Programmers for $2K per month, More? or Less? | Hacker News Reader

Programmers for $2K per month, More? or Less?

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8 pointsljw100116 comments

The Philippines is a fun and interesting place to live. Actually, lots of places in Asia are. And some of the biggest / fastest growing economies are in the area. You could get a group of coders from the U.S. and set up shop there. For USD 1K per month* you could rent a really nice / big house and get helpers to do all the cooking and cleaning for your group (live-in helpers charge as low as $6 per day.) Actually, you can hire people do do pretty much everything so all you have to do is code. Bootstrapping is relatively cheap due to the cost of living. Outsourced development, but from U.S. developers. ;)

Houses are actually far cheaper than that. You can get a really nice house for USD 500 per month and a one bedroom can go for as low as USD 150. If I were to come with a group, I would have everyone chip in to get something big. For 1K, you would be living in luxury. ;)

There is a non-trivial group of us who would be ready and willing to do that. I happen to be in Turkey currently, but if you could have caught me when I was a bit younger... ;)

I think the trick is that you would have to have someone taking care of all the government interfacing -- work permits and the like. That's probably the hardest part of working abroad.

Depends on how you want to go about it. If you want to go legit you have to do all those things. If you want to roll under the radar then you could live here easy on a tourist visa. You have to extend your visa once every two months but you don't have to do a visa run until you hit month 18.

Once you get into doing things like renting a real office, hiring employees and doing local work, then you would want to go legit. There are economic zones here where you can get a tax holiday for something like 6 years and requirements for locals to be part of your corp get waived if 75% of your income is from outside the country.

Interesting. I hadn't considered that people would move to another country to take advantage of the cost of living difference like that.

Rather, many of us want to live in another country to live in another country, and are willing to take pay cuts in absolute dollars to do so, if the relative lifestyle and savings don't suffer too much.

I'm in Turkey because of reasons other than saving money, but it's not a bad way to save money doing a startup while still living in a city as vibrant as Istanbul is.

Actually, the Philippines can very easily cost as much as an average spot in the U.S. Much of the drop in cost of living here for many people comes from simplification.

Sell your car, sell your house and then give away or sell everything that you can't carry on a plane. Then move into a small apartment away from from friends and family. That's a big lifestyle change and you might save a lot of money just by doing that.

I moved abroad because I saw the chance and took it, why not? That my cost of living went way down was just an added benefit.

So say you take $300 from each dev to handle expenses. They live like kings maybe spending another $500 a month on themselves. At the end of a year they've saved ~$18000, barring any plane tickets home. I'm not sure a lot of people would do it for that amount of money. You'd probably have to double it.

Well, this is the first commenter's suggestion. My suggestion was let people work from wherever they wanted, pay a 30% premium over local rates, and build a team of very good programmers (who value the flexibility and/or are located in places where good jobs are tough to find) - and you can do it at a fairly low cost, because all else equal, you could hire people in the lower cost locations.

So, nobody has to move ;)

I've actually considered doing something like this. Considering the amount I could get as a full-time contract Rails programmer, and the living costs (and amazing quality of life) in Chengdu (western China), I often ask myself why I don't just set up a dev shop there. The best reason I can give is that building a product company is way more interesting than a consulting company, though I'm not even sure about that.

I never thought about doing it with other Western programmers, but that could work, too.

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