The invisible billion-dollar economy CHARLES ASSISI
TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2005 12:15:45 AM ]
Online marketplaces like RAC (www.rentacoder.com) offer enough reason to generate effusive prose. It's the kind of place where 110,000 software programmers from across the world log on to earn a living. Of these, roughly 50,000 are Indians --all the way from Srinagar to Bhatinda, and Surat to Nagercoil.
Put the 70-80 marketplaces like RAC together and a picture emerges of approximately one lakh Indian software programmers who generate about a billion dollars every year.
At sites like RAC, mostly small and a few mid-sized American companies hoping to outsource their IT requirements post details of jobs that need to be executed. Interested programmers bid until the contract is awarded to a lone ranger in some part of the world.
The bids aren't worth writing home about. On the lower side, a small tweak here and a line of code there can fetch $45. Larger projects can rake in as much as $3,000. It's the rare project that fetches anything more.
Until very recently, online marketplaces like RAC were dominated by programmers from countries like Russia, Ukraine, Hungary and Romania. Then India, with over a billion people in her womb, got wind of yet another opportunity to deploy a few thousand of her masses straining at the leash. Like Vikas Sethi.
An engineer, he gave up a fairly cushy job at HCL Comnet five years ago. He now works out of his home at Paschim Vihar in New Delhi. He works, and he works. Then he works some more. Sethi wakes up at a rather unearthly 4:30 am every day.
That is when his clients in Australia get to office. By 1:30 PM, people from UK and Ireland start calling. Then a one-and-a-half-hour siesta, by the end of which the Americans have started trickling in.
Clients find the $15-45 he charges for an hour's work irresistible. A comparable programmer in the US would charge anywhere between $45-100. Around midnight, Sethi calls it a day. Which is why, RAC ranks him at 129. That is also the reason Sethi is booked for projects until end-2008.