http://www.elliott.org/inside-interactive-travel/outrageous-outsourcing-costs/ Consumer advocate Christopher Elliott's site. Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:25:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://www.elliott.org/inside-interactive-travel/outrageous-outsourcing-costs/comment-page-1/#comment-21783 Julie Fri, 24 Jul 2009 22:21:02 +0000 http://beta.elliott.org/photos/outrageous-outsourcing-costs/#comment-21783 Hi Chris, I understand not wanting to be overcharged for work you can't do yourself. That applies to anything: plumbing, car repairs, etc. But the tone of your article rubbed me the wrong way. To me, it sounded as though you expect to be gouged and that you need to be on guard. I occassionally do IT projects on the side, and I was recently invited to bid on a project that sounded like it could be very time-consuming (the person wanted his MANY CDs moved to an external hard drive and catalogued). He must have thought it would take many hours, as well, because he wanted an estimate for the whole project (not an hourly rate). I declined to bid. because I could easily have underestimated the work and "cheated" myself out of fair pay for the work done. My point is that when someone has an expertise, of course you can expect to pay for that expertise. A lot of us IT professionals charge fair prices and do not take advantage of people simply because they can't do the work themselves. Hi Chris, I understand not wanting to be overcharged for work you can’t do yourself. That applies to anything: plumbing, car repairs, etc. But the tone of your article rubbed me the wrong way. To me, it sounded as though you expect to be gouged and that you need to be on guard. I occassionally do IT projects on the side, and I was recently invited to bid on a project that sounded like it could be very time-consuming (the person wanted his MANY CDs moved to an external hard drive and catalogued). He must have thought it would take many hours, as well, because he wanted an estimate for the whole project (not an hourly rate). I declined to bid. because I could easily have underestimated the work and “cheated” myself out of fair pay for the work done. My point is that when someone has an expertise, of course you can expect to pay for that expertise. A lot of us IT professionals charge fair prices and do not take advantage of people simply because they can’t do the work themselves.

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