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Comment by amykhar | Hacker News Reader

The fact that it's using devs from 'remote countries' says to me they want to pay low wages. If this project paid market wages and was for devs worldwide who met minimum qualifications, I'd think it was cool. As it stands now, it just comes across as borderline exploitation.

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I think you're looking at it with malice in mind. I see it as more of a "Lets get work to remote countries that typically wouldn't and show people that they can be quality developers"

I don't think you have to have malice in mind to see it in that way. It's more like: This is a company, and they have to make money. And it isn't a far leap to assume the margins come from exploiting the mismatch between value of labor across countries borders.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but is it really "exploiting" if both sides are happy? Remote devs are getting paid where they may not have in the past, and customers are getting code written up to a standard that is acceptable to them, while paying less than they might otherwise.

> I don't have a dog in this fight, but is it really "exploiting" if both sides are happy?

I recall a study in which monkeys were given the same food for X days. They switched it up and replaced one monkey's food with something else, of an equal amount. It created frustration in the monkey that didn't get the different food, even though he was happy when he got the same thing.

I think this is really close to "ignorance is bliss". The ignorance of how bad you're getting screwed doesn't mean you're getting screwed any less.

You can frame 'getting helped less than the ideal' as 'getting screwed', but it doesn't change the fact that the baseline is 'not getting helped at all'. If you say 'you have to pay them American market wages or not at all', and they say 'okay, guess we won't hire them at all', who has this ultimatum helped?

https://laneless.substack.com/p/the-copenhagen-interpretatio...

Thanks for linking to that article. While it is indeed thoughtful, I'm not swayed by "the lesser of two bad options" being an argument for supporting paying people less for "exposure" to opportunity. Incremental improvement can look beneficial, until it isn't. I don't consider being able to get an expensive taxi as better as having no taxi -- a poor person can't access the taxi in any case to begin with.

This sort of ethics is almost shame-oriented, with a subtle "You should be appreciative you got anything" undercurrent in its view of the world. Does that mean we should only put the bare minimum of human consideration into our business offerings? That's how we got such destructive capitalist practices.

If humans cannot do business that is equitable to all parties, it shouldn't be happening. If that means some rich people can't access a service because it's not scalable yet or a tech firm has to hire developers to get code written, so be it. I can't get whatever I want, or justify getting it by swindling others. Why should a company?

There seems to be this in-built value in modern society that it's okay to totally screw somebody if you fit into some business-accepted guard-rails. Please note that business ethics are an oxymoron.

> If humans cannot do business that is equitable to all parties, it shouldn't be happening.

Again, how is the state of it not happening better than the state of it happening inequitably?

> There seems to be this in-built value in modern society that it's okay to totally screw somebody if you fit into some business-accepted guard-rails.

Again, why would you call it 'screwing' someone to offer an opportunity they can decline, that is a net improvement but not the greatest thing you could possibly offer? Per the first section of that article, what kind of sense does it make to assign blame for someone's negative situation to the first person to try to help them?

Who are these judgments actually helping, and how?

> why would you call it 'screwing' someone to offer an opportunity they can decline, that is a net improvement but not the greatest thing you could possibly offer?

It drives down the value of the work. Short term it may be better for the person who needs the money but what would actually be better is if that person was compensated fairly.

afaik gitstart pays above market in the local economies, but there’s always room to improve of course. however it’s hard to pay everyone the market rate of american companies.

the developers are typically folks who wouldn’t be able to get a remote job otherwise due to universities not being globally recognized or english is not super fluent. many developers grow a lot during their time at gitstart and eventually move on to getting jobs at places like Google, Amazon too. they support any developer to grow (there’s a team dedicated to figure out growth paths for each developer on the platform)

disclaimer: i used to work at gitstart

A low wage in the market is a market wage. I'm not sure where you get "exploitation" from this.

Market wages are set by supply & demand. If somebody to agrees to a "low wage" and there's no coercion or deception involved, it's a market wage, by definition.

What are market wages? Even in my country which qualifies as one of the most modern countries in the world the wages are really low compared to the US.

> wages are really low compared to the US.

Now consider that most US developers are under-paid

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