>> Surely you can demonstrate better value to your employer than the random, anonymous programmers on Elance, guru.com, RentACoder, or oDesk -- right?

Only if my employer can display better judgment than sheer greed.

"Unfortunately, Dan only blogs rarely..." just like Jeff? :-)

third

I used RentACoder for two personal projects of mine. Both were websites that I wanted to build, that I just didn't have time to build myself (new baby, full time job). I must say for this, it worked great, and very affordable, but there were some caveats.

I had to be on top of the coders to handle edge cases and security vulnerabilities. I had to review the code myself and make sure things were done "right". I have the ability to do that; I think your average manager type thinking of these sites as factories that you can hand a spec to and get code back is going to be quite disappointed.

But as basically a coding assistant, they work great. That's my $.02.

Christo: we have to cut Jeff some slack for a while. There's a new baby in the house. :)

Don't forget that on a lot of these sites the services are being offered from all over the world (and a lot of them lower priced that mainland US). There are good developers available who can provide adequate services at a comparatively low price point. Of course, understanding of requirements and deliverables is a risk that must be managed. So for quick & basic code cutting it is a viable alternative, but as always, caveat emptor.

I considered trying to do some work on a similar rent-a-coder site just for some basic experience while I was in college. I never ended up pursuing it however. I suspect a lot of people on these sites would be college students or similar. I also agree that the quality of work would be akin to a college assignment.

I used to use Rent a Coder frequently between roughly 2003-2006. It become more difficult to find a reasonable project to bid on, but my success rate was easily 75% or more.

You may be bidding against people from countries who can do it for a lot less money, but if you sell yourself to the buyer effectively (instead of just replying like some of the "i can do this 4 $50" bids), and the buyer knows what they are doing, appreciates effort and good ethic, you can easily win with a bid 10x the average low bid.

I made a lot of money from it with this technique, but stopped using it after it was easier to find work elsewhere and an incident with a dodgy buyer who completely shafted me with vague specs. The project ended up going into arbitration and because of the vague specs I lost (but not without a lengthy fight) and gave me a rating of 3 which ruined my average from all 10s.

Would I use it again? Hell no. It's tedious to find any decent work, and if you get into arbitration (where it seems RAC automatically favours the buyer), you're in the shit.

> I suspect I spent more time writing the spec and managing the programmers than I would if I had done the work myself

Interesting. If it encourages you to write specs, it might pay off in terms of quality the long run.

Your analysis is pretty much spot-on. On this subject, I have been quite extensively on the buyer side, both as an individual, as counsel to buyers, and for my employers. The recurring observation seems to be that the cost of conveying what is to be done can easily become overbearing: the initial specifications have to be written by someone with a technical background, with enough detail to avoid grey areas while spending less time on it than on actual development.

Then, there's the question of bad programming. A non-technical buyer on any of these sites might get a package that breaks on the next browser update, or displays a vulnerability, or doesn't scale past ten users, or doesn't play nice with unicode. There are so many ways in which a piece of software can fail that simply cannot be imagined by a non-technical person and can manage to say hidden for weeks.

Yet, it works. Several of my employers have used some form of off-shore delegation when in-house technical people had a fairly good idea of what had to be done (but not the specialized knowledge of how to do it with a particular language/framework/server), those in-house people who had that specialized knowledge but were too busy could still pitch in warnings and general remarks, as well as quickly survey the result, and the off-shore developers had the manpower and skills to do what was expected. Of course, this required a fairly detailed specification, but this is what formal test cases are for.

I second (and extend) Daniel's comments above ... I used RAC to jumpstart my freelance business 2005-2007. Simply by being able to communicate in clear English, I found I could draft proposals that the buyers on the site often told me were miles better than the competition, and I could generally get approved on my going rate at the time (which admittedly was somewhat lower than I charge now).

Another trick is to ask lots of questions before bidding on anything ... you'll find out if your prospective buyer is the sort of person who appreciates a thoughtful approach, and will be responsive to any questions/issues that arise during the project. Many buyers won't write back, or offer curt, unhelpful replies, and that's a great sign to skip those projects!

I've now moved on, but the experience I got with RAC allowed me to build a portfolio and in a couple of cases led to direct referrals for new business.

I've worked with sites like this in two contexts:

1) Trying to build large sites or work on large tasks
2) Tiny, function level tasks for things I just didn't have time to do

The former almost always ends up being a disaster. We all know the key to working well on large projects is face-to-face collaboration. And sites like RentACoder just can't cut it.

However, if you can distill the task down to a few sentences, a paragraph at most, I've found that option 2 above works out great. It's just finding the right balance.

> Interesting. If it encourages you to write specs, it might pay off in terms of quality the long run.

The problem is that most of the buyers on these sites a) don't know what they want, and b) don't know how to write a spec (other than "$500 for eBay clone").

This actually just reminded me of what the {programming,web,flash} teacher at my high school does every so often. Since he speaks geek, used to be a programmer, and is _very_ good with people, he acts as a mediator between clients and these sites. He figures out what the client (generally a friend) actually wants, and then gets the job done on there.

So, in short, unless you could do the project yourself, these sites probably won't work well in the common case.

The problem with all of these sites is that they are not built for people that know what they are doing. The fees are high, dispute resolution is unfair, they force you to use some of the worst collaboration tools ever created. Just about any other way of getting work would be better for both buyer and seller. Anyone good enough to have a choice will find long term clients and leave, which doesn't help the average quality much.

I believe this sort of site could be done well, but it would have to be very different to the way these sites are currently run.

Actually I was thinking about outsourcing some components (classes) of a project via one of these websites and planning to give the spec doc with unit tests.

What do you think about such an idea? Do you think this websites would work with if the Unit Tests given with the spec?

"Specification documents are hard enough to write when everyone involved is a coworker sitting in the same room. I can't even imagine the difficulty of agreeing on what it is you're building when the participants are thousands of miles away and have never met."

Believe me, it's hell -- especially if those coworkers don't even know your language. It warms my heart to know that you are not among those who suffer from that inevitable reality.

I've done some work on Odesk for extra money, and had reasonably good experiences there. RAC & Guru are out and out awful, Odesk at least has some redeeming features (guaranteed payment for hourly work the top one). I have a full time job, so finding clients any other way isn't nearly as easy, and it's good "playing around" money - I'm able to charge the same rate as my salary, and at that price, the buyers aren't fooling around.

There's only 1 thing you need to remember in life and it applies to anything.

You GET what you PAY for. Don't expect amazing code you paying the guy next to nothing. I think you can rent a coder but you'll need to pay him well

Yes. Yes. Yes!

As a coder it's an underwhelming experience, so I can't imagine it's much better as a buyer. I did 3 stints on Rent A Coder. Only one of which was grateful for my work and rehired me for more work. One was complacent. And the last wanted the world and still wasn't happy when I delivered. I faced all this aggravation and self-demotivation for a lousy ~$200/pop. McDonald's pays better.

I am an independent software developer that uses Rentacoder and have been for a couple of years. I've been using it as an introduction service and have found all of my long term clients through them (even the guy that turned out to be located down the street).

Things I've learned:

1) some people are willing to pay a reasonable for someone who can construct a complete English sentence or two (the others, you don't want to deal with anyway).
2) specialize (I do Windows Mobile work) in an area where the competition is less. I usually end up competing with 3-4 other bidders, not 30-40. And, I have developed a large library of solution templates that speed development for almost any project that comes up.
3) respond quickly. If I'm not one of the first responders, then the likelihood of a successful bid is minimal
4) never bid in the first response. Always review their documentation and ask clarifying questions -- even if you think you understand everything they want. These guys are, by and large, naive about the development cycle, so you want clients that give thoughtful responses. At this point, I can spot the troublemakers and steer clear.
5) If you find a client that you can work with, take them outside of RAC and work directly after that.

I agree with you on the high level - renting a coder isn't practical in the business world - but it's almost a year that I'm trying to find a solution for my need:
I'm a Computer Engineering student but I don't have time to fully understand the firefox/thunderbird extensions API. But I need a copule extensions that I'd release as open source. I'd pay small amounts for them (30-40 euro each).
On slashdot it was told to go and ask to developers of a similar app first. But which developer should I contact and how can I be sure that he/she has the knowledge on the specific part of the code I need?

rentacoder, imho, fits that niche.

Oh, and don't underestimate the power of CS students submitting their MPs on such websites. I'd bet it's a steady growing market.

Cla

Elance seems to have worked for Kevin Rose and Digg.

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/owen-byrne
Owen Byrne was hired by Digg founder Kevin Rose on Elance to create the PHP code behind the original digg site for a cost of $200. His code was considered bug free enough in December 2004 and the beta site of digg.com was released receiving 578 registered users in the first week.

I have used Rent-a-Coder for three small wordpress plugin and one theme. They worked great as it delivered quickly and cheaply. I think the key is to break down the project into very small pieces, and is workable, and programmer can actually estimate the cost realistically. As regard to client relationship, I found it is easy to build up a relationship, two of my projects are completed by the same programmer. I can in the future, I will keep use the same coder.

The main value add of those sites I argue would be the connection. It connects to programmers in other parts of world that you won't have access to otherwise.

Hello Jeff,

I'm from Romania. A place where you can easily guess that salaries are low. I think the average is about $500 a month (personal estimate only).

In the last couple of years there has been an invasion of small sized companies from "the better world" that do development here because the people are so cheap.

I also happen to live in a rather small city, with few IT companies. The salaries are one third of what's considered normal in the Capital and there is no "real work" done. I'm actually a low-level programmer with experience in UNIX world, Windows world and embedded world. I happen to prefer the UNIX world.

I can't work at local companies because besides the fact that they don't develop real applications, most of the people working there are clueless. I mean less then 30% of the companies use version control. You can't do real development unless you are using a version control system -- even an old, limited system like cvs.

People working there are the kind of people that don't care about warnings, as long as the code compiles. The build logs literally have millions of warnings in them and nobody cares.

Because I can't find any place to work in my town, I tried to find somewhere to work remotely. I mean real work, not Rent-A-Coder and such. Somehow, I wasn't able to accomplish that either because from my experience companies are not looking for expert people that know what they are doing. Companies are looking for cheap code monkeys that don't really need to think and don't really know how to do programming properly. I have yet to find a place where somebody would hire me for my knowledge and expertise.

Next step was to find projects on Rent-A-Coder. I did that until recently and have a few thoughts to share:

1) Most people are looking for poor quality, fast to implement hacks than real software products. That is because people that are interested in quality software don't come to freelance sites like RAC in the first place.

2) The work is severely underpaid. I am talking about 5 to 10 times less than it should be. This should not surprise anyone -- that is why people post projects on those sites in the first place.

3) People don't know what they want. I find this very hard to believe, but it is true. They have vague specs. If they don't really know what they want, why are they posting in the first place? I mean how can the software be of any use to them?

4) Almost all programmers I've interacted there with are clueless and with very limited English skills. Hey, don't get me wrong -- I have nothing against non-English speaking people, but non-English speaking people are incapable of providing documentation.

5) Programmers make poor quality software not only because they are inexperienced, but also because there is no real relationship between the buyer and the seller. In the worst case you can pretend you died and nobody knows anything about you any more. People are not motivated to do high quality work.

6) A lot of buyers are scamers and trick you to do interaction outside of the web site, so that when they get a copy of the product they cancel the product and don't pay you anymore. Last year I did work worth of $7,500 and never been paid. Even if you give them a reduced functionality demo, they cancel the product and hire another programmer for 10% of the price they promised you, to finish the rest of the project. Unfortunately, the documents you sign protect the buyer and not the programmer.

7) People what stupid, or impossible things.

8) People want a certain problem solved in a certain way. If you hired me in the first place, let me do the thinking for you. It is very likely that I know much more than you in that field. In 95% of the cases, the way you want to solve the problem is completely wrong, dangerous and insecure.

Because of this issues I no longer "work" on freelance sites. But hey -- now I don't have a job.

Is Jeff telegraphing what is up next?

He and Joel could easily leverage the platform that Stack Overflow was written on (if designed to be re-used) and come up with a better alternative for these types of freelance sites.

All they have to do is use the voting mechanisms and have independent evaluators evaluate specs and deliverables to come up with ratings. And let programmers evaluate the jobs people post as well so a job can't be put up to bid on unless it is vetted to be rational (i.e. not one of those "write facebook for $500" jobs)

Let the programmers rate other programmers as well as rating of the buyers.

For all those jobs that fall below the line, let people bid on them to write a specification. This must require a minimum deposit by the buyer and the winning bidder is paid hourly for their services.

It seems most of my clients are people whom previously used Rent-e-Coder or Elance and in the end were delivered a piece of crap. The biggest problem is the client who is receiving the code, is not a technology person. They do not know how to test it for scalability and see if the code is well written. And - that is the sad truth!

Aram: I think you should pack your things and move to a developed country ASAP. Even in the middle of the recession, experienced and competent developers are highly sought after and paid well. Since your English is quite good, I think you could easily find a nice and interesting position here in London in the matter of weeks.

I've used template slicing/dicing contractors for xhtml/css coding and have been quite satisfied on all fronts. I know that's not in the same league as real programming work, but for this sector of the industry, the template slicing services are amazing. For dirt cheap, somebody else takes your finished design, builds it with semantic code, tests in all major browsers (including IE 6) and sends the completed files back in a week or less.

If you guys did ever want to try your hand at bidding on one of those sites, or just seeing what's out there, I made what I think is a cool tool for aggregating and exploring the projects on all of those sites: http://www.gigbayes.com

Let me know what you think.

I think the foundation of how these sites work is broken. What we need is development nirvana. A few key aspects would be:
- Building Relationships and Reducing greed
- Educating All
- Putting real business users, and their verified requirements, together with real Development teams.
- Producing Quality code, at a fair cost...

So far this is just a dream. Right?

Can't agree more Jeff.

I've used RAC for 4 projects and have had incredible success. Of course, I do write out my requirements in detail and try to be very clear when responding to questions.

I've often found that if I ask questions of the coders that I will get a better feel for his or her talents. I treat it like I'm hiring somebody to work for me forever, and it has always worked in my favor. In fact, I often get better results than I asked for in a timeframe sooner than I expected.

I dare someone to post the halting problem on one of these sites and see what replies you get.

For me these sites simply are just to cheap. I signed up at one of them when I was in high school to make some extra cash. Ended up getting $30 to proofread a document, which was pretty good, but most of the programming projects came out to less that minimum wage, so I didn't do it.

I'm not really worried about this cannibalizing our market. I think that people know if you want quality you have to pay for it.

I do work for Rent-A-Coder. Like many have said here before me, the tasks posted are often either outrageously unrealistic (clone of eHarmony.com for $200) or extremely poorly documented (I want a website that sells jewelry -- no specs).

Pick and choose and you can do well. I've found a large niche in simply writing articles for websites in English. Apparently, many folks wanting work done for them have a hard time finding people who can actually write English well.

Since content is King of the Internet (you should know this better than most, Jeff), I can find an endless supply of content writing.

I won't bid on $2.00 per 500 word article postings either, but I've done articles for over $15.00 each. I've developed long-term relationships and have been paid $30.00 for a 700 word article from a guy I met on Rent-A-Code.

Many buyers are as desparate for good work.

I don't have the time or energy for huge projects. The one real development project I actually ever did was a C++ project that I only bid on after I was absolutely certain I could do it.

This project was pretty small and didn't take very long. More importantly, I had a lot of fun doing it.

However, I don't think anyone can possibly expect a large project completed correctly with the kind of specifications and project management available on these sites. That's why I won't bid on them. They're doomed from the get-go.

When I was first starting in coding, I did some work with RentACoder and at first, it was okay, as I was doing rinky-dink projects, like VBA programming.
Then I started taking on more and more larger projects and that's when things started going sour. It seemed the bigger the project, the more likely it was to go into arbitration, and normally for items that weren't worthy of arbitration.
I had to put a project into arbitration once because the client was attempting to change the project specs repeatedly, and I finally just realized that my $500 project was going to wind up paying me less than $10/hr because I'd spent about 20 hours just going back and forth about the fact that I wouldn't agree to widen the scope of the project without additional payment. Oddly enough (as stated by a previous poster about RAC's arbitration process), RAC took the buyer's side completely, and because I'd never actually stated a refusal to do the extra work (as opposed to saying we would discuss any changes when a conclusion was reached) they believed that I had implicitly agreed to the add-ons...without agreeing.
As of that point, I stopped working for RentACoder altogether.

A lot of clients have difficulties understanding that "there are coders, and there are coders". It's like they think the job is like painting the house or something where any sucker with two hands and a couple of legs can perform equally well...

Who would you hire if you could choose to paint your ceiling artistically, your nephew for $5 per hour or Michelangelo for $5000 per hour...?

Or would you pay rather pay some "random dude" $5 per hour to do your finances then pay Warren Buffet $10,000 per hour...?

What is "cheapest"...?

I've seen projects where the client has payed $20 per hour and the coder spent three months on it and the project was a NIGHTMARE when delivered and it followed *every* single anti design pattern and bad practice in existence today. Where me (or one of my "friends") easily could deliver a project orders of magnitudes better in all metrics for a fraction of the price in a fraction of the time. But just because "we" charge $100-$200 "per hour" the client goes blind and chooses the "cheap dude"...

How do we cope with THAT?

THAT is worthy a blog post Jeff... ;)

What the heck, I'm hitting StackOverflow with that as a question now in fact ... ;)

Did it; http://stackoverflow.com/questions/314863/how-to-convince-a-client-that-expensive-is-cheaper ;)

.t

Umm, why not? Are they different than a lawyer, plumber, heart surgeon, kitchen tile specialist?

* There's no such thing as a free lunch
* There's no such thing as magic
* Fast cheap and good, pick two
* You get what you pay for

Before you can have a rational interaction with *anyone* about software development, you must understand these timeless principles.

My experience with these guys is that you exchange your job as a coder for a job as project manager/Software tester/Security Analyst. Sometimes the trade-off is worth it. I mean, you *do* offload maybe 20% of the work to someone else, and if that person is any good, and has reasonable rates, it can work.

Is it a panacea or the new aeon of cheapness come in our lifetime?

No.

Coding is about 20% of the work and cost (testing, documentation, design and management eat up the rest), no matter what some pig-ignorant manager thinks or what sales pitch that developer in Lower Slobbovia is pitching.

"I dare someone to post the halting problem on one of these sites and see what replies you get." - Dylan

I dare someone to post fizzbuzz on one of these sites and see what you get.

"but I'd be highly suspicious of any professional developer who can't find a stable, long term relationship with a client eventually."

Rent A Coder is exactly how I found stable, long term clients. I havn't been back in over 5 years now, havn't needed to, but they certainly got the ball rolling for me.

It's a great starting place, for both buyers and sellers.

- You will be competing with people around the world
- Many of the projects are unrealistic
- A lot of projects go bad

How is this different than offline development experience ?

@ejunker
That's because Kevin (and digg PR) are prone to making up shit. A. It wasn't done through elance, and B. They paid me a lot more than $200 (try 70 times more plus equity). The only hint of truth to it is that I did work on elance up to about a year before, and some of it for Kevin.

To be fair, with Bugzilla I design features with people who I've never seen, who live thousands of miles away, several times a week.

However, I agree that it's hard to imagine getting a quality product out of any of those rent-a-coder sites. Development is not like buying some commodity--if a developer costs more, he's probably actually going to produce a better product (though not always, given cost-of-living differences in various nations).

When people tell me that they're going to offshore development to some cheap company, I usually make an impassioned attempt to convince them to do otherwise for quality reasons. It'd be the same for the rent-a-coder things.

-Max

I may be wasting my typing skills here because perhaps I should read the 44 comments before mine, but a quick scan tells me to continue, so here goes.

I used Rentacoder to find someone who could build an interactive site for me. Before I turned to Rentacoder I looked at the portfolios of some people whose sites I liked, but design is one thing and functionality is another, and I was in no position to judge whether the sites that looked good were well coded.

And the functionality I wanted was an amalgam of things I had seen on various sites but not everything on one site, and there were some things I couldn't see on any site I looked at.

So I saw no reason not to invite bids on Rentacoder, and every reason to give it chance, and I spent time asking the bidders follow-up questions to get a feel for their responsiveness, and for how well they had read the spec.

And there is a grading system in Rentacoder that acts as some kind of guide if you take the time to look at what the graders asked the coders to do and looked at how capable the graders themselves appeared to be.

So I chose someone who it seemed knew what he was talking about and responded like he wanted to do the work.

And it took longer than expected, and there were twists and turns along the way, but he remained good humoured, and so did I - and I tested and tested and tested (I never want to be a professional tester of website breakability) and after each change, I tested again. And I set up usability tests and we tweaked some more.

And now we are just about ready to launch, and my heart is in my mouth because I don't know 100% for double certain sure that it won't break under the strain of every combination of everything that people can throw at the site.

But I know that the man who did the job is very capable at fixing problems, and I don't know that I would have been any better off taking a chance on a coder I had found some other way.

That's my perspective.

I use RentaCoder all the time and have had around 80 succesfull projects, however you do need to be very cautious

1, I only use it for graphic design (as I can't do that)
2, be really specific about what you want
3, when I give feedback to the designer I don't do it just in words. I take screen shots and circle the bit I'm talking about to make my requirements really clear
4, I regularly choose 2 coders (i pay both) and I choose the pursue the one I like best.
5, If I find a good designer I keep giving them all my work and I pay them big bonuses, sometimes twice the bidding price. Hey they should get paid for good work

The only time a project went wrong was all my fault as I hadn't been clear in my explenation. I still paid the coder the $600, threw the work away and did it my self (it wasn't design)

I've been poking fun at those ridiculous projects to clone eBay, Amazon, or YouTube for years. What are these people thinking? It cost millions of dollars to develop those sites and they expect to reproduce that for $500?

I heard most buyers on those sites are programming students paying to have their homework done!

I use RAC all the time to make beer money. It's not my full time job: if it was, I would probably be a lot more stressed.

The trick is to be very selective about what you bid on, be very clear about what your bid includes, and don't be afraid to compete on quality, and not just price. I would never bid on the $500 eBay clone, and I would never bid lower than my normal hourly rate. If the bidder doesn't want me, it's his loss.

Also, there's keywords that steer me away from bidding on certain things. Stuff like "This should be easy if you know what you are doing" and any client who asks for "reasonable bids". Most of the "I want a clone of..." requests are not realistic. You can tell a lot from the wording (or lack thereof) of the request whether it's a good client or not.

I've been browsing these sites lately looking for some side work to pick up some extra cash. The amount of work involved to find a quality project (where the customer knows what they want) is nearly impossible. Not worth my time.

I use Rent-A-Coder frequently: Over 40 successful projects so far, as a buyer.

Here are some guidelines:

* Be specific. Your specification should be as unambiguous as possible.

* Post projects that you can check for correctness. If you do not want to spend time testing, then (any!) outsourcing/contracting solution will not be good for you. You will need an ***employee*** (not a contractor) that will be called to fix any bugs that appear down the rod.

* The site is great to accomplish basic, trivial tasks. Coders have libraries ready, so the cost for them is minimal as well. You get get scrappers/crawlers built for less than $100 and basic web+database applications for less than $500.

* Great as coding assistants. If you have a one-time task and the code does not need to be supported in the future, Rent-A-Coder is great.

Now, for full disclosure: I have a graduate degree in Computer Science. I know what is feasible and what is not. I know how much effort a project requires, and I know the running rate in different countries.

I am not a generous buyer but all the coders that worked with me are happy, according to the feedback that they left. I guess they appreciate predictability and the ability to interact with a buyer that knows what he wants.

Looks like the esteemed Mr. Turing is indeed soliciting bids for his famous problem. http://www.getacoder.com/projects/bug_finder_92913.html

Christo, maybe Jeff has to rent a blogger ;)

> How is this different than offline development experience ?

On some level, it's not, which is why I think it's interesting and vital for programmers to *look* at these sites and see what they get right and wrong -- and consider why.

Hello, I am responding to the Website needed, we can definitely assist you, please contact us at 602-404-4444 or visit us online at http://www.directconnectcommunications.com

Seems someone took me up on the offer: http://www.getacoder.com/projects/bug_finder_92913.html

Dylan, you got a reply that... well... let me just paste it:

As the superior German programmer I am I've already solved the problem in my head as per your specification. I'm able to deliver a solution in source code in any language that can print a line of text. If necessary, I can also provide flowcharts and a solution on solid German-made paper.

ROFL you CANNOT be serious.

Dylan's experiment is yielding fascinating and amusing results. My personal favorite at the moment:

"Dear Sir, You have found the right person to do the job. I am a representative of a company that has recently completed a large enterprise commercial project related to the development of a HaltLib.NET library that is meant specifically to solve the problem of interest to you, and I am ready to share my experiences and code. Note that our library works for a wide variety of programming languages, including, but not limited to, HTML, XML, PNG, CSV, SQL, BNF, Regular Expressions and even "Field=Value" .property file formats. I guarantee you maximally efficient and clean code on this project."

On the upside, 3 of 11 bids pointed out that the project was impossible. What I'm unclear on is how many of them realized that this wasn't a serious spec.

re: "I dare someone to post the halting problem on one of these sites and see what replies you get."

I saw (http://www.getacoder.com/projects/bug_finder_92913.html) show up as in an item in Hacker News I immediately knew it had to be a Coding Horror/Stack Overflow fan. LOL!

re: "I dare someone to post the halting problem on one of these sites and see what replies you get."

I saw this item (http://www.getacoder.com/projects/bug_finder_92913.html) on Hacker News and immediately knew it was a Coding Horror/StackOverflow fan. LOL!

Is it just me, or did the biddings disappear?
Please, tell me, you got screenshots!
The one who claimed, he already did it, "Grüß Gott, Gregor" and Turing's lover were Hilarious!

I've had a few hundred projects done on Rentacoder so here is my 2 cents

As a western coder used to tens of bucks an hour you've got to realise that when you come onto the site at first there is nothing to distinguish you from the very worst possible coders from hell.

The feedback system is critical here. New coders may be seem smart and hardworking - they may show you an impressive portfolio, accept your bid and then when the deadline comes you will find that they got a "real" job and can't finish the project leaving you stranded. This is not just tough on buyers - its tough on new coder.

That means that if you are a programmer in Munich or San Francisco who needs a few hundred bucks a day to pay the rent your first few bids are not going to be very lucrative. They are going to be "try-outs" amd you will be competing with millions of guys who can hardly code at all all bidding $8 for a 100 hour project.

Here - from about five or six years of Rentacoder projects is the rule of thumb. But don't panic - there is a way . . .

As the number of successful projects goes up the average amount bidders will pay per hour increases sharply.

The first dozen projects will be give-aways. So check though Rentacoder before you need to make money there and find tiny projects - one liners - from serious looking bidders and bid tiny amounts for them. This builds up a profile - say 10 or 15 10/10s) that shows that you are reliable and can work with a range of people without problems - many coders can't and have to quibble and sweat the tiniest projects so that will distinguish you.

At this stage your average hourly rate that bidders will pay rises from a few cents or a few bucks to burger flipping money (still don't take on any large or complex projects at this money). After you have a few dozen projects all with 10/10 you'll find that you should be bringing in an hourly rate equal to a salaried person with similar skills - but you are in the kitchen working in your underpants.

If you take a look you'll find there are plenty of coders with 100 projects with 10/10 who are charging full western rates - $100 an hour or more. To get this far you need to have great communication skills and not let their clients down by ignoring deadlines as many coders do - you CAN do that can't you?

As a buyer or seller there are two more rules - Avoid anyone who has lost an arbitration - and - if you are a professional only bid on coders who have consistently got 10/10 and if you are a coder don't consider bidding on anyones project who has lower.

With very large number of project this may slip to 9.9/10. These high scorers are the ones who have not failed their clients or for bidder ones who have not messed their coder around. They may be tough negotiators, but they are basically fair.

And I shouldn't have to say it - but spec your work tightly on Renatacoder -

Looking at mgroves comment

"This should be easy if you know what you are doing"

points us to a classic - the type of thing where you want some guy to set up an off the shelf PHP/MySQL package and trigger some function in it with a cron

You'll be surprised how many people who will bid on something like that and then after accepting the bid the first question will be "what is a cron"? If you are unlucky this question is the first that you hear from them, before they have started the work, half an hour before the deadline.

When I was first graduating college and didn't have any real world experience, I went to RentACoder to bid extremely low on some of the projects I thought I could handle.

I ended up doing 3 different projects through RentACoder and while I think I only made around $90 on each of the projects even though I spent up to 20 hours on each, I managed to achieve some real world project experience that allowed me to create a much better resume.

For that reason, I will always have a special place in my heart for RentACoder allowing me to get real world experience when I couldn't find a job due to my lack of experience.

I have used Rent A Coder for a few projects and in general I wasn't happy with the quality of work I received. I would give a warning to stay away from developers from India. I find them arrogant and are hard headed and they argue a lot. I am the buyer and instead of doing whatever I want them to do, they think they know better. I am a developer myself and I give pretty specific requirements and they end up straying from the specs for no good reason and try to convince me I am wrong!!
I prefer developers from Eastern Europe. They are smart and creative.
In my last project, I wanted a VB.NET app to be converted to C# and mentioned I use VS 2008. I accepted a bid from a developer with high rating (over 9) and gave him the code. A day later, he cancels the bid because he doesn't use VS2008. Why did he bid when I mentioned it's for VS 2008 is beyond me. I got pissed off with RAC because I couldn't contact the guy after the cancellation. I just wanted to tell him he could use VS 2005. RAC didn't care to help. Cancellation was done within 24 hours from bid acceptance and I have no recourse.
I was pissed off also with the developer because he cancelled without contacting me first. Yeah an idiot who ran off with the code.

I have to say the quality of coders on RAC is subpar. I am talking about the ones with high ratings as I never work with ones with no or low ratings.

Next time I will be using the other sites. Everyone's mileage will vary.

Do not use these sites. If you need some extra programming work done, go to people you know and ask for some good references. This is always the best option if you can get it. Also, go to your local college and ask some of the professors if they have any talented programming students that would be interested if you need the work done cheap. This way you know the person you are getting and if someone you respect says they are good. I have never been disappointed by using this method.

If I need to farm out some work, it is usually doing a larger project for a client of mine. It is only part of the work. However, you will save your reputation in the long term. It is worth the extra money.

Great post, I've had nothing but bad experiences with rent-a-coder. The flexibility of the code and trying to update the site is always a disaster.

I use Rentacoder and Getafreelancer for some side projects. You're not going to make a living from these sites alone, but they're nice for a little filler. When working on my normal long-term projects it's nice to be able to take a break and work on some smaller projects that you can finish in a few days, to break up the monotony, and make an extra $1000-$2000 per month or so extra.

It is true that you'll be competing against people who will bid $250 to build a MySpace clone, so just don't bid on MySpace clones or similar projects where you get high volumes of bidders. But if you can find a niche that you can get into then you can have an easier time. i.e. one of my niches for these sites is building plugins for Firefox. They're usually not big dollar items, but I can do one in 4 hours or so and make about $250, and the competition is small.

And occasionally you can develop a relationship with these people that will lead to more lucrative projects. One client I worked with from Rentacoder started off with a $250 project to build a skeleton out-of-proc COM server, a week later it was a $5500 project to build IE and Firefox plugins, and later led to several other projects over the last 3 years for about $150,000. Another one I did on Getafreelancer was for a small collision detection modification to the Torque Game Engine for $500, which led to a current contract to build a complete RTS game engine.

Many of the projects on there are pilot projects that are used to find competent coders for more long-term work. These are the ones that really pay off.

The other thing to keep in mind is that many of the best projects on these sites you'll never see unless you're already well established there. People who are willing to spend a decent amount of money can be more selective, so they will often post private projects and then invite only the coders who have high ratings and/or those who have proven work on similar projects to bid.

There are 2 rules that I would most highly recommend when working with these sites:

1) Make sure you spell out exactly what the requirements are before you commit to a bid. Even if you think the requirements they gave are clear, put them out there in your own words and have the buyer agree to them.

2) Always, always, always make the buyer escrow the money for the project before you start working. The only real bad experiences I've had on these sites is completing a project to find out that the buyer has no money or just disappeared, or did the project themselves. Rentacoder requires the escrow for most projects but most other sites make it optional.

Price and contracting are just part of a project cycle. The most important thing is the communication between you and your contractors, local or remote, with or without formal specification. Only a handful of categories of projects are suitable for remote contractors of various kinds.

One thing that hasn't been pointed out anywhere is that many of the lowest-paying buyers expect the coders to be using the latest, most expensive proprietary tools. It doesn't make sense to me, for example, that anyone would think that a programmer that makes $300 per month would be able to afford his own copy of Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, which costs $700, and his own installation of Windows Vista, complete with IIS and SQL Server. And yet, not only do many of these bottom-dollar projects require the most expensive tools, but remote development on a server that already has these things installed is literally unheard of.

Even more surprising is that these expensive projects actually receive bids. Perhaps these programmers are putting second mortgages on their houses to pay for constant hardware and software upgrades.

If anything, I'd expect every one of those $5/hour programmers to be stuck with third-hand, obsolete hardware, too underpowered to even run the latest version of Windows and Word, and I'd expect their software environments to be either 100% open-source, or Windows 98, with open-source programming tools.

Another observation that I've made is that, even though Rent-a-Coder has been around for many years, the majority the buyers posting bid requests today have fewer than 10 previous projects to their names. I've never once seen a buyer with "(6,000 ratings)" next to their username.

Hey all, I really find this string interesting since we are only weeks away from relaunching a popular social network as a Social Sourcing site for programmers to socialize with their potential project buyers. Your comments have truly helped us answer some of the questions we have had regarding making our system work 100% in favor of both parties. If any of you would share a minute with me to answer a couple of questions, it would be extremely appreciated. craig@scommerce.com Please tell me who you were in the comment string so I can ask the specific questions I have written down.

I did the site http://www.literamedpublications.com/ through RentACoder (as a coder) and even though the project got delayed, I was satisfied with the service, and I think my client too.

I wanted to have a real auction website and I posted the project on RAC with a detailed description of what I wanted. I started receiving bids and I have chosen a guy that seemed skilled and had around 10 reviews, some nice other telling very bad things. Nevertheless I continue working with him. He delivered two parts of the project completed which had several bugs, however I sent him some money (around $1500), and asked him to fix the bugs and continue with the remaining parts. After I sent him the funds he never replied me back and I lost my money. RAC never helped. Once again I tried to find a good programmer and I posted again my project, this time on GetACoder.com. I worked with a nice programmer on the project that completed it in less time and for less money than the other crook on RAC. GAC is an excellent platform where you found lots of skilled and professional coders.

Good question.

Only a foolish contracter would expect an entire system to be built this way. However, this is a very good way for a system designer to craft quality software, by delegating the work of somewhat trivial component crafting to others and concentrating on the system code.

Why?

Because it forces the designer to use best practices: Unit tests, written specs, etc. that other industries are already intimately familiar with. Like any other manufacturing task, the blame ultimately falls on the designer if the component supplier lives up to his side of the bargain yet it turns out to be bad.

Believe it or not, this is the future of software development.

From my perspective, RAC is a really nice site - I get to get paid for writing or fixing simple (for me) software every now and then, and the net effort is spending less time doing nothing - the joys of being in a university and not having to support your own ass. Simply by stopping to think before each bid, using correct English and not bidding on anything unreasonable, I've managed to complete 30 projects there at this point, and I only lost a bid 3 times, despite not being the cheapest bidder.

It seems that RAC and similar sites are badly in need of talented developers, though - I managed to secure a contract for a hardware I've had no experience with and was sent (later given) to me by the buyer *just* by doing my research before bidding, and sending him a detailed message about my findings. I only had two completed jobs at the time, and the hardware allowed me to secure a small niche market which really pays up every now and then. Most of my clients came back for more code later on, too.

I would definitely recommend RAC for small-to-medium projects *if* you're able to select a competent coder, or are a competent coder without a job.

I have used Rent a Coder on more than 300 projects. There has been some pain, but over time you find a good set of developers, graphic designers, and testers. It's up to me to set the standards that must be followed, and to manage the project. But if I do my job correctly, then I get great results.

I've worked in the IT industry for 20 years, and some of the coders on Rent a Coder are every bit as good as anyone I've worked with at any firm.

If you are a firm charging $10,000 for a basic website, then Rent a Coder should worry you - and you should probably bash them any chance you get - because they are taking your business and making you look bad.

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

Inc article on finding freelance programmers using oDesk, Guru, RentACoder, and Elance:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090501/technology-finding-freelance-programmers.html

I think sites like RAC and so forth are great places for people in the software development profession to gain an education about their own skills and where they stand in relation to people from all over the world. If you are a US developer you may think you deserve to be paid mega-bucks for your skills, until you realize that people from other countries can do the same job at a better quality for a much lower bid. Then you might go on to realize why US software companies are hiring from abroad and might stop whining about foreigners taking your jobs. Bottomline: it's a global economy and you need to stay competitive in order to make a living; stop blaming your woes on cheap foreign labor and instead focus on becoming better at your job.

I am seeing more questionable jobs on these sites. Posting HW is bad enough but someone is looking for an entire IEEE article to submit for publication for $100-300, I'm hoping its a joke.

http://www.getacoder.com/projects/reasearch_paper_ieee_106384.html

Description
I am looking for a reasearch paper that can be submitted to IEEE or other journals.The content should be original.

Required Skills: C++ / C, Network Design, Networking, Wireless

Additional information:
Submitted on 05/31/2009 at 4:21 EDT
The paper sgould be in IEEE format.

Starve, Starve, Starve, Starve, Die! This is like that movie the postman where all the men are forced to kill each other to survive. Yay. Three cheers for free death.

Well said Ben, the economy and the world in general are becoming more globalised as time goes by, whether you like it or not. You can either rolls with the punches or fall behind.

Agrees with Ben as well. In fact, I often tell a few disgruntled workers who um... have a habit of exaggerating employment stories that working on a website like Rentacoder doesn't give them the opportunity to blame their inabilities on others or other 'things' like racism, sexism, local-ism, and my favorite, what-ever-ism. The only thing that stands between the site's coders is skill.

rent a coder can be a nightmare. If the coder fails, you go through an arbitration process where, even if the coder agrees thay have filed, you go to a page where you release money to them.

You put money in escrow, and it's supposed to be returned to you, but it looks like that never happens.

Rent-a-coder keeps the money, and they do it by forcing you to follow a set of links that just don't make sense, and that never let you click on anything that actually ends the project, and ends up returning your money.

BEWARE rent a coder. They are honest, but their system is so complicated that you lose your money when the project fails. They have comments that say that someone had their money returned, but there is no way you can follow their instructions to allow this to happen.

Khalid, I am sure you make a good deal of money on RAC; either as a coder or as an employer, but it does not change the fact that the system is unfair to the coders.

After a couple successful jobs on RAC, I took a job from a buyer that changed her mind about what she wanted. She asked me to wait until she decided which CMS platform to use. So, I waited. Meanwhile, RAC's system sent me an email every three days saying that my project was past due. Not to worry, I had an agreement with the buyer, all documented on the PMB.

Eventually, RAC staff jumped in and took it to arbitration. They canceled the project and took my escrow money.

Basically, RAC stole my money. You can backpedal and rationalize for them if you want, but I have plenty of success on other boards. To be honest, the better coders don't use the boards very much because their buyers know good coders when they find them. They typically hire the coder outside the project boards for follow up projects. The best coders only use the boards a few times a year or less to find new projects once their clients finish up their work. I am still serving my original RAC client of two years ago, but RAC is not getting a piece of the pie, ROFL!