Hi, I can see here, on oDesk and on Freelancer that there are many jobs people are offering $5 or $10 to do programming job, or even developers who offer to do job for $5 or little more. Can you really do QUALITY programming job for little as $5? By my opinion, if you're developing for $5, you need to do a lot of week work to cover you expenses, and with this amount of work, you just cannot deliver quality.
This depends a bit on where you are in the world, I assume, and also what the job involves - if the job is changing a few lines of code, or embedding a video or image, it might not be that bad, but if you're spending more than 10-15 minutes... well. Also, remember that the minimum wage in the US varies between around $7 and $9-ish an hour. So that makes $5 about 45 minutes of work (compared). However, if you're in an expensive part of the world, as I am, $5 would give you about 4 minutes of my time.
I honestly don't think anyone can pull off decent money by working for $5 or $10 when the task involves a considerable effort and demands time and expertise or skill. I'm not a programmer and as such am not sure about what the fair pay for programmers/developers/coders is, but it seems that this problem of slave wages has affected to a certain degree, almost every line of work - be it programming, web-designing, content writing or anything else. Buyers are expecting 'high-quality' and 'perfection' for mere pennies on the dollar! A couple of points that might provide some perspective on the problem: Most of the people looking to hire freelancers for cheap rates don't have a blasted clue about what real or actual quality is. Whatever crap they get for $5 or $10, they mistakenly think it's 'high-quality'. There are tons of people looking for work on platforms like DP, Odesk/Elance, Freelancer etc. As such, the competition is fierce and lowballing is generally the key to win bids, grab work successfully and cut across the competition. Even folks selling their products/services for ridiculously low prices find themselves being undercut. Many freelancers coming to these places are from countries where the value of a dollar goes much further. So a $5 or $10 job, while it's despicable for someone in the US or UK, might prove to be good-paying work for someone from a country where the monetary value of a single dollar is high when compared to one corresponding unit of their currency. Many freelancers, esp. the beginners, delusively believe that one has to charge low due to lack of a strong portfolio and necessary experience to prove oneself. So, they set their prices way below. In fact, prices should always be set commensurate with the quality you deliver. Some sellers are caught up in the NOW-NOW-NOW mentality or the mindset of making money instantly. They want quick money and instant rewards/gratification. No matter how low they have to sell themselves, they accept sub-par offers just to grab a quick buck. These are just a few out of the various reasons that feed the problem of slave wages on freelancing platforms like Odesk/Elance, Freelancer etc. In any case, I don't think one can deliver real quality for $5 and $10, whatever trade-skill it involves. Anyway, just my 2c.
Must admin, I totally agree with you, @Content Maestro. You gave good points what main problem with slave wages are. Although I don't live in so expensive country like US or UK, a just don't want to depreciate my work, or my whole niche (programming) with slave wages like $5 per job/hour. I think that all programmers should think about that, no matter do you live in UK, US, India or Japan. @PoPSiCLe, minimal wage of $7 or $9 per hour as general wage or you mean programming wage?
Of course you can, I do $5/$10 jobs all the time and that works out to nothing in my currency (GBP) and always provide a quality service
I live in the US and was thinking about doing some $4 fiverr programing things, or some (similarly under paid) plugin development. For me it looks like easy work to get (maybe) and an easy way to get one or two projects to prove experience to either a future (US) full time employer or future consulting clients. Once established, fiverr might be a good way to get clients with larger projects to do (but the initial task is a huge loss leader). Things aren't always about getting fully paid for your time. I'm sure others would do fiverr ($4 for a job) just because they enjoy being helpful without regard for the income.
Unless i was just beginning writing code and needed the portfolio exposure - I wouldnt be able to cover my cost of servers, hardware, my time etc for that kind of money - I generally charge $50-85 / hr but usually per project flat rate. I dont understand how programmers regardless of the part of the world they live in can work and survive off of that kind of money.
Competition is very high on freelancing sites and many freelancers belong to a country where $5 is a huge currency, so they can afford to do the task for you.
Other thing on my mind is, what customer really gets for $5 or $10 of programming job? I know that one time I got a job to re-write code which was done before by one guy over freelancer.com. And it's was really mess. It was PHP/JQuey code and it was written in a way I did little scripts back in nineties in Basic/QBasic when I started to code.
Highly unlikely. Because if they really did, they wouldn't choose to go for a $5 programmer in the first place. EDIT: Here's a page I stumbled across some days back that tells why you shouldn't hire low-cost programmers - http://mattkopala.com/blog/2012/01/30/hiring-cheap-programmers-is-bad-business/. (Try using a proxy if the page isn't directly opening.) Hope it helps.
IF you want to purchase a good laptop - you have options at best buy of machines that cost $229.99 (compaq) all the way up to macbook pro ($2,499.99) which laptop do you think will perform better and or you get a better experience out of? It is the old motto - you get what you pay for ALWAYS.
I wouldn't even have wasted a minute of my time to go over what minimum wage is. A programming job is NOT a minimum wage job. Burger flipping is... mopping the floor is... holding a sign while it rains is. Not Programming or any other skill driven profession. Regardless of location NO $5 isn't enough for a quality programming job. You won't get quality. You won't get someones time. You won't get detail. You will get $5 of a slap job from someone who is desperate to spend a few minutes on your project.
I'm in North America and I've taken on jobs for $5 on DP. Usually smaller jobs, but sometimes coding larger backend stuff (PDF builders, etc.)- I do it to help out other members, and also when I have free time - I'm very selective of the project (I only take on smaller jobs) and since it's only something I do on the side, I have the luxury to choose when I do this.
I've purchased a good bit of coding on fiverr, and sometimes it's good, sometimes it isn't. More times than not, You'll have to buy multiple gigs to get any decent sized script written - I normally end up buying $20 worth of gigs to get about an hour or so of coding.
So roughly $20/hr for coding - still fairly cheap and under priced. If it works out in the end i guess that's all that matters, right?