Slashdot Mirror
Domain: rentacoder.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to rentacoder.com.
Stories · 3
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Computer Science Students Outsource Homework
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "'If U.S. companies can go online to outsource their programming, why can't U.S. computer students outsource their homework--which, after all, often involves writing sample programs?' Wall Street Journal colummnist Lee Gomes asks. 'Scruples aside, no reason at all. Search for "homework" in the data base of Rent A Coder projects, and you get 1,000 hits. (An impressive number, but still a tiny fraction of all computer students, the vast majority of whom are no doubt an honest and hardworking lot.)' Some of the Rent a Coder users appear to be outsourcing their way through school, at low costs--probably less than $100 per assignment. The posting are, of course, anonymous, but Gomes traces one to a student at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where an instructor tells him that Rent a Coder contributed to a problem of plagiarism last semester." -
Finding Coding Work Through Placement Websites?
An anonymous reader asks: "Poking around the net, I found a site called RentACoder. As the name implies, it allows people who need a program/web app written to 'hire' a coder to do the work, for a certain amount of money (minus a 15% commission). I was wondering if anyone on Slashdot has written code for this (or a similar) service, and if it's worth the time and skills. I would've evaluated it sooner, however they ask you to provide a social security number at registration. Is the site worth it, or will it just make me bait for ID theives? Is there a similar service that's less intrusive?" -
Outsourced Confidential Data On Children Posted
Kataire writes "MSNBC exposes a grievous blunder in which an outsourced programmer posts highly confidential data to a public website, concerning the daily whereabouts of hundreds of children in upstate New York. Yes, this person did this not once, or twice, but three times, with two different data sets. Even worse, the data was out there, publicly 'visible' for months. Just because RentACoder finally discovered and yanked it, after a coder 'stuck with a tricky formatting issue' posted the specific database he was working on to their messageboards, doesn't mean the damage is undone. The ramifications reach beyond the painfully obvious privacy issues, touching on outsourcing and peer ethics."