This is true outside of tech as well. Work at a midcorp with about 50-100 offices worldwide, we have 21 year old juniors who don't know shit (like me) follow templates and flowcharts to do bulk legal or accounting work, slightly more complex than data-entry, we charge clients $250 an hour. Most of the kids do have plenty of critical thinking competencies, but knowledge wise it's a few days of on the job training, it virtually doesn't matter if you majored in erotic dance or tax law, pretty much anyone can do the work... each of these kids generates close to half a million in revenue per year. And the costs are essentially salaries (averaging $25 including benefits and all) and an office (a fraction of that), profit margins are about 75%.
Those rates are utterly ridiculous because the work can be done from any location, a lot of these companies are in 2nd tier cities where the cost of living is very reasonable.
I won't even go into the opportunities of automating this stuff, but it's ridiculous...
But the hard part is selling it. I could easily run a team of 10 of these juniors who produce the same work (volume and quality) that generates $5m in revenue a year at the bigcorp, on a budget of 0.5m. Business wise it's almost free money, but without the big corp brand name, it's really hard to sell, even prices were cut by 50% or more and you put sales agents are ridiculous commissions. It's just crazy how important it is to clients to interface with a big brand name corp, despite the fact the actual people doing much of the work are on the level of interns. This is true for lots of finance/legal/consulting companies I find.
The reason is "exposure". Big companies want someone whom they believe has experience, and whom they can hold liable if there are problems. It's not the company spending the money - it is a collection of corporate people spending a budget allotted to them, who want a promotion.
Those rates are utterly ridiculous because the work can be done from any location, a lot of these companies are in 2nd tier cities where the cost of living is very reasonable.
I won't even go into the opportunities of automating this stuff, but it's ridiculous...
But the hard part is selling it. I could easily run a team of 10 of these juniors who produce the same work (volume and quality) that generates $5m in revenue a year at the bigcorp, on a budget of 0.5m. Business wise it's almost free money, but without the big corp brand name, it's really hard to sell, even prices were cut by 50% or more and you put sales agents are ridiculous commissions. It's just crazy how important it is to clients to interface with a big brand name corp, despite the fact the actual people doing much of the work are on the level of interns. This is true for lots of finance/legal/consulting companies I find.