I work in the creative industry and I can tell you with confidence that a huge number of design agencies take your money and simply outsource all of it to low paid freelancers overseas. You're basically paying them to forward emails.
@fesshole this is just theft 😡
@fesshole Now, they probably replaced the freelancers with slopmachines.
@fesshole A lot of consultancies use freelancers and sub-contractors. I think of it as the "white middle-age man tax". Clients end up paying an extra 30-40% so they can deal with a white middle-aged man rather than a woman or non-white person doing the work. 🤷‍♀️
@fesshole
The is full of grifters. This is small end of greed, if only creatives could prosecute a war for profit alone
I've hired a couple of people from dribbble. I try to ask enough questions to make sure they're legit. I'll visit their site or look them up on LinkedIn.
I always wonder if it's legit tho.
What are your thoughts on those sites?
@fesshole That’s what agencies do. They have the contacts and a relationship with the people they refer the work to and you don’t. Go ahead and spend an entire work day trying to find the actual person with the right skills, or send it out and have it done quickly.

@fesshole both the agency and the freelancer overseas are doing the work. The agency is responsible for selecting the talent specifically for the job, giving guidance regarding the creative direction of the project, delivering the work, and negotiating changes.

Being one of those designers from overseas, I can tell you that those chosen can deliver above the needs of the project and on time.

Don’t like it? Go to Upwork.

This will ALWAYS give better results than any slop machine.

#fedihireme

@fesshole $1 to fwd the email. $999 to know who to fwd it to.

@nobodyzhome @fesshole
RE
$999 to know who to fwd it to

That's life, you pay what you #outsourced #outsourcing #freelancer for

First few times the person meet, they say...
⭕️Can I know you?

After a few years, they say....
⭕️I know you. (You proberly did that, right?)

When in the nursing home they say...
⭕️Do I know you?

@fesshole This is true. I've been called in twice because Aotearoa New Zealand agencies have bid for a web development contract, failed to deliver anything usable, and under hard questioning admitted the project had been farmed out to India.

Sadly in both cases the client declined to sue the agency, which I strongly recommended. If nothing else this sends a strong signal to others that such behaviour is going to get them into a power of trouble.

One of the sites two off us were able to remediate across three years, gradually refactoring the duplicated spaghetti PHP into something that was maintainable. The other, sadly, was unrecoverable because the Indian dev shop had encrypted the whole thing and declined to provide a permanent unlock key unless the final payment was received. Neither the client nor the agency was willing to pay.

@leighelse @fesshole

...imagine how much worse this could get with AI coding! New levels of unmaintainable.

@bluewave_kiwi @fesshole Yes and no. Given that artificial intelligence coding agents have access to an enormous code base, I doubt their output would be worse than the spaghetti code I encountered from the Indian team.

@leighelse on the other hand, mass produced spaghetti code makes up a lot of the code out there in the wild, and thus the training data for the ai 😭

Only now the underpaid overworked developers can churn it out even faster.

@fesshole Congrats. You just discovered the concepts of globalization, subcontracting and arbitrage.
@fesshole
Britain; a nation of middle-men.

@IsItBroke @fesshole that's not really a fair assessment

britain is a nation of *incompetent* middle-men