I find this blog to be completly one sided. I agree that some of your points have minor validity in this subjet. For the most part however I find that you have a misunderstanding of how places like Rent-a-coder work. I would sugjest you take a closer look at how the actual site functions next time rather than ‘things’ you hear from other people. I have made many a transactions, not once to be ‘ripped off’. Thank you for your time.
Code auctions can work, but follow these rules:
- if you live in a rich country, be a buyer, not a bidder;
- subcontract parts of your projects, tell your customer, and tell them you can charge less because of this: they’ll appreciate you for it;
- subcontract technical parts only: a Russian will understand HTTP or XML, but not Dutch law;
- expect to spend a lot of time on specs and communication;
- use a few iterations to polish out parts where your specs were unclear or misinterpreted;
- test a lot and inspect the source code;
- never go for the lower bids: they’re always crap;
- build a longer relationship with coders you have good experience with, give them bonuses and follow-up projects.
gg8h9uh9h9
I ask everyone a question…
I have immense love for programming.
I am a beginner in programming.
Can I make a good career as a freelancer?
Is this job safe in market?
Do we get enough projects to work upon?
Is it related to setting up a software company?
I ask everyone a question…
I have immense love for programming.
I am a beginner in programming.
Can I make a good career as a freelancer?
Is this job safe in market?
Do we get enough projects to work upon?
Is it related to setting up a software company?
Please do reply with your valuable suggestion at vishalguleria155@gmail.com
Here are my two cents, I have used US based as much as foreigners and found that the foreigners to be just as educated as the US counter part but the US programmer is wanting Bill Gates money for basic programming skills. I just had a US programmer performs some work on my server, clearly outlining what I was wanting… think at $85 this person can read and handle the responsibility list. What did I get, not what I asked for and now they are wanting more money to correct their problem! Almost everytime I have tried to support my country, I find greed and laziness to be a problem.
To Vishal,
If you think depending on these sites (Elance, Guru, RentACoder, oDesk etc.) to earn money or to make living out of it think again. You should rather think it as a additional source of income.
I cannot say enough bad things about Rentacoder.com. They basically stole money from me after I worked 60 hours at $1/hr to complete a project to spec. I have had success both as a buyer and provider on Guru, Scriptlance and eLance but I would warn anyone not to use Rentacoder (RAC). The others seem to be a good place to earn a relationship with someone that might eventually pay more. However, trying to earn a living solely on these sights is very difficult as you’ve got to compete with the buck an hour Indians that most often will not give buyers what they want.
Aram,
Can you pop your email on a post so i can get in touch with you about some website creation work?
Charles
I cannot say enough bad things about Rentacoder.com. They basically stole money from me after I worked 60 hours at $1/hr to complete a project to spec. I have had success both as a buyer and provider on Guru, Scriptlance and eLance but I would warn anyone not to use Rentacoder (RAC). The others seem to be a good place to earn a relationship with someone that might eventually pay more. However, trying to earn a living solely on these sights is very difficult as you’ve got to compete with the buck an hour Indians that most often will not give buyers what they want.
Mark on January 26, 2009 11:13 AM
I do ot think Working on Rac is not Safe as i myself worked on all of the other websites and all of tehm are jsut nothing in front of Rac. As Rac provides security to both Buyers and Coders and other did not. What i think you lost your time and money is just because of your negligence and due to not full devotion and efforts towords your project. You were just thinking as you are doing another sites such as scriptlance where you can delay buyerws and clients many many days and there is nothing who can caught you. But this was not Happen on Rac as there is Arbitration here to help both buyers and Coders and if you are on fault then you should loss.
rentacoder Rent A Coder is the seller killer Freelancer . Be aware of this freelancer . But rent a coder is only Favorable for buyer.
Rent a coder Seller please do not work by this freelancer
There are lots of example ….
Rentacoder have to stop by seller
Actually if you are a coder you don’t have to worry about Rentacoder arbitrations.
I had an arbitration with someone called Ashley O’Dell and the code had an error which meant that it did not work at all. The coder simply said that they refused to take part in the arbitration or in any testing and started making threats of hacking my sites and physical violence to me if a carried on the arbitration.
Rentacoder threatened me for complaining to the arbitrator and found the coders behaviour OK. They did not bother to test the deliverables despite my request (I didn’t press it as the threats were still coming during the arbitration) and they let the coder have his money back. Rentacoder didn’t have the common courtesy to comment or help - Ian Ippolito was probably too afraid of the coder to bother to care about carrying out his own process.
So now you know what works on Rentacoder if you can’t be bothered to test your software.
Oh and I’m not some disgruntled script kiddie - I have over 70 projects with 10/10 on Rentacoder.
Slight correction there - the coder did not get his money in the end - but he avoided any blemish on his Rentacoder record or score by refusing to take part in the testing process and making threats about hacking and violence. He is still coding for people (and no doubt telling them what he will do to them if they point out politely that the deliverables don’t work)
Does anyone have a rundown on which sites support rss? It seems to me that getting an rss feed is critical as it is a means to allow for analysis of projects. One can add programmatic (or at least better searching/sorting) extensions to weed out the garbage.
There is so much garbage, this seems like a must.
Lookup ATuring rentacoder on your favorite search engine. It seems that Dr. Turing has paid a visit lol.
It seems that the buyer ATuring posted the Turing Halting Problem on RentACoder. 10 bids have been made! I guess their senses abandoned them when they saw the $1300 lol!
This was very helpful. As a buyer, I recently handled a project on scriptlance.com for a friend of mine and one for myself. Within a couple of days it became clear that the site in particular (only one I have experience with) does not work well. We had bidders with nothing but glowing reviews who didn’t come through on our projects when I’d given clear job specs. One job was to fix two bugs in a script my friend already had. We listed the project 3 times (paying and loosing the commission each time). Not one of the programmers fixed the problem. It seemed to be an issue with them bidding certain time frames while being unable to deliver results during those time frames. When we gave extension, we just got more excuses. To get a perspective, those two bugs I ended up fixing myself by spending hours trying to interpret what could be causing the problem (I don’t know PHP or MySQL). But I was able to fix both issues in less than a day. The other project was building an auction script and the programmers were bidding with unrealistic time frames or just couldn’t do what they said they could do.
My point is, I agree with you about these sites. I wish I could have found a way to be in contact with people who do programming for a living. I felt like I didn’t have a choice but to use one of these sites. I think its full of programmers who can make a little money by getting people to pay them a little to start a project they never intend to finish or discover later, they can not. And as you all have stated, buyers who are being just as deceptive.
Where does one find a reputable programmer?
Cheers
re: Tressa Sanders
maybe try and pay more, then good coders will come.
Folks make a lot of good points about the challenges
in working with these type of sites. I’ve worked
with these things for years and it’s been a mixed bag.
With a lot of care a good chunk of
these projects work out to be a great deal
all the way round.
A portion tend to be a little more stressing but
with patience can be made to come out well
Then once in a great while come the nightmares
that at times make one want to take up mopping floors
or something. (better pay and/or less stress)
I feel that with some refinement that the concept of
outsourcing sites could have a lot more value
to both the buyer and the seller.
I figure that others have probably had similar
or at least alternative thoughts on improving the
concept and expect to see a next generation of offerings
at one point or another.
Maybe something more akin to a consultants co-op
where code and talent can work together from a perspective
that is able to transcend the feast and famine of project
based work done at Walmart prices. Something where the 10-15%
commissions provide a little mor ebang than a poorly written
dating site.
–Doc
I think there are 2 sides to a coin. My firm Aurus IT Solutions has just begun working on Elance for roughly 6 months now although we have been a firm established over 5 years ago. In this period of recession, our CEO found it easier to find work on such tender sites than using offline mechanisms.
Employers some times find a great match if they find the right provider. For example, we have only 3 clients who consistently give us work and have showered us with wonderful comments like “A dream team”, “Why did I not find you earlier?”. Again, I believe there even on these freelance sites, one can find professional firms doing greate business. Ofcourse employers need to know what amount they should be looking at for projects (500$ for an Ebay clone, course it wont work out).
- Tejas