At one point I hired a personal assistant through oDesk. I took this idea from Timothy Ferriss's 4-Hour Workweek, but I hired someone in the US. I wanted to get a landscaping project done (that was required by the environmental regulators in Tahoe), but I didn't have time to track down the contractors, do background checks, make sure they showed up, and finally get the regulators to sign off on the project.
The contractors thought it was pretty strange to have to deal with someone in a different state, but it worked out pretty well. Our culture (at least here in the US) doesn't appreciate outsourcing day to day tasks (and I felt embarrassed telling people I had an assistant). Maybe this comes from our Protestant roots.
It reminds me of an episode of Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion. Some of his characters from Minnesota visit California and find out one of their relatives has a gardener, and they ask if the relative is having any health issues, because they couldn't imagine having someone do their gardening for them, unless they were severely ill.
Update: The poster above mentions getting what you pay for if you pay $2 per hour in the Philippines for instance. I agree with this. I payed significantly more, but I feel as though I got my money's worth. It isn't that expensive to hire in the US if you look to lower cost areas like the Mid-west.
For this project, I felt it was worth it to have someone who understood the problems of hiring and managing contractors in the US. The person I hired was a homeowner, understood what I wanted to accomplish, and did an awesome job. It turned out to be a fraction of the cost of the overall project, and was money well spent.
I'm not sure it's related to work ethic or religious roots but it's certainly true that there was never a particular culture in the US of service whereby even people of fairly middle-class backgrounds had servants. And this has probably carried over to modern culture whereby people probably outsource fewer tasks like grass cutting, housecleaning, and so forth than they arguably should (whatever that word means in this context).
That said, a lot of people do outsource tasks like cooking--but they do so in different ways (like going to restaurants) rather than by explicitly hiring help.
It's a good point about eating at restauranta vs. hiring a chef; in my limited norcal experience, it cost less to have a come-and-cook chef weekdays than it did to routinely eat out, and it was substantially more awesome in several ways.
Despite it costing less, though, several of my fellow Americans thought the chef was like, bourgeois, or pretentious, or something.
(I would still do it, except now I have a wife who cooks, and resists my lobbying to outsource this function...)
My college-age daughter LOVES to cook and finds it relaxing. I call her my "personal chef" and have basically turned over all household food stuff to her, freeing my time for other things.
Outsourcing by eating out has become much more acceptable in the past few years, but I can remember growing up that eating out was considered a luxury. But restaurants can achieve economies a scale that are difficult to get at home, especially if you don't have a large family. In many cases, eating at a restaurant or having food delivered isn't that bad of a deal.
Yeah, I think it definitely has a "weird things aristocratic British people do" association: job titles like au pair, chauffeur, butler, chef, governess, etc. don't seem like something that would fit into a red-blooded, down-to-earth American household.
Housecleaning and grass cutting are really common to pay people for in the U.S., though. I think in the neighborhood I grew up the same large company must've had at least 20-30% of the lawns, because they basically came through with their big trailers of equipment and went house to house marching through their customer list.
> Housecleaning and grass cutting are really common to pay people for in the U.S., though.
I don't know the numbers but it likely varies a lot even among those with houses and decent-sized lawns. My guess would be that in upper middle class developments where this sort of thing is more or less the norm, people will be more likely to avail themselves of these services. If all your neighbors cut their lawns on the other hand, I can see able-bodied people feeling funny about hiring someone.
The contractors thought it was pretty strange to have to deal with someone in a different state, but it worked out pretty well. Our culture (at least here in the US) doesn't appreciate outsourcing day to day tasks (and I felt embarrassed telling people I had an assistant). Maybe this comes from our Protestant roots.
It reminds me of an episode of Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion. Some of his characters from Minnesota visit California and find out one of their relatives has a gardener, and they ask if the relative is having any health issues, because they couldn't imagine having someone do their gardening for them, unless they were severely ill.
Update: The poster above mentions getting what you pay for if you pay $2 per hour in the Philippines for instance. I agree with this. I payed significantly more, but I feel as though I got my money's worth. It isn't that expensive to hire in the US if you look to lower cost areas like the Mid-west.
For this project, I felt it was worth it to have someone who understood the problems of hiring and managing contractors in the US. The person I hired was a homeowner, understood what I wanted to accomplish, and did an awesome job. It turned out to be a fraction of the cost of the overall project, and was money well spent.