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Comment by saralily | Hacker News Reader

what are you building that you are soliciting development labor from fiverr and think $30/h is appropriate for anyone on earth involved in programming

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Ad hoc scraping tool for something experimental that I didn't want to do myself. Would've taken me 2x as long as the dev I hired since I haven't done that before. Quality wasn't so important, I just wanted the output of the scraper on a specific site for a one off thing.

$30/h is a typical rate for a dev on Fiverr, I've been very happy with the value I've gotten from it.

Why are you dictating the language they use, then? It just shrinks the pool and increases the odds you're missing out on a simpler way to do it.

If they delivered a working scraper using Ruby or JavaScript or even a 3rd party service, the output would have been the same.

Because I know python and if I needed to make a small adjustment to the script (which I usually do, usually minor tweaks), then it's within my capabilities to do so. Takes me thirty seconds to adjust a small thing in a language I know well.

Also the pool of python devs is so large that shrinking the pool in this way doesn't impact on my ability to find someone suitable quickly

The bigger issue than shrinking the pool of devs is shrinking the pool of solutions and missing better/faster/cheaper options. E.g., many companies did exactly that in the previous two decades by trying to do everything in Java when a higher level language would have served them better.

If it's what you know and you're taking it over, though, that makes more sense.

> E.g., many companies did exactly that in the previous two decades by trying to do everything in Java when a higher level language would have served them better.

Can you give us some real-world examples that you've seen?

I agree but we're talking about a pretty quick and dirty personal project here where quality, maintainability etc aren't important, and I vaguely knew that the Selenium package could do what I wanted in this language.

If I was hiring for something more important I would've put more thought into that aspect

If you're that fast with python, you should be able to write it yourself pretty quickly. It's pretty a fundamental application.

Possibly, but they're only asking for $60, and I figured it would take me a while to learn the package + parse all the data from the various tables and sections (it was rather heterogeneous data across the site) + if this site happened to use anti scraping measures that could mean it takes longer. They've probably done this same thing 30 times (it was their main offering on Fiverr) and can copy and paste a previous project.

So it made time/financial sense to hire them, especially since I don't need this skill for later

I am guessing scraping, if using Selenium, Python, and hiring folks via fiverr.

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