Last night I went to a seminar in which the speaker owns close to a hundred websites producing some sort of passive income. He was teaching people how get started and replicate his success.
During the course of this 3 hour seminar he scratched the surface of using outsourcing. Claiming only the good things, $3 per hour, english speaking, systems to find them. What he failed to mention was the countless hours lost trying to find good people. Or the fact that all of his projects are 1-3 files and nothing of substantial substance. I feel that this kind of information leads people to believe that you can find that magical employee who works for pennies for any project. I laugh when he says you may have to pay as much as $10-15 for shorter term employment. With this kind of build-up the people in the audience are going to think it’s easy to find such outsourcing.
I’ve worked with quite a few outsource teams and individuals. I’ve had very little luck with anything outside of the U.S. Probably because of the cultural differences in expectations based on the the loose specs given for a project. Time lost finding a good person/team can be more valuable than the pennies you save paying them.
Outsourcing can work, especially for small 1-2 page websites with some sort of utility. But the people in this audience should really be working with someone local until they get their feet wet. They don’t know how to explain to technical person across cultural boundaries what they mean. They need a back and forth dialog with a local person that can meet them face to face a few times until they learn the ins and outs. Of course, if they’re willing to experiment and learn the hard way (spending money) until they learn to effectively deal with remote outsource teams, then that’s their prerogative.
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You can get HTML, article writing, and link building work done fairly cheap and without too much of a hassle, because there are a lot of people that offer these services, and most of them are not writers, or web designers, or marketing experts primarily. They’re usually full-time outsource workers, who expand their skill-set to cover what people are buying. So, it’s pretty typical to see $4/hour guys doing this.
For most anything outside of this, you’ll have to pay a reasonable rate ($12-25/hour) for decent quality work from professionals. There are some exceptions, but you really have to dig for them.
I should clarify that he was speaking about programming work. Mostly php developers.
Oh. In that case, $4/hour will buy you pre-written or generated code. Hefty profits on the contractor’s side.