[sebsoler]

ODesk worked great for me, stick with very straight forward / easy tasks, I was paying $3/hr for someone to do data mining. I ended up with a great excel doc with over 3000 related sites & email addresses, very useful to my startups initial launch

[nopassrecover]

The OP asked if you had used these services to find work. I think your response counts as a vote for "I've tried, but was unable to find a project that was worth my time".

[asymmetric]

i find paying anyone 3$/hr for doing anything slightly immoral

[kls]

While I would be hesitant to call it immoral, it can be alarming for a westerner to see that rate and realize the inevitability of it all. That being said markets find an equilibrium so long as they remain free, we have all kinds of things like unions to corporate collusion to corrupt governments, that work to keep them from actually being free in the real world. The reality is in some countries $3/hr is a respectable wage and corporations are exploiting wage and labor imbalances to pay that livable wage in one country while marketing their wares in a totally different economic environment. It may be immoral that we allow companies to exploit trade imbalances to the detriment of the people that are trapped in the reality of different economic conditions (e.g western workers), but that is a really complex subject to untangle.

To me, the part that I find perplexing is that if technical workers around the world knew exactly how short they are in supply they would understand their leverage in the market and not be asking for $3/hr. The thing is in some countries their is collusion to keep that realization from happening. I am not suggesting massive corporate conspiracies but rather people not knowing their true worth by gauging themselves and their income to local cultural norms instead of looking at global supply and demand and adjusting their rates accordingly. The reality is a guy in India or China could be charging $15 to $20 to $30 hr depending on specialty and still be competitive in the market.

That awakening happened among western technical workers and I think it will happen among other cultures, the cold hard reality is there is a small percentage of the population that choose technical career paths, and even fewer who are actually good at it. Once one realizes that the balances shifts in their favor.

I guess my point is in our field we only have our selves to blame if we are asking to little for our services. At one point outsourcing was used to leverage the price of technology down, but that has come back to bite the creator, it created new technical markets and constrained the supply of talent even further.

[jeswin]

Depends on which country you are in. In India, a junior developer in an IT Services company (such as Infosys or TCS) makes 20-25k INR a month. Roughly about $3/hour.

[Selvik]

Millions of people would risk death for a chance at making 3usd an hour. People still die because they can't buy food. If westerners isolate themselves economically from the worlds poor in a misguided effort to remain morally pure, the worlds poor will suffer more, not less.

[asymmetric]

There's no need to isolate: just pay fairly. 3$/hr for programming work can't be considered fair by any stretch of the imagination, imo.