Outsourcing Perl programming

[Jonathan McKeown]

On Thursday 07 June 2007 13:19, Andy Armstrong wrote:
> On 7 Jun 2007, at 11:57, Pete Sergeant wrote:
>
> > I'm looking to pay 10UKP/hour, for maybe 30 to 40 hours a week.
[snip]
> > I think I'm unlikely to find such a person for such a rate in the
> > US/Canada/England. So I'm happy to outsource to far far away.
[snip]
>
> Cheap bastard! :)
>
> If you find someone get them to recommend their friend to me.

As a point of reference, at current market rates that would hire you three 
junior programmers full-time here in Durban - although you might struggle to 
find a Perl programmer: I haven't met many since I emigrated from London five 
years ago, although other languages are common (mainly C/C++ and the 
Microsoft stuff, plus some PHP and Python).

Fluency in English is not an issue: it's the fourth most popular home language 
in South African homes (after Zulu, Afrikaans and Xhosa), a compulsory second 
language in schools, and the main language of business.

In terms of data transfer, bandwidth is not cheap compared to average income, 
but Telkom's entry-level ADSL (384Kb/s with 1GB monthly cap and a dynamic IP) 
gives reasonable performance at about ZAR350/GBP25 a month (I'm running 
OpenVPN to link our office LANs in Durban, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and 
Pretoria, with one fixed end-point on a leased line here in Durban, and the 
other office gateways on 1Mb/s dynamic ADSL).

South African time is 2 hours ahead of GMT/UTC, with no daylight savings, so 
we're an hour ahead during your summer and two hours ahead during your 
winter, which means you can get hold of people at sensible times; and we're 
an overnight flight away from London.

I'm in full-time work as a FreeBSD sysadmin, and a couple of weeks away from 
having two sons under two, so I'm not really interested in doing the work 
myself, but feel free to get in touch if (any of) you think it's worth a 
discussion.

Jonathan