Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

Right. That network cable goes all the way to Bangladesh. Average programmer hourly wage in Bangladesh:

https://www.google.com/search?q=average+programmer+hourly+wa...

I clicked on the second link:

http://www.salaryexplorer.com/hourly-wage.php?loc=18&loctype...

   Maximum: 698 BDT / hr
   Average: 326 BDT / hr
   Median: 279 BDT / hr
   Minimum: 58 BDT / hr

In dollars that is:

   Maximum: $8.6 / hr
   Average: $4.0 / hr
   Median: $3.4 / hr
   Minimum: $0.72 / hr

I bet you're looking for more than them. But when they go remote, aren't you competing with them?

I would say it is easier to become remote if you are already working with a company that knows you. As for establishing such a relationship, I kind of agree with codingdave's advice in this thread.

View on HN

You need to NOT be competing on price, add some other differential (in my case I tried competing on very good English and being on the same time zone as most of the U.S.).

Competing on price or selling yourself to the lowest bidder is a losing proposition.

That said, most of the best Indian devs aren't making that money remotely, they're making a lot more (or at least, I've seen them getting paid a lot more).

I got contacted and worked remotely through Hacker News and, although it didn't pan out (I wasn't a good fit) it was a great experience and I met really good people from around the world.

> But when they go remote, aren't you competing with them?

Not really. There aren't many companies who are considering both American and Indian remote developers for the same positions.

Well paying remote jobs tend to have time zone constraints, and require better English communication skills than the average Indian developer has (there definitely are Indian developers with excellent communications skills, but they aren't average).

People think that because they are out of the office that politics doesn't affect them and they don't need soft skills. But communicating effectively is even more important in remote work because of the inherently lower communications bandwidth.

fair enough.

Assuming an Indian coder is a good English communicator, would working the night shift be such a big barrier ,compared to the salary potential ?

Many hiring managers will be carrying around at least some latent racism from previous interactions with offshored developers that worked out as well as a car crash.

In some projects, having a night shift can be a tremendous advantage. It works particular well in extremely agile environments with fast assignment->deployment turnarounds. For example, if the night shift does daily deployments, then the parent does QA during the day and sends fixes/new requests before the start of the night shift.

Other times, particularly if the project has complicated architectural requirements, it's too hard to get the night shift on the same page a super the parent.

Considering the current perspective, 8 USD is good for Bangladeshi. AFAIK the current scenario is worst than that. Companies actually want to hire engineers 10k BDT which around 124 USD!! Same goes for upwork. The whole tech market looks totally unstable right now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com