lulzx.comThe Indian tech scene has a reputation problem. Cheap outsourcing. Body shops. "Do the needful."
I ignore all of it. I charge $1,000/day. I turn down work that isn't interesting. I open source everything I can.
The rate is a filter before it is a number. People who want a warm body at a discount bounce off it. People who want a specific person stay. I would rather have fewer days and keep the work I actually want to think about. The uninteresting work pays the same hour and spends a different kind of money. Attention. Taste. The next six months of what I am willing to open.
Proof that does not need a profile
The best developers I know are in India. They are building real systems for real scale. They do not show up in the usual writeups. A public repo does. A bot that stays up. A CLI someone else can install. I open source what I can because the work has to travel without me on a call explaining that I am serious. The code is the introduction. The commit history is the reference.
Visibility used to mean a magazine or a conference badge. I do not have those, and I do not wait for them. A stranger can clone the thing, hit a bug, and see how I fixed the last one. That is enough to start a conversation that ends in an invoice.
The old bottleneck
My internet is fine. My hardware is fine. My timezone is an advantage. I work while they sleep. The only thing that used to be hard was payments. Getting dollars into an Indian account used to mean fees, forms, and a stretch of not knowing if the transfer was actually moving. That part is solved now. An invoice goes out. The money lands. I stop thinking about rails and go back to the diff.
Once the transfer works, the remaining argument is the work itself. Location is a story other people tell about you. I let the rate, the public code, and the finished week answer it. I still turn work down. If the problem is dull, or the person wants a cheaper pair of hands with my name on the invoice, I say no. A full calendar of dull tickets is how you become the reputation you were trying to leave.
The interesting work still has to ship on a clock they can feel. I write the update. I open the PR. I do not hide behind "will do the needful." That phrase is the reputation. The opposite is a specific next step and a finished day. Charge enough that the wrong jobs bounce. Keep the repos public enough that the right ones can find you. Then do the work while they sleep.
Ship something they can run. Charge enough that the boring jobs select themselves out. Keep the rest public when you can. The rest of the scene can keep its slogans.