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Comment by arnvald | Hacker News Reader

Your comment is unfair. These websites are not scams. A couple of years ago I was looking for 10-15h/week gigs and using one of competitors of freelancer.com proved to work for me. Was it annoying to bid for gigs? Yes. Was the quality of their service low? Yeah, I'd say so. Were salaries low? For someone coming from Eastern Europe - not at all. On top of that, I always got money on time, which is not always the case if you have a direct client.

Yes, you will be outbid by competitors from cheaper countries, but hey, welcome to reality where half of the stuff you buy is produced in China, because you compete with people and companies from all around the world.

And no, if you pay someone $10 to get a gig that'll bring you $100, you're not ripped off, this is how business works, people earn money by helping other people to make money.

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> For someone coming from Eastern Europe - not at all.

> Yes, you will be outbid by competitors from cheaper countries, but hey, welcome to reality where half of the stuff you buy is produced in China, because you compete with people and companies from all around the world.

That's what a race to the bottom looks like, if this trend keeps on going it won't be long before everybody has the income of somebody working in India, without even living there.

This is not meant as an attack on the OP (or India), most people would act the same way if they'd be in that situation, just a somewhat scared observation where the future seems to be heading.

And it's not like we got any good solutions for any of this, bringing the living standards up for everybody won't work, due to resource and economic constraints, so down it is.

no, because India's revenue is growing, that's how you get developing countries out of the mud. Look how China developed since they became the world's factory.

Revenue is of no use when nobody is being paid living wages anymore. As good as China is doing, it still hasn't solved the basic issues and a growing middle class in China (and India) is only gonna worsen the situation.

I don't believe this planet can sustain billions of people living with the same standards/ways like Northern American or Western European people do, that's a pipe dream equal to "Everybody can be a millionaire".

Sure, everybody could be a millionaire, but at that point nobody wants to a millionaire anymore but rather a billionaire, the same applies to living standards.

so we are selecting who is gonna die so everybody raise to our standard of living? Are we selecting some people who we will purposefully maintain in poverty so that we keep our standard of living? Or are we reducing our standard of living down to some sustainable world average?

Who's selecting? I'm merely stating the obvious: Depending on how you count, there are around 1 billion people living in the "developed world" and it's already wrecking havoc on the environment and even the human psyche.

Yet people think it's viable to extend that same kind of lifestyle to additional 6+ billion people? Let's not forget that a large part of these 6 billion people are not even close to a Chinese or Indian middle class, but are stuck way below the poverty line. And it's not like India or China have solved environmental issues, imho there is massive "environmental debt" building up in India and China, people merely tend to ignore those in light of high renewable adoption rates, but that's only one part of the issue, waste management is another one.

As much as I wish it'd be possible, I simply don't see how this is supposed to work out with constantly rising living standards for everybody. So the other outcome is most likely that standards won't rise for everybody, but rather that they equalize on a "middle level", which still means close to a billion people gonna have to "lower" their standards and a couple of billion have to rise theirs quite a bit.

Everybody's going to die. I'm not sure what you're talking about.

just because people get richer doesn't mean they will or even could make the same unhealthy lifestyle choices as americans. There will never be huge suburbs of mcmansions outside of every indian city - there's simply not enough room, even if everyone had the purchasing power of an american. (I say this as american who lives in the suburbs). Not saying that all the growth will be environmentally sound growth, but perhaps not as bad as it was in the past.

Even if poorer countries(and people) get the exact same opportunities for same money, they still have to compete.

Why is a race to the bottom worse than getting paid 40 times more and spending 100 times more for housing and healthcare?

(Comparing Bangalore or Mumbai to San Francisco, since you mentioned India.)

I didn't even compare the two, obviously having insane high living costs is another issue, but it's not nearly as bad as this current race to the bottom of labor costs.

In Western Europe pretty much the whole low-income sector has been taken over by Eastern Europeans, working for weeks, sending home most of the money they make, working in conditions that nobody should have to work in (reversing labor rights progress) sleeping in their cars/group housing. I realize this sounds like some Brexit tale, but it is a very real thing that's been going on for quite a while and is one of the reasons for the stagnating real wages.

It's great for companies, cheap labor, it's not so great for the local populations who have to compete with foreign labor prices while having to come up with enough money to pay local living costs for their whole family.

Case in point: Try paying 100 times more for housing and healthcare in LA, once the vast majority of people are getting paid like call-center agents in India, won't work, can't work.

>Case in point: Try paying 100 times more for housing and healthcare in LA, once the vast majority of people are getting paid like call-center agents in India, won't work, can't work.

So, a bubble will burst and prices will decrease. You can already find cheap (as in cheaper than in India!) apartments some 30-40 mins away from Manhattan on the subway.

"I always got money on time, which is not always the case if you have a direct client."

This depends on how you charge your clients. If you charge them up-front, you will always get paid on time.

As another Eastern European, you might be doing it wrong. I no longer charge sums that would give me 10-20% more compared to the median programmer job around here. I charge 100% more.

The reason is: I value my skills and work. Confidence needs practice though; many people in our poorer regions never get any appreciation so their confidence is very low. Which is very good for the employers because they pay less.

Oh well. Not all employers. It all depends on the people of course but you should do your very best NOT to participate in the race to the bottom. Nobody wins there except the lowest scum of "employers" that would have you as a full-blown slave if they were legally allowed to do so.

Don't contribute to the problem. Resist. It's not so hard as many other fellow Eastern Europeans think. Confidence helps.

I think freelancer.com is probably one of the worst places because it affords no protection

they are money changers, and the last thing you want in a contract is someone in the middle making arbitrary decisions about when you get paid.

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