"I have a strict budget of $6.50..."

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.

 

Trust me its genuine.

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. @BoredMormon 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.

 

1. Get what you pay for.
2. Price of gas is different in every country.

 

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

 

That thread is hilarious - They should get a shiny medal, but the medal must be worth the value of $9.44 or less.

It has to be a joke thread.

 

For $9.44, it shouldn't be a big deal to create them a custom hand made gold medal, maybe with a few diamonds.

 

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

@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...

 

You don't think integrating those 3 APK things isn't worth a hamburguer?!
You greedy ****!

Hope you end up in Somalia and meet up with true hunger!

 

We haven't yet considered the offering to be coming from a third world country where this might be viewed as a decent offering.

More likely though, it's a 12 year old whose mom refused to give her credit card again.

 

See? That what happens when you take replies from job offerings. People'll take it elsewhere.

 

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.

 

I am sorry, I don't agree at all with what you said.

You defined exactly what not loyal competition means, and this is banned everywhere in EU as business practice, and probable in USA also.

 

I am sorry I didnt understand your reply. Can you explain further?

 

Damn that Loch Ness monster..! It must of caught on to inflation.!!

 

I have the perfect solution right here:

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.

 

Is a bit explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfair_competition

Basically, you come with a dumping product price, because you use total different costs of production. Or even maybe shady practices.

 

Here is how this works: The country where you live exploited other continents for centuries, stealing their gold, natural resources, enslaving their people, forcing your religion onto them and more recently forcing them into debt with international banks. Now you have an intelligent and talented human being forced to work for $6 bucks a day...

So when you say it's unfair, I really hope you are referring to the guy offering the $6 bucks and not the guy who is forced to accept that rate because has no other choice.

 

Ah so let me explain further. To us folks in so called developed countries, countries who's workforce charge lower prices are our competition. Fair competition has nothing to do with it. My point is that many people assume that work that is outsourced will be of a lower quality, when this is not true. There are brilliant artists in cheaper countries who have taught themselves and have learned much through outsourced work which they have received, and produce very good quality. Its neither fair nor unfair, its just the internet and business. That is how you get the crazy price in the first post.

But just as a side point I have a bit of a problem with the term underdeveloped country. The term gives the impression that those countries are somehow backward which is an opinion I don't share.

 

If the game actually has any revenue potential, someone is more likely to take his project, clone it, and upload it to multiple sites.

 

Which is utterly and doubtlessly BOLLOCKS. If I want to sell my next gen AAA MMO engine build on top of Unity for $5, I should be able to. If other want to compete, they should do it either with price or features. Such controlling of prices, besides obvious stuff like VAT, etc. never ends well for consumers.

Let me tell you something. In Poland, communist incarnation of thereof, to be exact, we had something called "centrally planned economy". Prices were tightly controlled, but what can you buy, if there is nothing in store? After 1990, when actual competition started it just was better and better for the customers. You could buy actual, real bananas in grocery store, for Pete's sake!

 

If that were true I'm sure someone would turn around and put together $100 to finance several games outsourced to those not-by-name-mentioned countries.

Or hobbyists like me who do have higher costs of living but will take on small jobs for pocket change just for the fun of it over the weekend.

Anyone else hoping science will find a way to turn landfills into precious metals & bacon cheeseburgers so the economy will dissolve?

 

From strictly a scientific perspective yes.

From a rational perspective especially since the politicians in at least my country can't seem to tackle even non controversial topics, I worry about it. Never mind, the more far out scientific breakthroughs but automation is going to drastically reduce the current jobs market significantly (especially driver-less cars) in the next 5-20 years. We need to be ready with a smart fiscal policy to either retrain or other constructive policies in place. The 99/1 percent argument already gets enough traction (regardless of whether you feel it's legitimate or not), but automation stands to make the corporation owners even richer while simultaneously reducing income for a significant percentage of the population.

If handled correctly (with at least implementing ideas from both sides of the table) it will be great. If not, I'm definitely worried.

 

In all seriousness, he could be a kid living in a poor area with dreams of making it big in the VG industry. It's possible that he's joking but I doubt it because of his sincere history on the forums.

Anyways, when I was 7, I got a dollar every time I lost a tooth and that was a lot of money for me. With that method of earning money, he would've had to have saved for an entire year to get $6.50. He's basically offering you his childhood.

Other possibilities:
- International dude whose currency is grossly undervalued compared to ours. This would also explain why he offers such an arbitrary max budget ($9.44) from the currency conversion. If that's the case, $6.50 would be a decent wage over there.
- He's a mastermind troll and I got played like a fanboy arguing that Hatred is not only a good game, but also a work of art that beautifully expresses forbidden emotions.

Btw, most people living off of $5 a day don't have access to resources to properly learn technical stuff.

 

Automation has been the end of the job market for over the last 200 years. And it hasn't yet resulted in a world wide global job shortage. (Except maybe in areas that have elected not to automate).

Automation is just a way of making a worker more productive. Each worker can produce more goods and services. They also get paid more. This leads to a higher quality of life. This leads to a higher demand for goods and services. Which leads to more automation. Its a cycle that has taken us from subsistence farming to every individual having smart phones.

Driver-less cars will be a great thing. There is the massive productivity gain through not driving. Imagine sitting in the back of your car completing a conference call or checking emails or finishing a report. Or if you like life balance you could install a console and complete the latest AAA game. It will be the equivalent of adding an extra hour onto your day.

There is also the potential for far more efficient use of resources. Imagine the driverless cars end up all owned by Google. I simply hire a car for a trip, pay a modest fee, and get dropped straight at my office. No need to pay expensive parking fees to leave the car idle in a park all day, it can merrily run along to its next pickup.

Sure it might suck for individual taxi drivers who refuse to up skill. There might be some losers in the car manufacturing industry. But for the general populace as a whole automation is a great thing. There is no way we could live the lifestyle we do today without the armies of automated systems doing low level labour for us.

 

Looking forward to that. The only jobs better done by people is fun things like entertainment or creative jobs.

I read into that. It's the same as climate change. The issue isn't the current values, it's the rates involved. The 1% don't just own a huge amount of wealth, they take in a majority of newly generated income as well, which leads to crashes. Seems like a valid concern.

Science will eventually do away with the need for an income because it will be able to rearrange virtual particles into food.

@BoredMormon self driving cars... can't wait to see the end of auto-insurance and one of the biggest killers Imagine a world where you don't need to be sober to get home! And cops won't pull people over for random things that escalate into people being shot in the head!

Automating that one thing alone is going to yield a great future. If anyone disagrees with automation... then try breathing manually. heh.

 

Automation is not the problem, just like the industrial revolution before it. What does matter is how quickly and smoothly the transition takes place. Each wave of technology, makes the speed of these transitions faster. Perhaps, you are correct and automation loss of Truck/bus/cab/etc. will happen slowly and smoothly. I hope so. I have a feeling with how fast the pace of technology is now that an entire field can be wiped out quite quickly, leading to a massive spike in unemployment. Don't forget that economies require their populations to be able to buy things or investment slows and in general it's not good.

Automation in itself is great. It's just over time I have become less confident in our governments to actually adapt with the times.

 

By this point the primary unit of value will be genetic manipulation to extend life itself. We've still got a few centuries left in us before there is nothing left to buy.

The government has little to do with it. Governments are no longer at the fore front of technological progress. Most governments and regulatory systems are about ten years behind the times. Not always a bad thing, just the way it is. Relying on a government to keep your own skill set relevant and up to date is a Bad Idea.

 

As an individual I agree that you should always pay attention and keep with the times and be learning new skills both for your own betterment, and for your career. However, if you look at the population in general its obvious that a significant % either can't or won't.

I'm not a fan of big government myself and I feel that's the impression you are getting. What I'm trying to convey is that if the market shifts fast enough there will probably be some disastrous side effects (believe me I'm rooting for your opinion that it will happen slowly). If it's quick and abrupt then large unemployment (which is the governments responsibility) will be a tough problem to solve and their track record of problem solving isn't so good lately.

 

Here we are on the same page.

 

Man, I've never so strongly derailed a thread with such minimal effort. Mods, I apologize.

ForumTopic.Lerp(Topics.AutomationOfTheFuture, Topics.OriginalPost, 1);

There, all fixed.

So, anyone want to make a website called sixr for tasks too extensive for fiver?

 

Why not tenr for the real premium work?

 

Don't make me open up elevenr

 

Then you could sell on tenr/elevenr and outsource to fiverr. Easy money

 

There is a reason why "underdeveloped country" term exist.

I agree with your opinion that talent/knowledge have nothing to do with anything.

Let me give you an example, a real one, there is a country (and may be more), where peoples lives with 30$ per month. Is not a joke, I can give you the name for that country, but I don't want to fall in nation bashing. Now, those guys, don't even have electricity. Do you expect them to know how to work on a computer? Or more exactly code something?

 

Just wait until the Boy Scouts start a "bob a job" site, then you will get your jobs done for $0.20

 

Man this thread is unstable

That's a great transition back to the main point. When I worked [briefly] for sandswept, a few of the employees were not in the US. I imagine that'll be common practice in the future if it isn't already.

 

We only have you to blame for getting it started down the road of amusement.

 

It is already common, especially with larger companies. In fact the previous company I worked for had an aggresive strategy of sourcing work both at home and abroad. Under the company directly they set up subsidiaries themselves in both Northern Ireland and India for development work. That's not to mention heavily using contractor's from other outfits like Accenture, Syntel, Comsys, etc. all of which find workers from both home and abroad too (mostly abroad) from India, China, and any other country where they can train people and keep their wages lower than having people exclusively from places with a high cost of living.

 

Actually, it's none of the above.

He's simply not educated on the value of software development services, like many people are outside the industry.

But given the software industry's own attitudes and positions, how can anyone really blame him, given that

• Software industry professionals continually out-do each other offering lower prices and better customer service, turning the industry into a zero sum game. Ironically, many of the critics of low-ball freelance sites offer rates well below other equally skilled professionals.
• Millions, if not billions of industrial quality, tested, and deployed lines of code are given away under generous licenses at Github, Bitbucket, and other hosting sites. Unrealistic expectations of developers are then created, along with the false notion that developers have nothing better to do with their time than to give away free software and source code.
• Profitable game studios make millions in revenues, yet offer the lowest salaries in the entire software industry, and ask for skill-sets and portfolios that very few graduates possess.
• Large amounts of professional, quality software and services available are simply given away for free. Blender, Unity, Unreal, Visual Studio, the list goes on. If someone can get these all for free of charge, it shouldn't be surprising that they try to get more services, including labor, for free.
• Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other distributors, staffed with tens of thousands of developers who should understand the conditions of mobile developers and enforce a price and quality standard, but don't, cheapening both the mobile development process as well as the consumer experience.

 

All very true points but it's not exclusive to development. All of the industries that are coming "online" musicians, video content creation (youtubers), artists, etc., basically any digital field that is being "democratized" is seeing a similar phenomenon. Physical goods and services are safe for now, but things like 3D printers and roombas are obviously the infancy stage of perhaps affecting those industries as well.

Quality is never easy to find though and that bar always is being pushed further downfield. It always seems to fetch a decent price as well.

 

When they were kids, some of my friends thought they could convince someone on the Internet to code a whole game for them. Guess what was the budget? $3.00. With time, I've come to the conclusion that:

• My currency is terribly devaluated
• Kids do stupid things

So please don't blame them for the ubiquitous "Strict budget" threads. They don't know what they're doing.

 

Hello,

Per the job I recently posted, I want to say this first: I changed the job budget greatly.

I had such a low budget because I am a just starting out teenage indie developer. I did not not mean to offend anyone. I also did not mean to hire someone for an unfair rate. I am just starting off with all developing and have invested hours and hours of work for the money I invested. So to me, I did not clearly see the amount of money someone would take for a job like this.

I know understand the actual amount of work and time this job requires.

I am deeply sorry for this. Please forgive me for this job offering. I have learned a lot from this.

Thank you very much.

 

strategic division of labor
but Im just entertaining the conversation.
I didnt even know these sites existed.

 

So my status is moving from forum jester to thread catalyst? I like the way it sounds, but the implications scare me. And probably a few of the mods.

@greggtwep16 Figures. I'm not surprised at all. It's so confusing... Valve acknowledges the cost of living issues by region locking games. I think Russia has the cheapest games per USD and brazil has the most expensive per USD. Brazil is getting screwed and russia is at a constant discount.

I dislike the interaction between multiple economies with different wealth distribution rates and costs of living. Too much potential exploitation and job loss for the more advanced society.

@davidsports no worries about any of that. I'm sure that's a decent job for fiver... you'll even save a little money! lol. Me personally... I go after people posting $10 jobs that are simple modules that can be extended. Almost like a miniature asset store.

 

If the world was friction-less it wouldn't be anything to worry about and probably a good thing (and still overall probably is a good thing, but the abuse by some is very disappointing). I wish capitalism wasn't always so short sided and took in some long term considerations into account. Obviously in hindsight those in Chinese cities wish their air was breathable, or the rivers in india were drinkable. Not to mention business tends to promote being on the edge all the time and cutting corners and makes accidents like factories burning down cause more suffering than it would have otherwise. The biggest thing that angers me is the complete apathy that those doing the exploiting seem to have for others or the environment. In the end sometimes it even comes back to hurt their bottom line, so I would think sometimes it would make sense to have a little more long term view.

I don't have any better alternative though.

 

Amen brother. For those who dont know, the film 'The True Cost' is a good shake up. You should check it out.

Edit: To the mods: I know we are not supposed to be political so if my post crossed the line please delete it.

Cheers