17 ms·

Genuinely curious about this - why do developers who are from those country not charge more? Why is their work deemed $30/hr where as a Western counterpart cou

Genuinely curious about this - why do developers who are from those country not charge more? Why is their work deemed $30/hr where as a Western counterpart could get away with charging $90? Same goes for people in India as well - if they are genuinely good at what they do why do they not charge a higher rate?

duckingtest 12y ago
Because customers aren't usually capable of assessing the technical capabilities. All they see is self-confidence, personal charm (English and accent is very important in this category) and past experience. So what happens is that a guy with these qualities, along with enough technical knowledge to asses the skills, resells the work of cheap foreign developers for enormous profit, probably as a consulting company. People with powerful personalities can get out of that, but those introverted or with some form of Asperger's won't. I know of several instances like that personally. They just accept that they're worth $20k/year as a fact, even though if they were more assertive and extraverted that could eventually turn into $200k. If they try to start out on their own, they start with low confidence, which means low prices. Which leads to people thinking they aren't capable of anything complicated, so they get only shitty jobs. Which reinforces their low confidence in their skills and they don't try much. Steve Jobs of the world will always earn more than Wozniaks.
NhanH 12y ago
Not everyone in those country can do work for other countries -- a majority of them have to do work for other business in their own country. Which leads to the fact that you can hire a BS educated employee in those country for less than $200-300/months: if the programmer charge more, they're just gonna screw automation and hire more people instead.
swatow 12y ago
As in all things, the answer is supply and demand. The demand for these services mostly comes from the West, and there is a big advantage to local workers. So assuming there is a large supply of skilled data scientists in India and Ukraine, but not the demand, then they can't charge higher wages. Furthermore, if these barriers could be broken down, and there was no longer an advantage to being local, then we would expect the price of Western and other workers to equalize, but the final wage would be somewhere in between the current Indian wage and the current Western wage.

duckingtest 12y ago

Because customers aren't usually capable of assessing the technical capabilities. All they see is self-confidence, personal charm (English and accent is very important in this category) and past experience. So what happens is that a guy with these qualities, along with enough technical knowledge to asses the skills, resells the work of cheap foreign developers for enormous profit, probably as a consulting company. People with powerful personalities can get out of that, but those introverted or with some form of Asperger's won't. I know of several instances like that personally. They just accept that they're worth $20k/year as a fact, even though if they were more assertive and extraverted that could eventually turn into $200k. If they try to start out on their own, they start with low confidence, which means low prices. Which leads to people thinking they aren't capable of anything complicated, so they get only shitty jobs. Which reinforces their low confidence in their skills and they don't try much. Steve Jobs of the world will always earn more than Wozniaks.

NhanH 12y ago

Not everyone in those country can do work for other countries -- a majority of them have to do work for other business in their own country. Which leads to the fact that you can hire a BS educated employee in those country for less than $200-300/months: if the programmer charge more, they're just gonna screw automation and hire more people instead.

swatow 12y ago

As in all things, the answer is supply and demand. The demand for these services mostly comes from the West, and there is a big advantage to local workers. So assuming there is a large supply of skilled data scientists in India and Ukraine, but not the demand, then they can't charge higher wages. Furthermore, if these barriers could be broken down, and there was no longer an advantage to being local, then we would expect the price of Western and other workers to equalize, but the final wage would be somewhere in between the current Indian wage and the current Western wage.