[consulting] Lowball offers

[John]

Friends,

Thanks for some more measured responses today. I realize I was asking for an 
incredible amount of functionality for $1K. Although I am new to this list, I 
have worked as a professional web developer for 8+ years. I've done a lot of 
.NET/SQL Server work by necessity, but I recently turned the folks at my day job 
away from the dark side, and we're migrating to Drupal. It's a big project.

That's one of the reasons I cannot goof around with my motorcycle club's site 
too much. I held a one-hour requirements gathering phone call with my "client" 
aka my riding buddies. Perhaps I should have refined the requirements further 
before posting a request for quotes, but I was kind of curious about the 
responses I would receive. Broadly, I have seen:

1) "You jerk! That site would cost $10K minimum, and your request is insulting."

2) "Sure we can do it for $899." (Many of these responses come from providers on 
Elance in developing nations.)

3) A few Elance providers said they were willing to work with us on an hourly 
basis ($18 from Eastern Europe), which indicates to me that my requirements were 
unrealistic and incomplete.  :)  These are the people I'm most likely to 
contact. I would like to hammer out a realistic scope and agree on a fixed bid 
with a low-cost dev shop. I would also consider a teenager, but I'd have to see 
some sort of track record, maybe a few lines on a contrib module.

Personally, I do not feel threatened by low-cost dev shops. For the next 20 
years, two industries are sure bets: technology and health care. Programming may 
become more of a commodity, but U.S. companies will always need people who can 
interpret technology for the masses. We may turn into data analysts, PMs or 
business analysts, but we will have work.

Worrying about offshoring feels to me like Windows server admins who complain 
about the cloud. You can still be a server admin in this country, but feeling 
your way around the OS by right-clicking no longer passes muster. You need to 
upgrade your skills to learn about virtualization, load balancers and high 
availability.

That said, I'm still an app developer for now, one of you. I'm not bacon, so 
don't flame me.  :)

-John