Just because you're not in a cubicle doesn't mean that you've escaped the Dilbert comic strip.
Now that the shutdown of Google Reader is in the news, about two weeks ago, someone posted an offer on Elance for a website with a few RSS feeds posted to it. When I made a proposal asking for details, I got an e-mail essentially asking for Google Reader but with a snazzier user interface. Yup, the asking price was "less than $500."
I sent an e-mail in reply pointing this out as diplomatically as I could. A few days later, I got an e-mail saying that the project had been canceled.
It saddens and enrages me to ponder how many people either have so little respect for programmers or so much ignorance of programming that they think that they can get away with this. Would these people try the same thing with lawyers? Or even plumbers?
I did not downvote you, nor do I think that you should have been downvoted. Sure, perhaps plumbers and lawyers get unreasonable price requests as much as programmers. Sadly, getting panties in a wad over this — in one way or another — is the only way to keep wages up. If we are not for ourselves, then who will be?
Supply and demand determine our wages. We compete in an international market. You can choose to refuse to take the job. But somebody somewhere may be prepared to accept a lower price, and you cannot control this.
If you want to get your panties in a wad, then go right ahead. But that won't help your cause.
If you want to keep your wages up, then find a market where there is a supply shortage, or increase your own quality so that you can command a higher price in the market that you're in.
I feel like this happens much less often for lawyers. I never heard of someone say "let's hire a lawyer, it'll cost almost nothing". It's always the exact opposite. People assume a lawyer is going to be really expensive because they are.
Everyone seems to always know their uncle's friend's nephew's brother who makes web sites for $100 so they assume a 2 page static site of horribad quality will cost the same as anything else.
I don't think they artificially limit their supply. I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure you need to pass a fairly difficult exam and maybe need some formal schooling?
That's going to cut down on the supply of lawyers.
Programming can also be done remotely. Having someone working in India where the cost of living for them might be 50x less than NYC is going to result in them working for a cheaper price than a programmer in NYC.
You can't really hire a plumber or lawyer from another country and expect them to be able to do their job remotely too.
> It saddens and enrages me to ponder how many people either have so little respect for programmers or so much ignorance of programming that they think that they can get away with this. Would these people try the same thing with lawyers? Or even plumbers?
I don't think it should sadden or enrage you. The vast majority of people posting on these sites have very little idea what it takes to get things done, what constitutes quality work, etc. If they see they can get a dev to work on something for $5 / hour and detail what they want and get it delivered, I fail to see how it affects you in any way. There is always going to be a low-end market for developers. If wages in countries currently popular for outsourcing/contracting go up, there will be another group of developing countries with people willing to work for "low" wages.
If you're looking for work, I know at least oDesk allows you to filter based on price, so you don't need to see these types of jobs. I know many people are willing to pay higher wages to experienced designers and developers who do quality work, are reliable, and can easily understand specs and offer expertise. While I imagine a ton of work on these sites are done for $5-10/hour, I do see some people getting paid $50+/hour for their work.
I can't speak for lawyers, but how many people bodge their own plumbing because they underestimate the skill required by professional, trained, plumbers?
I'm willing to pay someone up to $10-15 to rebuild the transmission on my car, but I need it by this afternoon. It also needs to be converted from manual to automatic in the process. Provide your own parts.
For $500 one could easily install roundcube, add some branding to the default skin, and still have some budget left for ramp-up support or doing some additional tweaks.
From this point of view, the project and budget is actually quite reasonable.
Funny how we ridicule freelance sites like elance and their seemingly ingnorant project requests and race to the bottom pricing model yet celebrate low budget - super fast development feats of engineering like http://blog.zite.com/2013/03/14/google-reader-is-dead-so-we-...
I'm not sure that's fair because zite obviously already had some degree of integration with Google Reader, and an elegantly enough built back-end to speed further integration (admittedly, I don't know the specifics).
As a side note:
I'm not a user of zite, feedly (sp?), or flipboard, and I can't stand these magazine-like interfaces. It seems to me, people that want that sort of interface never want to see the RSS acronym, nor know what it is/ how it works.
This is no exception. elance, freelancer, odesk are full of such projects. And he will get a lot of bids, someone will even be ready to do it for $100! There are lots of people out there who think building and running a web service like email or social network or even a search engine is a piece of cake!
With news of one year old startups getting acquired for billions Everybody wants to be a web entrepreneur. :) During my freelancing days I have seen a lot of such requests, and they never actually get awarded because someone sensible will write a comment saying you can't build such a service for that amount and that the front end they see is just the tip of the iceberg and there are costs involved in running the servers and getting users and all.
But there are some who go ahead and in fact at places like scriptcopy.com you will find clone scripts for almost anything - Facebook, eBay, Hotmail. I have seen someone selling Yahoo clone script for $20! Some even provide hosting. Go figure!
Think about it, there are two of you working on two maybe three pages. So you're telling me that you need more than 100 hours (because of course, it's a start up, and we're on "salary" - so yeah, overtime) to build TWO PAGES! My opinion it should take one, maybe two days max.
I don't think you guys have the drive to be working at a startup (<- heard this before)
geez..you don't really take such drugs, do you? Have you ever tried turkish coffee? A friend of mine is a coffee junkie, but he got a racing heart and felt immensly active after one cup. Something he never felt before and we coded until 4 in the Morning :) hehe However he'll stick to less coffeinated drinks in the future.
Even coffeeine should be used in limited dosasges. So, please don't recommend drugs anymore.
You still live in the 70s regarding your knowledge about these drugs. SARMs, siRNA and RNAi will be very popular in future - See stock valuations and research it's history.
I recommend informing about these, but advise everyone to avoid them. Peptid research is in the beginnings, don't make yourself a Guinea Pig.
Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators (SARM), Small interfering RNA (siRNA) and RNA interference (RNAi) are way ahead of what you may know about this topic.
The reason I know about it, is because some idiots in the Gym always kept asking me about Steroids and I didn't know anything about it. Which was frustrating and led me to inform me bottom up about everything that's necessary to know. Including talks with regular Steroid consumers.
My Conclusion, taking these drugs is irresponsible and not worth it. Everything comes with it's side-effects. SARMs, siRNA and RNAi are making babysteps and there can be severe side-effects that you won't be able to lookup on a google search.
Why is this news? These kinds of postings have been on Elance / RentACoder/ Guru.com / etc since 2000, when I first started looking at those sites. Many of which are probably more outlandish than this.
If they're going to pay $500 for it, give them $500 worth of work. Let's see, if you bill $150/hour, then that's 3 full hours. 3 full hours, assuming you type 120 wpm, with 10 minute breaks per hour, that's 18KB.
As stupid as what I described is, I bet it would appeal to the people who think you can clone something like that for $500. Scope is everything!
Freelancer websites are full of things like this. "ebay clone with all features" etc.
Problem is, how does one define "all features". Does it mean all the obvious features, like the ability to list an item and have people buy/bid on it.
Or do they want an actual replica of ebay complete with all the anti-fraud stuff that ebay must have and all of the seller account controls etc?
Obviously there's a huge difference between the two, but you won't get much more detail from them than "I just want all the features, should be simple".
So yes, you can probably make an "ebay clone" in a day or two, but what happens if they refuse to pay because it doesn't have some advanced feature that ebay does?
>Project Will Given to who post complete structure details + resume
I don't know what 'complete structure details' even means but I assume it means something they could toss to another developer for the excuse of paying them less and the schmucks who apply nothing at all. I've already made the mistake of completing a "test" of putting together a couple of email templates for a job that then magically never materialized after I was "awarded" it.
I will point you to my github and linkedin profile, but you're not getting free work.
There are plenty of projects like these on freelance websites; They either end up being a low quality clone with fewer features than the original, or never get funded to begin with.
Roundcube would probably do the job. The problem is what if the guy says "but this doesn't have feature X that gmail has, add it or I won't pay you."
If you could change the spec to be "install roundcube" then maybe it wouldn't be such a bad deal, but then you're essentially doing the most important part of the work (telling him how to get what he wants) for free.
To be fair, we don't know the expected use and it says to state the features to be included. If you throw in non US labor rates, you might get something useful. Admittedly, I'm reaching.
This is why I don't look for work on these sites. I'm literally better off just sitting here waiting for the phone to ring.
I am reminded of the questions I see posted on Quora with some regularity - so many that show a staggering ignorance of the most basic systems fundamentals, coming from people claiming to be professionals.
Looks ridiculous at first glance but that's actually not unreasonable.
The value in Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo is first and foremost their users. Next is the technical infrastructure to support all of those users. The front-end website and basic functionality of sending and receiving emails isn't that hard of a technical problem.
Given the level of intelligence this guy appears to have, an Indian PHP dev on elance who charges $10 an hour could probably build something in 50-100 hours that would support far more users than this guy would ever be able to attract and they would both be happy with the transaction.
If I post a job to one of these sites, it's pretty much guaranteed to get 20+ responses from devs in India. Most are pre-written responses that don't really show that the project was read in any sort of detail.
I'd actually be curious to find out how these operations actually work. Are they solo devs just casting a massive net ? Solo devs actually outsourcing responding to gigs? Agencies applying for as many jobs as possible and subcontracting them out or having employees on staff to do the work?
I think they're just cheap and aggressive companies. I had one calling me daily trying to "partner". I had to yell at him to get him to stop.
What I don't get is why some of these guys don't approach business like their US counterparts and charge US rates. They could live like kings in some areas of the world. Maybe that's easier said than done. But even the good ones seem to compete on price.
Ya I don't get that either. It's a race to the bottom. I mean I love finding diamonds in the rough that don't know what they're worth. I have a guy who does Rails jobs for me, used to work for Microsoft, went to a top Indian technical college, speaks perfect english and is really, really good - and he charges me $25 an hour. He could easily be charging $100+/hr if he just marketed himself to different clients (i.e. not on elance).
I guess it's the opposite of what's going on in San Francisco where anybody with a CS degree or equivalent experience expects six figures. There they all expect very little and are happy to get a bit more than the guys hustling hard for $10/hour.
Yeah, I posted a job for some rails help. I specifically said Russian developers only. I must have 40 Indian applicants and several who called me. Not a clue how they got my number. It's not publicly listed anywhere.
Have you used elance? I've been posting multiple jobs per month for years and 90% of proposals I receive are PHP devs from India that charge ~$10/hour.
That's not a bad thing. Many of those guys are highly skilled and I hire them often.
I heard a story from a friend who works in the oil industry. The Indian dev team had updated the software that controlled the oil flow from a field, but they'd introduced a bug that was losing $5000 (or barrels, memory fails me) a day somehow.
They couldn't roll back to the previous version because they weren't using version control for the software.
I've seen some balls ups from UK teams too fwiw, but nothing that approaches that level of wtf.
You're pointing to a highly specific example about a particular instance, about a tiny sample from an entire lot, about something that shouldn't have been outsourced in the first place and then trying to conclude in general that "therefore X group of developers sucks". I would rather label this argument with 'wtf' instead of your (pointless) example.
I'm not saying "they suck" at all. Just providing a piece of anecdata. So most of us on here work on the web and it would be standard for us to work with source control.
Software controlling an oil field is a step above the bog standard CRUD app that powers most of the web. I'm very surprised that such a mess up could happen, and so was my friend who was in charge of the project.
I'm as quick as anyone to bash low price outsourcers, but there's nothing about that situation specific to being Indians. I've worked on many projects here in the states with active codebases that had no source control, and all of their "talent" was home grown.
You're diverting. Bad software teams are bad. The fact that they were Indians is irrelevant - using home grown talent doesn't guarantee a level of quality.
The issue is experience and whether or not the company doing the outsourcing knows how to follow up the projects to verify that they are getting sufficiently experienced developers.
The problem is that markets like India is seeing such a crazy growth that the market is full of inexperienced developers being passed off by outsourcing companies as far more experienced than they are.
Actually identify sufficiently experienced developers, and you don't have bigger problems with Indian dev teams than UK team teams.
You see exactly the same in the UK, but I suspect on a much smaller scale simply because we don't have the same growth and so the supply of inexperienced newbies makes up a substantially smaller part of the overall pool of developers available.
It's fairly standard for big corps to outsource software development. They see software as a cost centre, and in some ways it is. Even at a loss of $5000 per day they may have still come out on top in the long run.
Edit: source, my brother has a senior position at one of the big four accountancy firms, they outsource a lot of dev work to India.
Now that the shutdown of Google Reader is in the news, about two weeks ago, someone posted an offer on Elance for a website with a few RSS feeds posted to it. When I made a proposal asking for details, I got an e-mail essentially asking for Google Reader but with a snazzier user interface. Yup, the asking price was "less than $500."
I sent an e-mail in reply pointing this out as diplomatically as I could. A few days later, I got an e-mail saying that the project had been canceled.
It saddens and enrages me to ponder how many people either have so little respect for programmers or so much ignorance of programming that they think that they can get away with this. Would these people try the same thing with lawyers? Or even plumbers?