worked for and now work for Nokia. I am specialising in JavaScript, a language that I used to love but then got pushed out from when a bunch of HTML/CSS guys picked up jQuery and changed their titles to "Front End Developer." Fortunately at Nokia, when I need to build applications that run fast on a mobile phone like the N900, neither jQuery nor throwing another server is the answer. So, honestly? I'm not worried.

TL;DR: the only people that need to be worried about a "World Wage" are people whose knowledge or expertise can be picked up in a week's worth of "PHP/MySQL for dummies."

stralep• 16 years ago

Isn't it 2^10=1024?

It is not important for the story, but there is some kilobyte sign missing :)

Daniel_Newby• 16 years ago

I am so reminded of this quote from Snow Crash:

"... once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity–y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else

music

movies

microcode (software)

high-speed pizza delivery"

U.S freelancers pretend to be from other countries to get jobs

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