Sometimes we see job posts in the Commercial: Job Offered forum like this one, offering to hire someone to integrate three different APKs for eight different advertisers, all for the sum of $6.50. (However if you have a Freelancer account, he could pay as much as nine dollars and 44 cents!)
When I see something like this, I’m never sure what to think:
Perhaps it is a joke meant to be humerous?
Does the poster really find decent programmers to work for much less than minimum wage?
Do they believe that, including discussing the task, transferring the files, doing the work, explaining what was done, meeting about any inevitable changes, etc., that the whole thing is going to take less than 15 minutes, thus bringing it up to a half-decent hourly rate?
Was it perhaps a typo (maybe they really meant the more reasonable amount of $6.5k)?
Or are they just trying to take advantage of kids or others who may be that desperate for a few bucks?
I’m curious to hear what others think is going on with posts like these.
I don’t think the post is meant to be funny. If you go on Freelancer.com and browse through jobs you’ll see that people will do a whole bunch of work for not a whole lot of money. If that’s not depressing enough for you, next head over to fiverr.com and see what people will do for $5. You might need a tissue for the tears.
Its the unfortunate result of the internet that we have set up a massive expectation that everything is free or next to free. Combine that with very inconsistent international wages, labour laws and wage expectations.
There are still people and places where 6.50 for a days work would be welcome. But generally those places don’t have the education levels required to make games, so maybe that’s a moot point.
Cost of Living and a worldwide economy makes things look skewed sometimes. I looked up my city vs. places in the world that many of my coworkers in a previous fortune 500 company I worked for came from and the cost of living can be 3-4 times less than where I live currently. Couple this with the fact that we work in an in electronic medium and can work from anywhere and this is not uncommon.
Quality will always fetch a decent price but you need to have a large portfolio and reputation to achieve quality rates. If you don’t have that you will be competing with those with a lower cost of living and it will be difficult until you have done enough things of quality to earn those rates. @Kiwasi is correct that there is a correlation usually between education and cost of living but due to sheer numbers there will still be plenty that live in a place with low cost of living that self taught themselves so you will be competing with those that can undercut on price.
Just remember that this economy works both ways and makes it easy to hire people for a low rate. Anyone who has done this knows that good contractors are darn difficult to find regardless what the going rate is and are willing to pay for quality when a quality contractor comes around. The low rates do make it less of a deal when you sift through a sea of contractors and inevitably you get a few bad ones.
First of all, all those 6$ jobs and contractors offers, looks dubious as hell.
This guys pays taxes? This guys pay software licenses? Are this guys try to exploit 3th world at maximum?
Is super questionable and even more a problem of trust.
@greggtwep16
I agree partially with cost of living. Since globalization started is not anymore generally a correct indicator. I’ve seen some dream locations where I would like to stay, some times considered cheap, unfortunately, will cost me in the end 3x times more that in Europe:) But I agree, globalization goes both ways:)
@JoeStrout I took a job like that before. It’s mostly kids… I think. For $10 I built an inventory system you could add items to and arrange in the editor so at runtime as you gathered things they would appear physically on a little tarp, similar to The Forest. They discuss all the details and initially you think you’ve got a reasonable client with a reasonable idea. Then you get to the budget.
Standards of living make reasonable online jobs hard to find. My cousin in NC can take lesser paying jobs than I can in NJ because despite my house being a shack and his house being a mansion I pay considerably more in taxes…
Fiverr is total garbage except for the very very highest rated sellers. Even then they sell a base $5 product/service and you must buy an extended upgrade package to get anything worthwhile which always costs $20 - $100 more. If they actually say that you’ll get some awesome thing for $5 then they are lying, you will get something that they have questionably obtained or ripped from elsewhere in the shortest amount of time possible.
Fiverr is basically ‘Pay $5 and get a preview, or total crap. Optionally pay a normal rate and maybe get something average’.
You get what you pay for. The more services/products you buy the more you realize this.
This,… and cheaper countries are producing very reasonable quality these days. Not as a political comment, but a production one: we have been taught to refer to lower priced countries as under developed, when it only means countries with lower opportunity. The people who live there are generally not under developed at all and are very capable of teaching themselves with all the free and cheap resources available. Outsourcing has been teaching the competition for years as well.
$6.50? That doesn’t even make sense to me on any level. I used to make more than that as a HS student back in the 90’s helping teachers recover corrupted files with PCTools.
But jokes aside, I can see it being a real problem when competition has a living cost of 5 dollars a day. Internet is becoming widespread and anyone can teach themselves technical jobs in matters of months or a few years.
It’s hard to regulate at a personal basis, but you can regulate services… or at least services can self regulate, like the Asset Store, which is control not just quality, but prices, they will let you know if price is too low or too high.
