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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

How in the world does one hire $9 an hour software engineers?

Without wanting to sound disrespectful, most of the engineers outside US and some EU countries, get paid a lot less from what you’re used to and from what you read in major tech sites. I know a lot of good engineers in many countries (Greece, Croatia, south-east EU, India...) that get paid less than 9$/hr (myself included). The bad thing with all the big companies outsourcing positions and working with external partners is that it’s difficult to distinguish the good engineers from the copy-paste developers, self-taught coders and really bad engineers that give some countries a bad name. I have first hand experience of really bad engineers, working for top companies, who get paid low wages and don’t care about the quality of their work. I guess that’s how the system works...

> self-taught coders

That need not be a disadvantage, I've seen awesome self-taught coders (and really bad ones too).

> Still, for the 787, HCL gave Boeing a remarkable price – free, according to Sam Swaro, an associate vice president who pitched HCL’s services at a San Diego conference sponsored by Avionics International magazine in June. He said the company took no up-front payments on the 787 and only started collecting payments based on sales years later, an “innovative business model” he offered to extend to others in the industry.

How is that allowed? It is like basically the equivalent of dumping products below market and production price like what China frequently does to steel.

Why wouldn't this be allowed? This is the company equivalent of a person working on commission vs salary. Salary is more stable and predictable, commission is riskier but has higher potential for upside.

it's also the equivalent of what they call "royalties" in the music industry.

It’s more like becoming a partner or working for shares. Rather than getting a fixed price up front you take a (presumably larger) payment at a later date but accept the risk that there may be no payment.

You just described Uber.

How common is this, payment based on sales, and years later!? I guess you only do that with established companies? Still seems like a risk.

I'm positive they are more "developer" than "engineer".

9hr = 72 day = 1440 month = $28800 MXN a month. Buys you 1 software engineer between Jr and mid level here in Mexico my

$9 an hour works out to about 100,000 rupees a month, which allows one to live relatively comfortably in India.

India. Billing rate is around $30

Go to India?

That's usually the case, though in my experience from doing a bunch of re-writes of code outsourced to India - you really do get what you pay for.

Had to run an outsourced team out of India a few years back. Had to sign off on the time / pay paperwork. I believe their Senior-level folks were costing us $20 - $25 per hour. Not sure what they made after the agency took their cut. $9 sounds like very Junior-level staffing.

As for code quality, this team was working on a Spring / Java application. They were instructed to use Spring JDBC templates instead of Hibernate. So of course they build their own query-builder that was just concatenating strings. Naturally we paid them to clean up their own mess.

> Naturally we paid them to clean up their own mess.

Heh, basically funding external developers too learn without the benefit of retaining them then.

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