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Comment by dpau | Hacker News Reader

Flimsy anecdotal account. Funny that this person's Fiverr account has gigs like "I will develop a web app for you (starting at $20)", which for me epitomizes the "rush to the bottom" that the writer bemoans.

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$20 is for a standard prototype or a quick wireframe, its a marketing strategy to bring to client to the discussion table. I don't do full web app gigs for that price! The other two packages (standard & premium) is where most of the development happens.

Great strategy! I'm guessing you are referring to these packages [1] These rates for me as a western european still look incredibly low. or are these still prototyping prices?

[1] https://www.fiverr.com/prahladyeri/develop-a-web-app-for-you

Yep, this incredibly low price is just for creating a rough prototype (which the client is typically never interested in). As I said, once the client comes to discussion table, I then bring the topics of well-maintained and commented source code, unit and integration testing, benefits of cloud hosting on AWS, etc. and then we start forming real estimates.

Picking a large but lower paid economy (India), and using https://tradingeconomics.com/india/wages as an arbitrary and hopefully valid data source, I get a bit over $US 28 per work day for high skilled employees. Lots of fuzz here (IT vs 'high skilled', work from home, own equipment & expenses, ultra short term contracts), but even then, where the 'bottom' is for these sorts of jobs is surprisingly low to many of us.

And maybe the fiverr model is better, where you might need to sit back and wait for a customer prepared to pay for your accent or residency status or physical location, rather than bid against people in a completely different economic situation.

For the past year I've had a flexible Upwork contract, enjoying the convenience of working remotely, by the hour, for good money. But my hourly rate (based in part on the cheap cost of living here in the rural US) most likely underbid developers in more expensive places like NYC & SV.

I guess we will just need to admit to ourselves that remote work like software development, graphic design, translation, etc. has become an internationally-traded commodity, and that in order to compete we will need to physically move to cheaper places in order to survive.

Saying that skilled services are a "commodity" implies that the work produced by two people across the globe would be interchangeable or "fungible". This is not true in most cases. There exists a considerable difference in the service quality when working with a team located closer to your place of business. This is mostly due to the differences in communication and cultural understanding when talking about the business goals, requirements, and changes after the fact. Repeating the mistakes of outsourcing made during the 80s and 90s will lead to similar outcomes.

There are also many legal concerns. When you outsource a job to, say, India, you are also paying to have that work either stolen from or should expect it to be stolen and given to, your competitors. There is no protection of intellectual property there. Even if the authorities in India became amenable to foreign entities penalizing Indian businesses for playing fast and loose with intellectual property, it would be astronomically expensive to hire a skilled international lawyer to deal with the case.

Yeah, what you say applies to firms who care about their intellectual properties (like software companies or music companies) but most clients who hire freelancers don't fall in that category. Its mostly custom development work for their website or app and the clients are typically startups and small businesses who perhaps don't even care about these things.

Can you imagine how terrible it is on Upwork?

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