[gexla]

It's not generous. They aren't running a charity. There is a market rate for work and that rate isn't limited by geographic location. It's your ability to sell which will get you that rate.

As a developer, you have all the power to become a black hole of resources, sucking in all the money paid to you, the time of everyone who deals with you and all positive energy. That's why the start-up gurus will tell you that one bad hire can sink a company. On the other end, you have developers who can will into existence the sun, the moon and the stars. Location and nationality don't matter.

I think what people get caught up on is they think it's about developer skills. But paradoxically, when you are hiring a developer, it's those development skills which are the last things on the list of importance aside from the fact that they should be present.

https://80000hours.org/articles/skills-most-employable/

There was an HN thread on this article the other day. Agree with it or not, but I think all those things above programming is what separates a disaster looking to pick up a check from an A-team operator who doesn't have to worry about getting work.

[saiprashanth93]

>There is a market rate for work and that rate isn't limited by geographic location. It's your ability to sell which will get you that rate.

But for most programming jobs, developers are interchangeable and a big part of hiring a developer(remote or not) in developing countries is that you can pay a fraction of the salary you would be pay if you were hiring a dev in US/Europe. Hence this in essence is one of the major selling points.

What are the specific things would you say one can do to sell themselves at that rate keeping in mind the above mentioned point?

[gexla]

No work is interchangeable. Some manufacturing jobs get close, but certainly not programming. I have heard this idea of programming jobs being interchangeable but I haven't seen it in the real world. This must be the work of a snake-oil salesman who was really good at being heard pushing this idea. Outsourcing and jobs sites like to push this idea because it makes them money. They can sell the idea, get the contracts and pay developers, but that doesn't mean any real work gets done.

If you want to know how to sell software (or services), I couldn't even touch the advice which tptacek and patio11 regularly give on HN. Do a search for their threads and run with their advice. As per patio11's profile, you could even email him and there is a 70% chance of him getting back to you.

[patio11]

I should probably update that downwards [0] these days -- I've even been thinking of dynamically calculating it to have an excuse to do a weekend programming project.

[0] Busy with work and kids leaves me with less time for the Internet generally, as you can probably gather by e.g. my HN participation being "a time or two weekly" rather than "multiple times every day for years."

[ddorian43]

Keeping in mind the "most programming jobs developers are interchangeable" ? Either be very good at php/css, or be good at, something else. That is more rare. Say, low-level java/c++. And find a job at redislabs/scylladb/elasticsearch/etc.