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Comment by stubish | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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