Thread

http://pittsburgh.craigslist.org/web/1026132030.html

i love how companies underestimate how difficult it is to create a great website and drive traffic to it. also everyone wants to pay $100 for a million visitors. they wouldnt expect to pay a construction company $1000 for a skyscraper so why do they expect that we work for nothing.

ahh sorry just letting off a little steam here.

why so do they expect that we work for nothing

Because, sadly, a lot of people do work for nothing. It’s stupid. It’s annoying. But it’s never really affected me in my work, so I tend not to fuss over it.

ya getafreelancer has pretty much saturated the industry with unqualified inexperienced people who underbid just to get the job. ive never used it but i have seen “build me a social network like facebook” sites go for as low as $120. for that amount of money i dont even get out of bed. then what ends up happening is the client that gets screwed over has to hire another person who actually knows what they are doing and have a grudge against web developers…people need to learn that you get what you pay for. but i dont think that will ever happen.

$120.. Haha.. so stupid. It’s the same story in the design industry. I mean, admittedly I’ve done stuff for friends for free or on the cheap (actually just charged my brother only $15/hr to fix up his site), but I think that kinda stuff is sort of outside of the market and doesn’t have any sort of impact. It’s so funny when people think, “if I charge less, I’ll get more work.” Yet, if they actually charged more, they’d likely get the same amount of work, but make more money.

one site ive found to be really great for freelance jobs of any kind is the one over at freelanceswitch.com, its people who actually know what things cost and dont mind paying it for quality work.

I agree gaf/sl etc. things get done for silly money, and I can’t compete. I actually used SL several years ago to covert a ASP website to PHP, I picked a middle priced company (Indian) and it’s been the biggest hash I’ve ever seen. I’ve ended up rewriting the whole thing myself now in CI (http://www.emailremind.co.uk) because half the site didn’t work anymore. All they ever wanted was money…

I think this type of problem is only going to get worse: due to the globalization-effect of the internet.

Just because $100 USD, is like working for nothing here in the USA, that same $100 USD can be like winning the lottery in somebody else’s country of origin.

zimco your last statement is true but if that someone can get contracts for that kind of money he/she would be very naive to go under that price because the money is more worth in his/her country.

If people go low budget most of the time you get low budget code/work/appliances/ingredients/...

I think this problem is more driven by the fact that people who are hiring don’t know the difference between a good web developer and a bad web developer.  I’ve seen this repeatedly, and even talked to a number of small business owners who just “want it done”, and from their perspective they think “why would i pay twice the price for the same thing” not realizing how significant the difference is in quality of product.

“you pay peanuts and you get monkeys”

Have to digress there a bit. I’ve had the pleasure of working with many eastern european and asian developers. Those that have settled here in the UK are most definitley not charging peanuts, but those that have stayed behind are, and doing very good work too.

Its all about trust. You have to build up trust in your outsourced worker and them in you. Each time I outsource, with local / overseas developers alike, you should farm out small, well defined jobs first to gauge their level of expertise, and then pay them promptly… only when you are confident in their abilities should you farm out the ‘build me myspace’ job.

I ended up paying for one guy’s wedding once… wish I could have gone, it sounded like a riot. I got him started by helping me to fix a dead linux box, via msn with a webcam on the screen (it was very dead), and lots of coffee.

Naive clients will always think that they can get a job done for nothing, everyone looks to cut costs, but you have to point out the added value that you can bring to the table

1) ring me and moan
2) come round to my office and moan
3) potentially take me to court if you still want to moan.

An educated client will have already realised the above (probably why they are talking to you in the first place), and should only be worried about the accountability and ownership of the work to be carried out. For this reason never, ever out-source on the sly.