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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

I used to offer tutoring for C, Go and Python programming for $50/hr.

I can’t tell you the number of people who asked me to do work on for their day job... I would always accept at $100/hr.

Almost every week I’d max out my 15 hours I’d set aside for “tutoring”. So beyond that I’d charge $200/hr, and I’d still get people for both tutoring and day job style work lol

$1/min is a fair price, but if you’re good you can make a lot more

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This is fascinating to me. Is there any particular kind of profile that hired you as a ghostwriter? Do these people know how to do their work and decide to outsource it or they have no clue and just got lucky in the interviews?

There was a story about a developer from IBM that hired somebody, and was only discovered because the inbound VPN IP was from a different country.

I would like to read this story!

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693

Not the same one in all likelihood though.

That's a failure from the dev and management.

Being able to find and get repeatable good results from contractors across the globe and manage them is a skill in itself.

I like this because it's a really off the wall take, but it also feels a little bit like the sort of reasoning that gets you tangled up with a Bernie Madoff type figure.

It's true that unscrupulous people are often very effective. But it's also true that they are unscrupulous. Leaning into lack of scruples probably isn't the most stable of pro business strats, but I imagine it works out sometimes.

Clearly needed to use a jump machine.

The Onion has a good video about this phenomenon https://youtu.be/rYaZ57Bn4pQ

I too would like to hear more about the clients. Also would be really interested to know how you viewed the level of difficultly you were dealing with when people were paying $200 out of their own pocket - did you view it as "tough stuff" ?

What did they ask you?

Did you get to clone their entire code repository?

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