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Comment by hoof_marks | Hacker News Reader

Consider another aspect- agency costs. I recently asked for a quotation for some custom work in php. To generate pdf and zip files from database with a dashboard. Agencies quoted it as roughly US$ 340. That is steep.

So its good that a lot of help is available at sites like stackexchange. We completed the stuff ourselves.

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Is it steep?

I suppose you paid the salaries for the person(s) doing that work in-house. Assuming your programmer's salary cost (~1.3x their gross salary) is $5000 per month and the median month having 20 work days, that price is about the equivalent of 1 day of work for your in-house programmer.

So that price needs to pay for 1 work day for the outsourced freelance programmer+overhead/profit margin for the company itself...Sounds reasonable to me.

Below a certain threshold it doesn't make sense to put in the time/effort to get a new client.

true i agree on the threshold principle. A minimum time slot or billing is reasonable. But as a client let's say thats just a slice of the entire web-project. And if this simple stuff takes $10/hour x 34 hours. It is steep.

Which programmer rates at $10/hour in salary cost? Here (Germany), this is just about minimum wage.

So even a cashier in the supermarket or a street cleaner earns about that or more.

EDIT: I guess the situation is different in India (just saw you're based there from your comment history), although I remember reading that even there developer salaries are slowly closing the gap with their western counterparts.

Like i said, I am not disputing the wage or salary as such. However with respect to a custom project it makes it costly. Again compared to having your own people do it using help from the net. As they may not be experts themselves.

I started writing this before having seen your other comment :)

That's a reasonable salary. But when you have to add the overheads + profits i guess the piece work project will come out costly.

Actually, a 340$ quote from a US (or similar economies, like EU, Canada, AU, NZ) is a big red flag. No consulting business can really thrive charging that low, especially for non-recurring work.

It is quite literally not worth my time to get out of bed for less than 500$ unless the client is a frequently recurring client.

Some development jobs are too small to be worth doing professionally. Assuming that wasn't a typo, I'm surprised any agency gave you a quote for a $340 job. Even my little consultancy business would need an extra zero before it was worth doing the paperwork to set up a new client in most cases, and our overheads are significantly lower than a lot of agencies would have.

This makes me think of the usefulness of interns, especially in niche areas.

Take a few per year. They'll enjoy the experience. And when mentioning niche areas, take them in skill-sets the team don't have, and have them teach the team. Example, for an engineering team: Graphic design, marketing, languages, etc..

Secondly we never could get anyone to do cURL stuff. In house we did a splendid job using online help and tech blogs. So my point is also there are gaps in web design agencies. Either they provide something with a premium cost. Or there is no one to take up custom projects.

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