Topic: gffgh (Read 241 times)

A fantastic way of developing your portfolio is by offering your services as a donation to a charity. Local charities are usually quite poor in the web development aspect, and don't have the most appealing websites to potential donators. By doing work for a charity free of charge it will look very good on your CV, as well as help a usually decent cause. Most charities are more than willing to get free labour done for them too. Plus, you have the added benefit of that a charity being a authority figure in the community, and therefore their website is likely already being seen by a lot of people, and you could get ongoing feedback from the charity on what their customers think, as well as if they have had a increase in donations etc.

When I was just starting our on all my services I offer a free trial and very low rate this is to earn my portfolio and testimonials from my first set of clients, you can just charge an amount that is equal to top-notch developers are charging without proving what you are capable of doing, you must work your way up and you can do this by offering trials and low rate, but I'm not against your goal to set up a union, but this is how this industry works.

It could be rip-off in the beginning, but that's how you build reputation not just here.

In years of myself working at odesk, and any other free lancing websites. I also offered cheap services in the beginning, but I still try to delivered high quality products to my customers. And then employers started to recognised my skills and then I started to increase my $x/hour. No one complain, didn't join any "Web developers Union" of sort. So I would say that it is ok to charge small on your services and work your way up, just saying.

No war, its simple market freedom. This is the reason America lost most of its manufacturing, because it was cheaper to do the same things elsewhere.

So what are you going to do if i don't join your union? How much money do you think the people in my country are willing to work for? Did you know we have the lowest wage in the world? Its currently about 4 USD a month for a full time job. And if you are somehow in a very good company and you are a stellar programmer, you might be able to earn... oh 10 times more! (40 USD a WHOLE MONTH).

So lets not even talk about hours.

You can do nothing about this. This is world inequality for you. There is people willing to do it cheap, and there is people looking to hire those people.

As for quality and results, its random. But its probably cheaper for an employer to try and discard until finding the gem to exploit than hiring "from the union".

It is funny you go the protectionist way (Like Trump). The Chinese that make your products, often don't buy them because they can't. The average Chinese won't buy an iPhone, they might get a knockoff or some other android that looks suspiciously similar, but not the actual thing because the price is probably 10 times more. Of course that doesn't include the rich elite who don't mind buying everything imported.

In the end protectionism doesn't work, it only makes your already expensive lifestyle even more expensive, since you have less choice (ie. no more cheap Chinese goods). And you already lost your production capacity, maybe because manufacturing became more expensive, because people joined unions...

China is now the world's production power. If China coughs, the world gets sick (quite literally, recently). This is globalization, and there is no going back to mercantilism and other outdated practices that can only harm your economy more.

Perhaps if you dropped the Chicago school and studied the Austrians, you might find an advantage, but its probably not coming from America, unless the USD collapses and somehow people there see the light of Bitcoin before that happens.

I know you're partially right, but it is a bad mentality.
We are in charge of our actions and our community.
There are tons of examples in history of union striking and getting what they want.
If people managed to coordinate themselves like 100 year ago - why can't we in the era of the internet...?

Acquire new skills or improve your current ones so that you don't have to compete with people who try to live off of low rates. Even in poor countries those who are more skilled will often charge $20 or (way) more. You could also work on your punctuation, some will not treat you seriously if they see you make glaring mistakes.

At first when I read the title, I thought OP was going to form a team of professional bitcoin web developers who would work on bitcoin and crypto related plugins, themes, payment gateways and etc.

Well, OP, the amount of money you think is low, seems pretty huge for some people who live in poor countries. If for example someone wants to create website in poor countries and developers may ask for thousands, they will lose customers and no one will order from them. So to gain customers, they need prices that's normal for their country. If developer earns 2$ a hour, that may be good in some countries. I have seen one kid (15 years old) who was coding websites (from psd) into html/css and was doing it 100x better than others and he was coding very hard designs, believe it or not, he was doing it for 10$ (main page, single page and contact forms). And he was happy with it. While someone would ask for 100$, he was doing it for 10$. 10x lower price and very high quality.

We can't have standard prices in a world when there are poor countries. Why apple is manufactured in china? Because in this country there are cheap workers.

Evolution gaming was expanding their studio in Georgia, they were employeeing tens of dealers daily and opening new tables daily because workers are very cheap, employees were doing their job very well and evolution was selling tables with the same price as any other tables.

You can't change this world easily.

Even if there is a Union project developers or employer can always find a web developer that will suit his need in terms of price because web developers are in competition and there are newbie web developers that still want to build their portfolio and they will accept a much lower price the union has set up.

It would be more helpful if freelance sites would make low threshold for $/hour price of each profession.
However we're far far away from this and now we has to unite and start this off by ourselves

Bitcointalk is a decentralization community so that supply/demand is what drives the price without interference from mods and others. Therefore, setting a minimum price will not take place until checking the experience of each developer and therefore more effort.
You can create an alliance from several developers and set a minimum limit, but it is a mistake to force everyone to this minimum.
For example, $ 20 an hour would be satisfactory to some and bad to others.
If you can prove your ability, you will be paid the highest amount because the digital work is based on trust.

It's common practice for new freelancer (in various industry) to offer their service for peanuts to build reputation and as learning experience.
But as @Welsh mentioned, most of them are fraud and will run away when something gone wrong.


Usually only employer from 1st world who would agree with 20 USD/hour

If you use an already made template and you modify it,that's not web development ,you have to make the template from zero ... to be considered web development.

It can go either way. In my experience, there are a number of quality programmers who are willing to work for less than $20/hour. On the other hand, I had very bad experiences with developers who, to put it mildly, overestimated their abilities. One character tried to charge me over $800 for a plain WP with a Divi theme without any modification. Price is not always the right indicator.

I don't believe so. I have experiences of working with team, playing role as project coordinator. I had to deal with wide variety of people. People working with cheap price are usually the programmers who are very new in the space or it's not easy to work with them.
Price is something what we are getting in exchange. Cheap price = Cheap quality. I have been observing the article writers offering their service here with such a cheap price which I would never allow, even though I had no job at all.

I agree with that it's a sort of arbitrage and many third parties are good at doing that, advanced web developers will not go lower than that amount, but we have brothers who are from third world country who are also good accepts that amount because they treat it as a sideline apart from their job in the office.

I am not saying that there are no good programmers for $2 / hour , i am just saying that $2 / hour good programmer is getting ripped up , sometimes people outsource to $2 / hour programmers and make like $50 / hour just by connecting real client with programmer ... you find that fair ?

It separates us from so called "web developers" , and people that want web development services ,can check this topic to see if the "web developer" is a BWDU member , we can easy check if some guy stole other people's work , we can help each other when we get stuck with bugs ,code etc ,and most important a BWDU member will never work for less the 20 usd / hour as he hursts him self,his family and other web developers.

You can get just as good of a programmer for $2/hour as you can for $200/hour.

What incentive do web developers have to join your union? You won't guarantee them work at your minimum price. And if they can't find work and they can live off of less than $20/h they have every incentive to lower their rates.

Usually those that are selling their services for cheap, and claim to be "web developers" are in fact those that download plugins, themes, and publicly available code, and edit it via a nice user interface. Many "web developers" claiming to be Word press experts for an example, but are in fact downloading themes, and just customizing them to the clients specifications. Usually, the specifications are something like "Clean interface, something related to sports". They then go over to one of the numerous marketplaces out there, and purchase a theme for $20 or whatever, and plant that on word press, do a few customization such as editing the title, and filling in the content for the customer, and charging double or even triple the amount. This is just one example. Most good web developers are charging a pretty penny for their services, because there's a lot to consider when developing custom content for a website.

Usually, the customers looking for "web developers" are in fact looking for "web installers", and don't know the difference. Go to any serious company, or individual, and ask for a custom designed website, and you're probably starting off in the hundreds, but most likely will end up in thousands. For projects which I haven't had time to do myself, I've been quoted as high as 100k.