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Web design is cheap now. Eastern European and Southeast Asian talents can deliver at a fraction of a cost. Next up is going to be mobile app design. Additiona

Web design is cheap now. Eastern European and Southeast Asian talents can deliver at a fraction of a cost. Next up is going to be mobile app design. Additionally every other person in Silicon Valley is in a coding school or graduating from one. Salaries are going to drop. Programmers are the new lawyers.

hoof_marks 10y ago
Consider another aspect- agency costs. I recently asked for a quotation for some custom work in php. To generate pdf and zip files from database with a dashboard. Agencies quoted it as roughly US$ 340. That is steep. So its good that a lot of help is available at sites like stackexchange. We completed the stuff ourselves.
- ido 10y ago
  Is it steep? I suppose you paid the salaries for the person(s) doing that work in-house. Assuming your programmer's salary cost (~1.3x their gross salary) is $5000 per month and the median month having 20 work days, that price is about the equivalent of 1 day of work for your in-house programmer. So that price needs to pay for 1 work day for the outsourced freelance programmer+overhead/profit margin for the company itself...Sounds reasonable to me. Below a certain threshold it doesn't make sense to put in the time/effort to get a new client.
  - hoof_marks 10y ago
    true i agree on the threshold principle. A minimum time slot or billing is reasonable. But as a client let's say thats just a slice of the entire web-project. And if this simple stuff takes $10/hour x 34 hours. It is steep.
    - ido 10y ago
      Which programmer rates at $10/hour in salary cost? Here (Germany), this is just about minimum wage. So even a cashier in the supermarket or a street cleaner earns about that or more. EDIT: I guess the situation is different in India (just saw you're based there from your comment history), although I remember reading that even there developer salaries are slowly closing the gap with their western counterparts.
      - hoof_marks 10y ago
        Like i said, I am not disputing the wage or salary as such. However with respect to a custom project it makes it costly. Again compared to having your own people do it using help from the net. As they may not be experts themselves.
        ido 10y ago
        I started writing this before having seen your other comment :)
  - hoof_marks 10y ago
    That's a reasonable salary. But when you have to add the overheads + profits i guess the piece work project will come out costly.
  - acveilleux 10y ago
    Actually, a 340$ quote from a US (or similar economies, like EU, Canada, AU, NZ) is a big red flag. No consulting business can really thrive charging that low, especially for non-recurring work. It is quite literally not worth my time to get out of bed for less than 500$ unless the client is a frequently recurring client.
- hoof_marks 10y ago
  Secondly we never could get anyone to do cURL stuff. In house we did a splendid job using online help and tech blogs. So my point is also there are gaps in web design agencies. Either they provide something with a premium cost. Or there is no one to take up custom projects.
- zhte415 10y ago
  This makes me think of the usefulness of interns, especially in niche areas. Take a few per year. They'll enjoy the experience. And when mentioning niche areas, take them in skill-sets the team don't have, and have them teach the team. Example, for an engineering team: Graphic design, marketing, languages, etc..
- Silhouette 10y ago
  Some development jobs are too small to be worth doing professionally. Assuming that wasn't a typo, I'm surprised any agency gave you a quote for a $340 job. Even my little consultancy business would need an extra zero before it was worth doing the paperwork to set up a new client in most cases, and our overheads are significantly lower than a lot of agencies would have.
ido 10y ago
Maybe that's a good thing in the long term? So many businesses (and other walks of life, like governments, public organisations, etc) can benefit from software that currently don't, making programmer-time more affordable will increase the amount of software they can get custom made for their needs and automate a lot of drudgery/improve efficiency.
- gaius 10y ago
  Do you really want to be "more affordable"? Personally I want to do high-quality work for people who know what it's worth...
  - ido 10y ago
    I don't want to be more affordable, in the same way that I suspect autoworkers don't. But it might be beneficial to society in general.
spriggan3 10y ago
> Programmers are the new lawyers. It's more like white collars in general are the new blue collars.
- michaelbuddy 10y ago
  Yup and many blue collar jobs, are going to be where people want to be. They'll see staring at a screen as entry level BS you have to drudge through life because you didn't learn to weld or repair manufacturing machinery.
  - Razengan 10y ago
    > because you didn't learn to weld or repair manufacturing machinery. Why would you, and how would you do it better, once robots can cheaply and perfectly do almost all the current blue collar jobs?

hoof_marks 10y ago

Consider another aspect- agency costs. I recently asked for a quotation for some custom work in php. To generate pdf and zip files from database with a dashboard. Agencies quoted it as roughly US$ 340. That is steep. So its good that a lot of help is available at sites like stackexchange. We completed the stuff ourselves.

ido 10y ago
Is it steep? I suppose you paid the salaries for the person(s) doing that work in-house. Assuming your programmer's salary cost (~1.3x their gross salary) is $5000 per month and the median month having 20 work days, that price is about the equivalent of 1 day of work for your in-house programmer. So that price needs to pay for 1 work day for the outsourced freelance programmer+overhead/profit margin for the company itself...Sounds reasonable to me. Below a certain threshold it doesn't make sense to put in the time/effort to get a new client.
- hoof_marks 10y ago
  true i agree on the threshold principle. A minimum time slot or billing is reasonable. But as a client let's say thats just a slice of the entire web-project. And if this simple stuff takes $10/hour x 34 hours. It is steep.
  - ido 10y ago
    Which programmer rates at $10/hour in salary cost? Here (Germany), this is just about minimum wage. So even a cashier in the supermarket or a street cleaner earns about that or more. EDIT: I guess the situation is different in India (just saw you're based there from your comment history), although I remember reading that even there developer salaries are slowly closing the gap with their western counterparts.
    - hoof_marks 10y ago
      Like i said, I am not disputing the wage or salary as such. However with respect to a custom project it makes it costly. Again compared to having your own people do it using help from the net. As they may not be experts themselves.
      - ido 10y ago
        I started writing this before having seen your other comment :)
- hoof_marks 10y ago
  That's a reasonable salary. But when you have to add the overheads + profits i guess the piece work project will come out costly.
- acveilleux 10y ago
  Actually, a 340$ quote from a US (or similar economies, like EU, Canada, AU, NZ) is a big red flag. No consulting business can really thrive charging that low, especially for non-recurring work. It is quite literally not worth my time to get out of bed for less than 500$ unless the client is a frequently recurring client.
hoof_marks 10y ago
Secondly we never could get anyone to do cURL stuff. In house we did a splendid job using online help and tech blogs. So my point is also there are gaps in web design agencies. Either they provide something with a premium cost. Or there is no one to take up custom projects.
zhte415 10y ago
This makes me think of the usefulness of interns, especially in niche areas. Take a few per year. They'll enjoy the experience. And when mentioning niche areas, take them in skill-sets the team don't have, and have them teach the team. Example, for an engineering team: Graphic design, marketing, languages, etc..
Silhouette 10y ago
Some development jobs are too small to be worth doing professionally. Assuming that wasn't a typo, I'm surprised any agency gave you a quote for a $340 job. Even my little consultancy business would need an extra zero before it was worth doing the paperwork to set up a new client in most cases, and our overheads are significantly lower than a lot of agencies would have.

ido 10y ago

Maybe that's a good thing in the long term? So many businesses (and other walks of life, like governments, public organisations, etc) can benefit from software that currently don't, making programmer-time more affordable will increase the amount of software they can get custom made for their needs and automate a lot of drudgery/improve efficiency.

gaius 10y ago
Do you really want to be "more affordable"? Personally I want to do high-quality work for people who know what it's worth...
- ido 10y ago
  I don't want to be more affordable, in the same way that I suspect autoworkers don't. But it might be beneficial to society in general.

spriggan3 10y ago

> Programmers are the new lawyers. It's more like white collars in general are the new blue collars.

michaelbuddy 10y ago
Yup and many blue collar jobs, are going to be where people want to be. They'll see staring at a screen as entry level BS you have to drudge through life because you didn't learn to weld or repair manufacturing machinery.
- Razengan 10y ago
  > because you didn't learn to weld or repair manufacturing machinery. Why would you, and how would you do it better, once robots can cheaply and perfectly do almost all the current blue collar jobs?