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Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

If they can't get jobs for more than $200 they're either terrible programmers, or they need to look for work on places other than rentacoder. Probably both.

EDIT: To be clear, I meant to say that if they can't get jobs making more than $200 for two weeks of work, they're either terrible or need to look elsewhere for work. Further, I'll put my money where my mouth is: if you want to make $5 / hr and you can write good code, email me and I'll give you all the work you can handle. I'm guessing I won't have any takers.

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Maybe you haven't heard, but at least 1 in 10 people in the US can't find work right now. Unemployment figures always undercount by quite a bit. The official "discouraged workers" count is about 10 million, so let's put real unemployment closer to 16%.

We don't all live in Sunny California where tech jobs are seemingly always abundant -- unemployment wouldn't be so high if the jobs were available. If you can't find any work, then $200 is better than missing rent and living on the street.

If you think unemployed or underemployed coders are either terrible at what they do or aren't looking, well, you're not living in the same country as me.

Maybe you haven't heard, but at least 1 in 10 people in the US can't find work right now.

How many of those 10% are unemployed coders who would be glad to take work for $2 / hr? I'm guessing zero.

Sorry, but $200 for two weeks of work is less than minimum wage. If that's all you can make as a programmer in the US, you're either not looking in the right places or you're not much of a programmer. I know enough programmers (myself included) who charge more than an order of magnitude more than that and turn down work constantly to think otherwise. And I'm no rockstar. A good friend of mine who does PHP web development landed a good telecommute software developer job last year making $80k / yr. He lives in the Midwest and has been coding for like 3 years.

So maybe I'm not living in the same country as you.

A good friend of mine who does PHP web development landed a good telecommute software developer job last year making $80k / yr. He lives in the Midwest and has been coding for like 3 years.

I just graduated from a great school, but live in Cincinnati for family reasons, and can't find a damn thing job wise that's looking for anything but "senior" level, and places won't even consider the 3 years I spent interning at a place in Rochester, they just see the graduation date and think "bottom level"... So if your friend can clue me on where to find that 80k telecommute, I would be eternally thankful....

Honestly, if I were you, I'd stop looking for a job, or at least stop looking just for a job. Put together a portfolio of work you've done, some references, and start looking for contract work. Making $25 - 50 / hr should be no problem depending on your skills and portfolio. Once you've done this for a year or two and you have a solid body of work, no one will care where you went to school or when you graduated.

Learn Drupal. There's customer demand, and a shortage of coders who really understand it.

this

How did he find that job?

I like the city I'm in but the tech industry is very homogeneous here. I would love to find a telecommuting full-time software development position that pays well and where I can work on an interesting project. I have more experience than your friend and have experience working from home. I'd be interested in knowing more about how he came across the position.

Edit: $80k is almost at the ceiling of what a top software developer could expect in my city so this has really peaked my interest.

It was a contract-to-hire position...I think he may have actually found it on Craigslist, though I'm sure that's not the best place to look.

So - the challenge is, that companies are not looking for $20/Hour developers (Adjust $20/Hour California Wages for wherever you live). They are looking for $50-$70/hour developers, and all that happens, is the $20/Hour developer doesn't get a job.

The 10% figure may be a bit of a red-herring as it applies to programmers. If you look at the data[1], people with college degrees are only at about ~4.5% unemployment.

Even if the intersection of the programmer set and college degree set isn't complete, it does hint that the nature of this recession has been affecting one class of worker a lot harder, namely, the unskilled & assembly-line workers.

So while Ryan's point may have seemed a little unsympathetic, I think there's probably _some_ truth to it.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/econo...

Underemployment is arguably worse than unemployment for a given person. It ends up moving the equilibrium S/D price to a drastically lower position in the short run, and ultimately somewhat a lower position than where it should be. Taking gigs like this is foolish for anyone in software who cares about a stable salary any time in the future.

What do you suggest, then?

If you can't find a job that pays your normal salary, don't work at all? So, homelessness?

Or a career change? Take up a job as a janitor for a few years until the job market recovers, then look for programming work again?

It doesn't sound like you are grasping the situation millions of people are in right now. They've been without jobs for months if not over a year, the local labor market in much of the country has more available workers than jobs (hence the 16%+ unemployment and underemployment), they've long since run out of credit and savings to tide them over... and you're suggesting they pass up income opportunities because it might hurt their future salary.

If you can't find a job that pays your normal salary, don't work at all? So, homelessness?

Come on, this a total false dichotomy. There is a range between an $80k / yr salary and $200 for a 2-week development project. I wouldn't blink if this story said that junior developers were taking gigs for $10 - 30 / hr. But $2 / hr? You either are a really poor developer or you have no idea how to find work.

In fact, I'll put my money where my mouth is. If anyone out there who can code well wants to make $5 / hr, email me and I'll give you all the work you can handle.

ryan at mightybrand dot com

Have to agree with you. I am based in India and yet, I myself wouldn't settle for anything less than $15 / hr. $2/hr in US is just crazy.

Hah. Evil man.

But you have a point, and one I had to realize when I graduate from college right as the bubble burst and there was 0 work in the industry: If you can type >85wpm, you can easily make $12-14/hr starting out in an office temp position. It's not great money and the work is no fun, but it leaves you with open lunch breaks to read a book on programming and nights uncomplicated by deadlines. If software engineering doesn't pay for you, do something that does until you can land the job you want.

With respect, you're making huge assumptions. What proportion of the increase[1] in unemployment is composed of competent software engineers? How difficult do you think it would be for a decent software engineer to change jobs tomorrow?

If I had to bet, I'd say a fair chunk of those people were involved in construction, one way or another, since the boom was largely in housing and construction is very labour intensive.

Here's a datapoint for you: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=programmer,+developer&...

I'm not sure that adds much. How do you normalize for growth (or not) in the market, population, etc.? Here's the corresponding relative chart:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=programmer%2C+developer...

So demand for programmers is down 25%, but developers are up 25%?

My guess is the trend has been to call programmers developers and the relative number of jobs available is roughly the same.

Unless there's some sort of real difference that I haven't found, I don't care if someone calls me a programmer or a developer. I really don't see any difference beside word choice.

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=programmer+OR+%22software+...

"Or a career change? Take up a job as a janitor for a few years until the job market recovers, then look for programming work again?"

Yes. Or as a waiter, or in retail, or anywhere that will pay you. Coding for half of minimum wage is about the last thing you should do.

Yeah I'm completely perplexed by this. I'm not questioning the guys article, but there's got to be more to it then we are reading. $200 for a two week project is $5 an hour if you only work on it 4 hours a day.

Even in the current economy any halfway decent programmer should be able to pull in more than minimum wage.

When asking for fairly straight-forward work, I believe a lot of contractors use generated code or repurposed code from other projects. At least this has been my experience from outsourcing application development.

It became especially apparent when I began requesting daily subversion commits for projects that lasted more than a day.

They are doing this on the side in the night to make some extra cash, not their main job, from what I understand.

For me, personally, I tend to low ball my costs because I'm just not that sure of my ability.

Where do you gauge something like that? There isn't anywhere.

I'm questioning the guys article, I think it's either an anomaly or a fabrication.

Well, I'm the guy. If it's an anomaly, I don't know, but it's not a fabrication.

I have the same reaction to many of the items maxklein posts. And he has said in the past that he engineers his postings for the effect on the audience...

That said I know more than a few people who use rent-a-coder or odesk as a way to motivate themselves when learning a new language or toolkit.

That's a brilliant concept: nothing teaches you something like a real project, getting paid, even a pittance, helps all the more, and you can put it on your resume honestly.

I wonder what the age of the developers is. When I was 15-17 I could do simple development jobs and would have rather taken $100/week doing stuff I enjoyed (and learned from) than minimum wage packing fast food.

Yeah, I'm 20 now but learned a ton doing crappy freelance work (not saying the stuff you need done is crappy max :P). I probably made less than minimum wage frequently, but I remember the first time I could charge $500 for a website (when I was like 15 or so - it was a huge amount for me at the time). It took about a week of work, but for a 15 year old $500 (or even $200) for a week of work is quite a lot of money.

You know what though? For a college kid in ohio who's used to working the counter at Starbucks $5/hr for coding is a dream come true...

I've worked with a lot of college kids who got into coding after the recession started who's minds were BLOWN that they could earn extra money writing code

When there's no service / labor jobs on the local college market kids start looking for other angles and will take coding work for peanuts

I don't get it either. I'm doing contracting on the side (here in New Zealand), and two weeks worth of work is around US$3000, if I'm doing 8 hours a day at my contract rates.

I guess if they need the experience, but there really should be better ways to get it.

You can earn more flipping burgers.

Depends. Who says that these aren't side gigs to their main source of income?

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