Working from home revisited

An internet connection, a computer and a cup of coffee is all you need to make your day's worth. Really?

Globalisation has its rewards. If you live in India, Russia, the Philippines or Bangladesh you can now sell your services and support your family without having to migrate overseas.

If you live in the USA, the United Kingdom or Australia you are scratching your head as to how people can make a living working for a pittance like that - undercutting rates and driving prices down to a ridiculous level.

The clients who commission the work are hiding behind a dummy username. They are probably not the Fortune 500 companies. More likely they are themselves operators working from home - forever scheming the next wondrous website that will make them millions. But right now, they are investing as little as possible - trying to leverage any bit of technology that might come their way. They never commission someone to take on and deliver the full project for them. Outsourcing is not exactly the word. Instead they fan out bits and pieces so that no participant could steal the project from them.

They are hopeless at telling you what they exactly want. The more descriptives state; "I want a website like so-and-so!" By the time you submit a proposal you have wasted as much time as it would take to actually complete half of the work involved. They like to bait you saying they are looking to establish a working relationship with a reliable contractor. When you read between the lines, you discover they will repeat the same ploy with an endless supply of beggars who have nothing much to lose.

What types of trades are affected by this plague? Besides PHP programming you will find all sorts of web marketing related activities such as scraping other websites for data gathering, web design, WordPress plugins, copywriting, link building, etc...

They are two ways of being compensated in those marketplaces. One is a fixed price contract, the other is an hourly rate. The hourly rate option involves a piece of spying software to download onto your PC to take random snapshots of your screen to prove you are indeed working on the project rather than watching your friends on facebook. The fixed price option is fraught with danger as clients like to pile on requirements and withhold payment by arguing you haven't ticked all the boxes involved.

It is still amazing that through technology and globalisation people are able to work in a distributed fashion with folks they will never see face to face. Correction: some require you to take Skype calls to manage the project. This results in having to keep your PC turned on at all times in case they might want to call you in the middle of the night because of timezone differences.