Hacker News Reader

Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

Where I live, a software engineer makes about $500/month. That's $3/hour and some change, I know software developers who make even less. Freelancing for me is basically a no-brainer as I will not work for those wages if I can help it. I have the incredible fortune of being able to speak and write at a native level, that gives me and a few others an edge but most people suffer a lot.

If you land a job making $5/hour, full time 40 hour weeks, that's $800 a month. A LOOOOT of people here would kill for that kind of salary.

View on HN

Your name looks South American. I can verify that a similar situation exists in Africa, right down to the numbers you stated.

I'm curious. At that sort of rate, buying hardware to work on sounds very expensive compared to your income. What sort of machine do you use, and how much did you pay? I'm guessing you don't have a $3k MacBook.

Seems like there would be an opportunity for developers to donate laptops/hardware to people in developing countries who could use them to make money. I have at least 5 sitting around my office, only 2 of which are in use. I guess the logistics would kill it, but still.

My consulting rate is not $5 because I'm not doing "Wordpress installs". I make similar wages to a software developer working in the US.so I do own an iMac 27'' and a $1200 built Windows PC for .NET work.

It would be very hard to donate laptops here in Bolivia because of how this ass-backwards government handles importing goods and taxes when importing something.

Not OP. But someone who's also in a country where an average salary would be around 3 USD per hour. If you work and charge local rates you're pretty much restricted to either saving longer time for new average, not high end, laptop or shorter time for used one. Ordering used hardware online is much cheaper because prices are much lower, but there's about 50% chance that it will be "caught" by customs and then you have to pay ~27% (tax+customs) of the purchase price, additionally. Prices of new stuff locally is pretty much the same as in other countries in my experience. For reference I'm in Bosnia right now and prices are same or very similar to those in Italy,Germany and Austria.

OK, I stand corrected. Where is that? (just curious)

Bolivia

Reply on news.ycombinator.com