Experience with RentACoder.com ???
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Don't bother bidding if you value you time at somewhere near $10 an hour or higher. I've seen bids for stuff as low as $5 for something I wouldn't attempt for less than $50. The 3rd-worlders will undercut you every time. To them $5 is a fortune (even after rentacoder takes it 15% cut).
John P.
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Sign Top wrote:
if he ... then I'm going to be posting his arbitration publicly
Just as well you are located in Florida. :-D If you were located in the EU that would be a breach of Article 6b of Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. (Unless of course you've got his permission.)
Upcoming Scottish Developers events: * Glasgow: Tell us what you want to see in 2007 My: Website | Blog | Photos
I'm sure there could be some legal issues in the US as well, given the nature of the site and the information they require to sign up (SSN for US Citizens for tax purposes). The government has gotten very nasty about privacy issues as of late, consumer rights are highly valued and releasing any type of personal information without permission is not taken lightly.
if (!interested){return false;} amclint
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Ed Dixon wrote:
either positive or negative
let's see... the milder response before Christian finds this.... what positive or negative can be said about "lowest bid" work? We're not talking about lowest bid for quality, we're talking lowest bid, period. If you have dent in your car there are two ways to fix it, the slow meticulous and delicate way of trying to pop it out with either suction cups or removing the panel and pushing it in place, or drilling a hole popping a hook in, pulling it out, filling the hole and handing it back to you. The latter one is real cheap, can be done for about $25, and definately "repairs the dent" just adds extra issues. So too rentacoder, cheap quality lacking code offers keeps the costs to the "requestor" down, but so too the quality of the result. Also, similar to our contract here, there is no standard for grading the result, so even if you do quality work, you may get downgraded for any reason. We stopped doing work with one customer on our contract because he didn't believe anyone deserved more than a 75% grade. Now if you do absolutely perfect work, and can at most receive 75%, why bother? So outside of being good for the college student with no experience, and nothing to loose, it is near useless for both customers and experienced programmers.
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
Yeah, that's pretty much my position. A forum that focuses solely on price and gives you no way to know who you're hiring will always result in work going to people who are unable to do it, and therefore are happy to work for next to nothing.
Christian Graus - C++ MVP 'Why don't we jump on a fad that hasn't already been widely discredited ?' - Dilbert
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Jeffry J. Brickley wrote:
We're not talking about lowest bid for quality, we're talking lowest bid, period.
Hey, if it works for our government, it should work for coding too, right? ;P Marc
People are just notoriously impossible. --DavidCrow
There's NO excuse for not commenting your code. -- John Simmons / outlaw programmer
People who say that they will refactor their code later to make it "good" don't understand refactoring, nor the art and craft of programming. -- Josh SmithMarc Clifton wrote:
Hey, if it works for our government
you are making an assumption! ;P;P;P
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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Maybe Chris figured that he can CP run more smoothly by the following snippet:
if (CurrentUserID==UserIdOfChristianGraus && thread.Contains("RentACoder"))
thread,Hide();We should try to start a thread about RantECoder, ad see how fast CG jumps in :cool:
Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Velopers, Develprs, Developers!
We are a big screwed up dysfunctional psychotic happy family - some more screwed up, others more happy, but everybody's psychotic joint venture definition of CP
Linkify!|Fold With Us!peterchen wrote:
RantECoder
:laugh::laugh::laugh:
If you try to write that in English, I might be able to understand more than a fraction of it. - Guffa
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Sign Top wrote:
if he ... then I'm going to be posting his arbitration publicly
Just as well you are located in Florida. :-D If you were located in the EU that would be a breach of Article 6b of Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. (Unless of course you've got his permission.)
Upcoming Scottish Developers events: * Glasgow: Tell us what you want to see in 2007 My: Website | Blog | Photos
Colin, Actually, Colin, privacy violations are regulated in the U.S. by the FCC and are also illegal in Florida. And, yes all site users give us permission to post their arbitration records publicly. It really shouldn't be a problem to anyone who has the facts on their side. On the other hand, it is a real problem for those who know that the facts aren't. Ian
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I really don't mean to compare them, as they are clearly different. However one might have expected that buying and selling blind goods to blind customers would have had a poorer success rate than the buying/selling of professional services. 40% is a big number. Finding ways to drive that down is a very good thing to consider. Ed
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Colin, Actually, Colin, privacy violations are regulated in the U.S. by the FCC and are also illegal in Florida. And, yes all site users give us permission to post their arbitration records publicly. It really shouldn't be a problem to anyone who has the facts on their side. On the other hand, it is a real problem for those who know that the facts aren't. Ian
Sign Top wrote:
privacy violations are regulated in the U.S. by the FCC and are also illegal in Florida
That's good to hear. We seem to get lots of stuff on the news about how the US government wants personal details of passengers arriving into the US before they've even boarded the plane out of an EU airport and how the EU wants to prevent airlines from divulging that information because they see US data protection legislation to be inferior.
Upcoming Scottish Developers events: * Glasgow: Tell us what you want to see in 2007 My: Website | Blog | Photos
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Having done bids in the software industry for some time, I can tell you that 40% is not all the far off base. I agree that for a coder coming in it can seem high, but the reality is that software projects are just like any other project and get canceled or moved down in importance and are forgotten about. The non-action ratio was very useful for me in bidding on big projects that required time to even come up with a bid. I never wasted time if the buyer had a bad ratio, because it was likely not worth my time. As for the US/UK programmers I agree with you that there should be some separation there. In talking with the buyers I worked with on RAC I found two types, the ones that liked working with US types (for time zone, culture preference, etc) and the ones that really didn't care if it was US or Offshore. The ones preferring US always paid hire and were generally more open to paying more if the job went over, but they are very difficult to find out of the bulk of jobs. What would be useful is a metric that told you what % of projects a buyer went overseas for as opposed to US. I don't know if that would be discriminatory or not but it would be useful for US coders ;)
if (!interested){return false;} amclint
Amclint, >>As for the US/UK programmers I agree with you that there should be some separation there. In talking with the buyers I worked with on RAC I found two types, the ones that liked working with US types (for time zone, culture preference, etc) and the ones that really didn't care if it was US or Offshore. The ones preferring US always paid hire and were generally more open to paying more if the job went over, but they are very difficult to find out of the bulk of jobs. You're right. We need to do a better job of just filtering those out for coders in the US/UK so they don't get frustrated weeding through the other ones. I am actually working on a spec on how to do this right now. :) >>What would be useful is a metric that told you what % of projects a buyer went overseas for as opposed to US. I don't know if that would be discriminatory or not but it would be useful for US coders Right now you can see from the site http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/About/ThePulseOfRentACoder.asp[^] that 13% of the 13,000 projects last month were onshored to the U.S.. The UK took another 3%.. The U.S. rotates in the top 3 countries every month (with India and Romania)...so sometimes it is a bit higher...but it is fairly representative. Ian RAC
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Sign Top wrote:
privacy violations are regulated in the U.S. by the FCC and are also illegal in Florida
That's good to hear. We seem to get lots of stuff on the news about how the US government wants personal details of passengers arriving into the US before they've even boarded the plane out of an EU airport and how the EU wants to prevent airlines from divulging that information because they see US data protection legislation to be inferior.
Upcoming Scottish Developers events: * Glasgow: Tell us what you want to see in 2007 My: Website | Blog | Photos
Ah...national security is a different story. We deal with businesses so we don't have too many national security issues. But if there is a terrorism (or potential terrorism) tie-in, the PATRIOT act allows the government very wide discretion (some would say too wide). Regardless of one's opinion there, however, that discretion is limited ONLY to the government. No business or citizen is allowed any such discretion. We still have the FCC and other agencies that monitor privacy...and those are in full effect to "normal" people. Ian RAC
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I can tell you Ian from experience that the opinion of lower quality code from outsourcing out of the US is not a biased one but a valid one in many cases. I am not talking about the cost of the project at all, but the experience and discipline of the coder that is bidding. Having personally cleaned up many websites done by coders in India, Romania, Pakistan, Turkey and Israel I can tell you that standard coding practices are not employed in most situations. The code can be bloated, overly complex and have no documentation (comments in code or external) and worst of all is often not even fully tested. In a few situations a large site was done by several different coders over the course of a few months, by completion there were issues with different coding styles being employed in some modules and not others. This is a large headache for someone picking up the site for fixes or additions down the road, as you have to pick through code very slowly in order to get anything done at all. Compare that to projects done by US coders and I do see some with the same tendencies, but to a far lesser extent. From my experience it is statistically not worth it to outsource work as it costs more in the long run on most projects. Again this is from my experience, which happens to be filled with projects picked up that had already been outsourced and completed (or had been outsourced and the coder went MIA on the project part way through). I realize you have alternate opinions (I would hope so since you make a living off people outsourcing), but for software that is even remotely complex I will never outsource as I find it a waste of time and resources.
if (!interested){return false;} amclint
Amclint, Well I don't doubt that you've cleaned up alot of bad code from coders in those countries. I can tell you my story. I worked as an indpendent consultant in the U.S. for several years (before people knew what "outsourcing" was) and took over for many coders in a number of companies. I found that 99% of the time the system was so brittle it had to be majorly refactored to get what the client wanted. About 75% of the time the database design was poor...about 50% of the time basic things like identity fields for primary keys, and foreign keys were not used at all. About 85% of the use of OO was either not done properly or not used at all. I received adequate documentation on maybe 15% of the projects. I've also interviewed alot of U.S. coders in those positions to work under me. I've found that about 10% were very good, another 15% were acceptable, and the rest did not perform at a level where I would employ them. Personally, I don't think this is a U.S. versus non U.S. problem. There are smart people and there are incompetent people in every country. And in today's world, even in places like India, there are now opportunities for training for the brightest. I think it's a software engineering problem. It's just hard to create software properly because it takes intellgience and disclipine. No matter what country you are from. >>for software that is even remotely complex I will never outsource as I find it a waste of time and resources. That's certainly your choice and your right. I will point this out. If you're working for someone else...you can certainly take that attitude without a problem. If you work for yourself (independent consultant) you are leaving money on the table. The new breed of U.S. coder is clearly emerging who leverages outsourcing, by keeping the work for themselves that they do better, managing cheaper outsourced work, integrating it, giving it to the client and profiting more than they would be "going it alone". Ian
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Leslie Sanford wrote:
I've not shared this experience.
I think part of the reason you haven't shared Marc's experience is that you aren't as visible as he is. I can think of 5 or 6 people I would hire in an instant from here - all based on their visibility in the forums first. I can also think of a bunch who I would never hire, despite some good articles. Again, based on their forum posts. For instance, I recognize your name and vaguely remember a synthesizer article from way back but I don't recall the general nature of your posts and so can't form an opinion of you as a person. I'm sure I come across the same way - people might recognize my name, but I doubt they have enough to form an opinion of me. I think the personal networking aspects of the forums likely contributes more to potential contracts because the forums provide a good understanding of a persons attitude, work-ethic, principles etc. The articles back that up with what the person can do. Cheers, Drew.
Drew Stainton wrote:
I think the personal networking aspects of the forums likely contributes more to potential contracts because the forums provide a good understanding of a persons attitude, work-ethic, principles etc. The articles back that up with what the person can do.
Hey, thanks for your response. I really do appreciate it. I will try to get more involved in the forums. I've been meaning to drop by the C# forum to give a hand answering questions.
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Drew Stainton wrote:
I think the personal networking aspects of the forums likely contributes more to potential contracts because the forums provide a good understanding of a persons attitude, work-ethic, principles etc. The articles back that up with what the person can do.
Hey, thanks for your response. I really do appreciate it. I will try to get more involved in the forums. I've been meaning to drop by the C# forum to give a hand answering questions.
Leslie Sanford wrote:
Hey, thanks for your response. I really do appreciate it.
Your welcome!
Leslie Sanford wrote:
I will try to get more involved in the forums. I've been meaning to drop by the C# forum to give a hand answering questions.
I still keep meaning to do the same thing. Too busy sometimes, but who isn't?! Cheers, Drew.
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Jeffry J. Brickley wrote:
We're not talking about lowest bid for quality, we're talking lowest bid, period.
Hey, if it works for our government, it should work for coding too, right? ;P Marc
People are just notoriously impossible. --DavidCrow
There's NO excuse for not commenting your code. -- John Simmons / outlaw programmer
People who say that they will refactor their code later to make it "good" don't understand refactoring, nor the art and craft of programming. -- Josh SmithYeah, I love the part in the movie Armageddon where they are about to blast off and the guy talks about how complex the ship is all built but the lowest bidder causing you the warm fuzzies ;) While I am posting, I also liked the "Never want to pay taxes again" comment and the "Get off the nuclear weapon" comment :)
Rocky <>< Latest Code Blog Post: Vista for Web Development, Read this first! Latest Tech Blog Post: USA City Burnt To Death...
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Yeah, I love the part in the movie Armageddon where they are about to blast off and the guy talks about how complex the ship is all built but the lowest bidder causing you the warm fuzzies ;) While I am posting, I also liked the "Never want to pay taxes again" comment and the "Get off the nuclear weapon" comment :)
Rocky <>< Latest Code Blog Post: Vista for Web Development, Read this first! Latest Tech Blog Post: USA City Burnt To Death...
Rocky Moore wrote:
Armageddon where they are about to blast off and the guy talks about how complex the ship
Rockhound: You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it?
Rocky Moore wrote:
"Get off the nuclear weapon" comment
:laugh::laugh: Colonel William Sharp: [In response to Rockhound riding the nuclear warhead] Get off... the nuclear... warhead. Rockhound: Just wanted to feel the power between my legs brother. Colonel William Sharp: NOW!
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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Any have experiences with www.rentacoder.com either positive or negative? Ed
I have been on both ends of RentACoder, both purchaser and seller. Most of the programmers on RentACoder are in eastern Europe and India. Make sure you are dealing with an individual not a company. On many of my bids, the responses from companies indicate that they have hardly read the requirements. They will low-ball the price then find ways to raise it after you have committed. Stick with individuals as they don't play that game. Also, don't put out a request for some huge project. You need to slice it up into pieces. You need to be the master architect and carve the job up into pieces that can be done in 5 days or less. If you can't architect it yourself, then don't go there. As to quality, it ranges. If you want something as esoteric as J2ME (Java for cell phones), I have found that anyone who will respond will be really good. If you want an ASPX application, I would be quite leary, unless you are in total control of the architecture. I once worked on a project where the owner of the project knew nothing about programming and jobbed the whole thing out to an Indian company because they were cheap. I had to come in at the end to try to clean up the mess. It was a TicketMaster type application and they were keeping the current order as an ADO table in a session variable!!! Needless to say, the project failed. If you are a North American programmer looking to RentACoder for work, you really only have 2 advantages: you comprehend english very well and you are available during the North American business day. So don't even bother with most of the jobs because you'll only be able make $10-$15 an hour.
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Ed Dixon wrote:
either positive or negative
let's see... the milder response before Christian finds this.... what positive or negative can be said about "lowest bid" work? We're not talking about lowest bid for quality, we're talking lowest bid, period. If you have dent in your car there are two ways to fix it, the slow meticulous and delicate way of trying to pop it out with either suction cups or removing the panel and pushing it in place, or drilling a hole popping a hook in, pulling it out, filling the hole and handing it back to you. The latter one is real cheap, can be done for about $25, and definately "repairs the dent" just adds extra issues. So too rentacoder, cheap quality lacking code offers keeps the costs to the "requestor" down, but so too the quality of the result. Also, similar to our contract here, there is no standard for grading the result, so even if you do quality work, you may get downgraded for any reason. We stopped doing work with one customer on our contract because he didn't believe anyone deserved more than a 75% grade. Now if you do absolutely perfect work, and can at most receive 75%, why bother? So outside of being good for the college student with no experience, and nothing to loose, it is near useless for both customers and experienced programmers.
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
This analogy is quite accurate. When I was in College I did a little bit of work on RentACoder ... it wasn't long before I realized, I was better of working at McDonald's for minimum wage. The only was to make decent $$$ on rentacoder is to live in the cheapest country in the world, or produce subquality work. I quickly left the scene. Later, I had an idea to code a couple things that I didn't have time to (non-work related) ... due to my previous experience, I knew going into it that whatever I get will not be the best (or even what I would produce). Yet I figure it will get me started right ... so I got what I paid for a recoded the project after. Another instance, I had a project I had been working on ... I just needed someone to wrap it up. I wrote a detailed specification on what needed to be completed and how ... so they re-wrote the whole thing in a different language and it worked for the most part ... I had to fix several things ... test it to death and reintegrate some of the functionality I had already produced ... this was a complete waste in the end. I even had to question if this was original code. Long story ... so in the end I think it will not benefit anyone about 98% of the time. There's also a real danger in that you don't know where the code is coming from. You may be getting code that will affect your licensing or land you in court eventually. Rentacoder does have very goes technical writers though ... I have found that farming out documentation has been quite good. Good luck! :cool:
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Any have experiences with www.rentacoder.com either positive or negative? Ed
To Ed: I have 783 projects, completed via RentACoder.com I have many repeated buyers, mostly from USA. To coders: If you are expensive for nothing - you can't compete with me. To buyers: If you employ expensive local staff today - you will be bankrupted patriot tomorrow. -- Sergey I.Grachyov [MCDBA, MCAD.NET] My profile at RentACoder.com[^]
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Any have experiences with www.rentacoder.com either positive or negative? Ed
RAC is one of the largest free sites, I personally started freelancing from RAC. Nice site, but too much competition so as a coder, sometime you have to lower your bid amount to get some work. The bad thing is, no mimimum amount for a project which cause the buyers to post even $5 project out of which $3 is deducted by RAC and you get $2 only. Horrible???? BUT sometime, some serious buyers find you and your life is happy. As a buyer, you need to be very careful while selecting someone to do your job. I have both experiences, Buyer and Coder. as a coder, I got some good clients and started working with them and getting good amount to live and eat. As a Buyer, I posted a project there and NO ONE BIDDED on it. Think what? it was a little complex project (Retrieving SPD information). On the other hand, I posted another project and received good bids. Selected one and he didn't completed project within time. It was an article actually of several thousands words. Even it was not completed, service provider added about 25% garbage in that making it fully waste. It doesn't mean RAC is not good for you as a coder or buyer, it could be, if you are careful while choosing coder (if you are a buyer) and if you are lucky enough (as a coder) :rolleyes: Transaction Fee is another point for RAC. If you are a buyer, you dont have to worry about it, but as a coder, you will have to pay 10%-15% (normally 15%) fee of project worth. So, $1,000 project means, you lose $150 and get only $850. If you really want good thing (both as buyer and coder), I will suggest Elance.com. From last couple of years, I have shifted myself to Elance and not using RAC anymore. Sameers
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RAC is one of the largest free sites, I personally started freelancing from RAC. Nice site, but too much competition so as a coder, sometime you have to lower your bid amount to get some work. The bad thing is, no mimimum amount for a project which cause the buyers to post even $5 project out of which $3 is deducted by RAC and you get $2 only. Horrible???? BUT sometime, some serious buyers find you and your life is happy. As a buyer, you need to be very careful while selecting someone to do your job. I have both experiences, Buyer and Coder. as a coder, I got some good clients and started working with them and getting good amount to live and eat. As a Buyer, I posted a project there and NO ONE BIDDED on it. Think what? it was a little complex project (Retrieving SPD information). On the other hand, I posted another project and received good bids. Selected one and he didn't completed project within time. It was an article actually of several thousands words. Even it was not completed, service provider added about 25% garbage in that making it fully waste. It doesn't mean RAC is not good for you as a coder or buyer, it could be, if you are careful while choosing coder (if you are a buyer) and if you are lucky enough (as a coder) :rolleyes: Transaction Fee is another point for RAC. If you are a buyer, you dont have to worry about it, but as a coder, you will have to pay 10%-15% (normally 15%) fee of project worth. So, $1,000 project means, you lose $150 and get only $850. If you really want good thing (both as buyer and coder), I will suggest Elance.com. From last couple of years, I have shifted myself to Elance and not using RAC anymore. Sameers
Need custom software? Contact DevelopersINN[^] Need to add reminders for your Outlook emails? Try Outlook Personal Assistant[^]
>The bad thing is, no mimimum amount for a project which cause the buyers to post even $5 project out of which $3 is deducted by RAC and you get $2 only. Horrible???? Yes! If you care about $5 projects. > So, $1,000 project means, you lose $150 and get only $850. You lose. But I pay $150 for protection against bad buyer. Did you ever hear about arbitration feature at RentACoder.com ? > If you really want good thing (both as buyer and coder), I will suggest Elance.com. I decline all job-related sites where I should pay monthly subscription fee. In fact - you pay $$$ to get possibility to receive some job. -- Sergey I.Grachyov [MCDBA, MCAD.NET] My profile at RentACoder.com[^]