The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (2021)

Re:The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlan... by breadloaf on Saturday July 02, 2022 @04:37PM (#31962135)

Well that really depends. I was outsourcing to India when it was still cheap. I probably did something wrong, but I provided definition of the project, set of unit tests and access to git repository so they can upload the result. I got completely useless trash code, incoherent excuses and wasted time.

I paid the company for their "work" and never considered outsourcing again. Sometimes cheap means horrendously expensive.

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Re:The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlan... by bilekas on Saturday July 02, 2022 @05:11PM (#31962469)

This might get a bad rep but I've had this experience too. It's not a blanket statement though. Outsourcing is fine but you definitely have need to do your homework. That's why you see a few of the outsourcing companies being bought over by their employers, because they're good.

Out of curiosity and related to another HN topic, have you ever hired freelancers directly?

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Re:The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlan... by breadloaf on Saturday July 02, 2022 @06:40PM (#31963131)

I tried to on the Upwork. But it is really hit or miss there.

1. I got hardware electric engineer to help me with a design of PCB. Guy was worth every cent.

2. Got embedded developer on separate project. Guy pretended that he can do a lot. I tried to explain to him, that I need a USB CDC device driver in MCU which has USB PHY and I want Windows to recognize and use usbser.sys (generic COM driver) or something similar. He told me that he understand what he is doing, I sent him the dev kit and then he ghosted me and I have ended up doing it myself with TinyUSB.

So as I said, really hit and miss on Upwork. Some people are writing lofty skillset so they can get more per hour and then failing miserably.

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Re:The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlan... by ido on Sunday July 03, 2022 @01:33AM (#31965360)

You have to know people personally or have contacts to people who do to reliably get the good ones, I would never rely on outsourcing websites like Upwork for exactly the reason you stated.

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Re:The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlan... by Aeolun on Sunday July 03, 2022 @08:45AM (#31967285)

In that case, I’d like to chime in and say that I have the opposite (or at least better) experience. Our contractors in India are fairly decent. We sometimes hire them directly from the company that sources them to us.

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Re:The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlan... by mlboss on Saturday July 02, 2022 @05:09PM (#31962452)

Any developer charging $3k will not be good. And even then you need to pay lot of attention on how they are doing.

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Re:The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlan... by benhurmarcel on Monday July 04, 2022 @04:05AM (#31974648)

You can get very good quality work from India. You won't get it by sending a "fire-and-forget" file to some cheap consulting company.

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Re:The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlan... by sumedh on Saturday July 02, 2022 @04:53PM (#31962281)

How did you select the outsourcing company?

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Re:The trimodal nature of software salaries in the Netherlan... by breadloaf on Saturday July 02, 2022 @06:41PM (#31963142)

7 years ago, I don't really remember anymore.

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