Fair price for consulting services?
Umm, where am I going with this and what’s the alternative? What’s wrong with complaining about $35/hour competition? What’s wrong with complaining about poor service from outsourced jobs, toys with lead, soaring gas pricese, spam in our mailbox, and broken levees on the river bank?
The problem is that all of these things were easy to foresee and we only take offense when they directly threaten us. I’ve been warning MV application developers for years that free and/or open source software is being developed which will trump their own offerings. I’ve been warning them about "The Big Four", Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and IBM, who have dominated the enterprise at Fortune 1000 companies, and it was inevitable that their next target was going to be the SMB market that we live in. I’ve been encouraging them to offer their software as a service – and many large companies are funding efforts from smaller developers to do this. These other companies that have taken the funding are now offering for-fee services using a model that caters to contemporary sensibilities (meaning it’s politically safe to buy SAAS/SOA) and these other offerings now compete directly with MV apps.
If MV developers adapted to differentiate their offering then they wouldn’t need to fear low-cost competitors now coming from Russia, India, and Mexico. It’s not enough to just know how to program in BASIC. You need to offer clients a richer diversity of products and services. The way to compete is to keep on top of the market and consumer needs so that the consumer knows that they can come to you for whatever they need. Is your offering limited to MV BASIC programming, with some application-specific expertise. End-users can easily find that elsewhere. But if you can offer a complete set of solutions to address every possible need, then they have no need to look elsewhere. If they look elsewhere they will need to deal with overseas time issues, language issues, and multiple vendors – all of which is a logistics hassle that costs more than the per-hour savings that they get by outsourcing.
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To clarify. I’m not trying to "lower the bar" by outsourcing to cheaper labour markets. This particular job is for a non US company that I’ve been dealing with for some time now. Considering that the average office worker there only makes about $US 300/mth, one should be able to understand that they simply do not have the money to pay a "first world", US rate. Based on some of the critical responses posted in CDP, I guess those people have limited international experience. I, on the other hand, have spent most of my career working in markets outside of North America.What really baffles me is why anyone not interested in the position would bother posting anything at all. I suppose some people like to "hear themselves talk", so to speak.