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[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 17 points 9 months ago

Unfortunately, this already exists

Upwork (previously e-Lance) has a massive systemic lowest-bid-wins downpressure dynamic already, favouring labour from extremely low-cost markets and rushthrough result output. It is occasionally possible to find a good/decent bit of work on there, but largely I t’s a shitshow across multiple dimensions. (There’s more I could say here but it probably deserves its own post somewhere)

And then there’s fucking Turing, a newer entrant to the market labour arbitrage space (because, really, that’s what these are). Turing is a Startup. They explicitly search out developers from developing/third-world nations, mail them (e.g. I got on mail they could only have gotten from scraped commits), and then pitch them on a number that is “better than what they may get locally” but still far below whatever it is that Turing itself bills to end customer. And they called it fucking Turing.

[-] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 14 points 9 months ago

I’m glad Alan Turing never met the modern techbros

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 9 months ago

Yes, I know gig economy for programmers already exists, but to really make it the UberBnB for Upwork, the idea is to push the CAPEX to the workers themselves.

Uber became the world's biggest taxi company while owning no cars. Airbnb became the world's biggest hotel chain while owning no hotels. Imagine being the world's biggest cloud while owning no servers.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 9 months ago

ah right, soz, I meant to address that too but was typing from phone and fucked that bit up

more than a few of the projects/things on these sites tend to be in a shape of "programmer provides all facilities", be it dev tooling or "before launch" site hosting etc. but in favour of your point, it's still definitely incidental instead of structural/built into the system foundations

might not swing that way either, because it places a lot of leverage on the dev's side (and in an exploitative economy, the money doesn't like going for that)

[-] jonhendry@awful.systems 7 points 9 months ago

Sounds like they called it "Turing" in the midcentury law enforcement sense.

this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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