let me piggyback on this thread. this is my freelancer.com experience as a hirer https://medium.com/@ss88/freelancer-com-my-horrible-experien...
> Freelancer.com is a cesspool of low-level coders who says yes yes yes when you ask them of their skills and knowledge of frameworks.
Yes it is. And you should avoid them, especially if you know this. Fool me once and all that. I think this experience is as much your fault as it is theirs.
1 chinese, 1 indian, and 1 bangladeshi.
Doing it correctly or completely isn't part of the contract.
I don't know how true it is about China, but I certainly recognized that attitude.
[0] https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/if+you+pay+peanuts%2C+y...
一分钱，一分货 which means you get the equivalent in goods of what you pay in price, and
好货不便宜，便宜无好货 which means good products aren't cheap and cheap products aren't good.
Nothing against people from Asia, of course, it's just what happens when there's a billion people and people are cheap - the best leave, and the rest do whatever they have to.
People are exaggerating their skills because a job that you aren't qualified for is better than no job.
edit: you mention the prices in the comments, so here they are for anyone curious:
Node.js port 155 USD, Android port 789 USD, Website theme 300 USD. It is not slave wages considering the living costs in the respective countries.(sic!)
>Node.js port 155 USD
This is good for what, 1 hour of work?
Pay peanuts, get monkeys.
So if you follow that principle, how is 155 USD low for 3 days work? its 1000 CNY
>So if you follow that principle, how is 155 USD low for 3 days work? its 1000 CNY
Let's see: Bangalore is (only) 5 times cheaper than SF.[1] So it's hardly 3 days of work. Shanghai is 2.2 times cheaper.[2]
1 - https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
2 - https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Because that's basically the whole point of globalisation.
Both parties benefit, I don't see what the problem is.
I have worked with many Indian and Chinese devs on the past, so I have some knowledge of the outsourcing industry.
[1]https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...
I've worked with many Indian devs over the past 10 years or so, and have become good friends with a few. One of those is freelancing for US and EU clients - he is earning far more than he would be paid by a local company, and gets to choose which jobs he takes on, as well as his working hours.
He is of course very happy with this, and very far from being 'exploited'.
Why do you care which ISP someone uses when committing to a repository or login to VM?
On the other end of things, would I move to a more expensive neighborhood if that meant I will get a bigger salary? While I don't know about you or your friend, my answer would be yes please.
Fair is when equal work is equally compensated. When you earn significantly less than others in roughly the same position you are being exploited and it does not matter whether you can make ends meet.
We're talking about different countries here. It's not quite so simple to just move to another country.
> Fair is when equal work is equally compensated
So it's unfair that an Indian dev working in India for an Indian company earns less than a US dev working in the US for a US company? Different countries have very different economies.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one - local economy, market rates and living costs still seem extremely relevant to me.
You don't even have to move to another country, salaries vary wildly throughout a country and there are obvious outliers think NYC, SV or even London. And then we are talking about contracting/freelancing/remote work. If you want to have a job done, why do you care what is the purchasing power of the contract fee in a given country?
By the way, if dev A and dev B works for the same company on the same project in the same position one in location A and the other in location B, they should be equally compensated.
> Do you think the prices offered on freelancing sites are fair?
Yes, I think they are 'fair'. This is how a free market works - clients are free to offer whatever price they like, devs are free to take on the jobs they feel make sense.
> Would you be willing to work for such prices?
It depends on the job but, taking $100 for 10 hours of work as an example - No. But just because such jobs don't make financial sense for me, doesn't mean the same for other economies.
> Why do you care which ISP someone uses when committing to a repository or login to VM?
I don't, nor did I claim to. What I care about is market rates.
The problem, as always in this kind of situation, is how unequally the benefits are distributed.
If the investor pays 4-5 times (and that's a low end) less for something, while the worker gets 10% more compared to doing the same locally then it's unfair, even if both sides "benefit".
It's also natural for investors to seek the lowest prices they can get. That's why there are laws like minimum wage and other protections of the workers. The globalization is not just a way of getting things for cheap, it also a workaround for laws which prohibit investors from paying too little.
It's unfair, in my opinion, even if the worker does benefit. It gets much worse when the workers don't benefit at all. For example, in EU, we currently have a heated debate about delegated workers - people employed in one country and working (and living) in another. Companies do this to dodge the laws - minimum wage, social benefits, and so on - of their own country, while the workers suffer the higher costs of living in the richer country. It also makes the richer country native workers screwed. It's probably going to become illegal in the next couple of years.
People working remotely are in a different situation, in that they indeed live in a cheaper place. They still get paid much less than the minimum wage of the richer country where the investor comes from, which I think is also unfair. Also, the "cheaper place" is often not really - the prices in these countries are getting ever closer to the richer countries, while the wages lag behind the prices significantly.
In other words, there should be - and is, in many places - a limit on how badly workers can be exploited. The globalization is a loophole which circumvents these laws. I hope it will get closed in the future.
EDIT: note that it's definitely not the only way globalization affects people and many effects of globalization are positive. Just not this one, in my opinion.
India hasn't seen such growth exactly because they didn't embrace globalization to the same level China did. Indian policies are much more left leaning, market unfriendedly.
Note that all the hardware and software that were used to create the original internet or Unix or Emacs (dumb 80x24 CRT terminals hooked up to mainframes or mini-computers running low-level languages) were shitty tools by today's standards, yet amazing things were done with them by smart people.
It's insane to think that modern tooling doesn't affect results at all.
Perhaps you meant: "compared to cost of living MacBook is a tiny fraction of developer cost". That's true.
Note: food might be cheaper, but consider housing is very expensive here... 0.5M+ USD for about 60m^2. If I take this pay and calculate it as a contracted worker, he would receive about 8000 CNY and this is considered a low pay.
This, this and this.
There's isn't a dearth of good talent out there. Please just be willing to pay a fair price (not just for the hours worked but for the fact that he's available to you on demand, cc Adam Smith).
As an aside, I do believe freelancer.com should do a better job filtering candidates (and gigs). Can maybe turn into a premium service like toptal.
Yeah, no. They literally just ask you a random question from CTCI and call it a day if you can make it run in 20 minutes.
All of these "gig economy" websites are funny that way. Go over to the "I want to hire people" tab and they'll tell you all about having the best experts in the field.
Then you look at how they find those experts and it turns out that they make them do a fizzbuzz.
In India? No, will get you several hours of work from a decent dev and still be a great deal for the dev
If you're not a freelancer, but rather a salaried person... take some times to calculate how much your employer is paying for your benefits, and all the costs associated with employing you. It's typically around 2x your "hourly" wage.
This pisses me off big time. It is more expensive to live in developing countries than in developed countries. Try to wrap your head around it. These countries are developing, so they don't have infrastructure to support their populace.
local people typically don't aspire to that
Yes they do, of course it is not accessible to most.
Have you by chance never been to a developing country? Honestly, how cheap some things are would shock you; for example, you can eat like a king in the heart of any Indian city for 1-2 dollars!
Where I am in the UK, for a senior dev house prices are 5-7 times annual income.
~950 sq ft 2 bedroom apartments in Noida can be had for as little as £35k. This is actually large by UK standards, and is 3-5 times cheaper than where I am in the UK - I do however realise that property in much of the US (assuming that's where you're from) is relatively cheap.
Trying to shift the blame to the market is still discrimination in my book.
Require that the bid contains a snippet on how they intend to solve the problem. Or if it's something obvious/non-explainable, require that the bidder put their favourite fruit on the bid. Something simple that lets you know they didn't just copy and paste the thing
Also pick the middle of the road proposal price-wise.
Can't really do much more than say "I can do this" and draw attention to your reviews if you have any.
For me this is one of the many red flags on this site. If you're very focused then you can make it work, but for common garden jobs, not so much.