Why do you think $9 an hour is shameful? Doesn’t that entirely depend on the cost of living? $9 could be 3x the average wage in some parts of the world.

// Why do you think $9 an hour is shameful? Doesn’t that entirely depend on the cost of living? //

No. It does not depend at all on cost of living. It depends upon supply and demand, like anything else.

I’m not saying the rate depends on cost of living. I’m saying the fact that it’s “shameful” depends on cost of living.

I mean, there are a lot of things it could depend on. I'd like to say that it should depend upon the value that the programmers are creating--that more productive programmers should make more.

Unfortunately, if the article in the OP is true, these programmers were negatively productive :-( so it can't be as simple as just how much value a programmer produces. It's more complex than that.

Honestly, I've never gotten any good answer from anybody about what wages "should" be, for any job, programming or not. In reality, what happens most of the time is wages are simply determined by supply and demand, like anything else. There are plenty of people working for $9 an hour in very expensive cities in America--so whatever it depends on, it most certainly does not depend on standard of living.

It's shameful for the quality of work asked for.

So you're not saying it's shameful in general, just in this specific context because of the type of work involved?

If you take the article at face value--if its claims are true that $9-an-hour programmers cost Boeing billions of dollars--it is indeed a shame that, in this particular instance, Boeing was not willing to pay more for better programmers.

Are those claims true? Who knows. I'm sure that whoever hired those $9-an-hour programmers thought that if they could manage those programmers soooo well that they could get them to program as well as $100 an hour programmers.

YMMV, but in my experience, you can't manage programmers to be better programmers. No matter how much check-in approval bureaucracy, or how much QA, you will not get better programs. If you want better programs, you need to hire better programmers.

I’d agree on that wholeheartedly. Especially the last part.

Well, for better or for worse, it is true that 9 dollar/hour or 1440 dollars/month would be a decent salary in India. Twice the current median.

I saw your other comments, so I would add that while it is a decent salary in India. That doesn't mean you can expect the same quality as you would expect from someone earning twice the median in US. Because standard of living never really scales like you want it to.

200 dollars in India still cannot buy you a cheap computer, while 1000 dollars (the equivalent in US) can definitely buy you a solid computer.

So, yeah, it is shameful for this kind of work, because it is skilled work, and skilled workers wages (because they can essentially move all around the globe) are not tied to cost of living.