Agree! the HN hiring thread or the contractor spreadsheet might have helped too (but I doubt the "reasonable price" part :)
I definitely did not feel good after reading the post. (Most of) these guys on the freelance sites seem to be undoing the good work by others from the same geographic region by providing such poor service and thereby allowing others to define the stereotypical "Indian developer" by the poor quality of services offered. I personally know fellow good programmers who would be offended by kind of service offered by these people.
IMO, the author of the blog post should have taken help from a technical friend to choose the contractor(s).
In the couple of interviews I've gone thru (and even while making friends), the opensource code I've written and the a reference at the startup I did my internship at, has come to influence the other party's decisions and outlook towards me.
I sincerely hope, that the author has his project completed at the earliest.
Or, if you are like me, include #3: Plenty of time to build side-projects and experiment with products that you hope will grow into something substantial by graduation.
Yes, this is somewhat true -- I know several professors that accept virtually any student as an advisor, provided they're willing to work on their over-arching research program.
I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, though. In some of these fields, one of the bottlenecks seems to be the low numbers of researchers worldwide in the area. While the students do provide cheap labour, they also (depending on the fame of the professor) get immense networking resources. Since the field has comparatively few people, the big names all know each other, and all help get their students hired post-thesis.
Nepotism? Perhaps. But for the research program I'm thinking of in particular, if the problem does get solved, it'll revolutionize mathematics. Talking to some of the students involved, I feel that's why they're willing to put up with being cheap labor -- they're getting paid in happiness and a feeling of being worthy.
Some, yes. But definitely not all. My supervisor only had a very vague notion of what I was doing most of the time (to be fair, I only had a very vague notion of what I was doing most of the time).
Did your supervisor think your work was good enough to attach his name to? I think that counts in the cheap labor argument, even if you aren't just a worker on the assembly line.
I think good advisors (should) enjoy supervising for the sake of supervising, but that doesn't mean it doesn't also boost their CV's.
Did your supervisor think your work was good enough to attach his name to?
We did co-author a paper later, but it wasn't about anything in my thesis. I certainly didn't hear any indication from him that he disapproved of my thesis, though -- he was just happy to let me work independently, and it would have been entirely improper for his name to appear on work he hadn't contributed to.
