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Comment by markpercival | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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