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RentACoder Losing Street Cred?
Itninja writes, "Having used RAC several times in the past (as a buyer), I was shocked by a recent experience. I did a bit of looking around to see if I was the only one having problems with Rent-A-Coder. Apparently, I'm not." From the article: "This unfairness of RAC fees motivates the majority of coders to negotiate payment outside the scope of RAC which amounts to you and coder getting a better deal. For example, I have several coders that I fully trust willing to work on projects on a monthly basis because it is easier for him to deal with established clients than to have to bid for projects all the time. It saves me time and trouble because I can work with a person that I trust and he knows what is expected." A comment to this posting links a discussion of RAC at Google Groups, and there the service has its defenders. What has your experience of RAC been, either as a buyer or as a coder?
I've done contract programming work for people directly before, and that always worked out fairly well. I tried using RAC a few times to find both small and large pieces of contract work, and always had a bad experience - either I'd deliver a working product and the buyer would run off with it without paying (and RAC would ignore my requests for them to actually do their job as an escrow service) or the buyer would continually redefine the requirements so that I could never actually 'complete' the work and 'earn' the payment.
Of course, half the listings on there are so ridiculously underpriced ($25 for a week of work? No thanks!) or utterly brainless (Please write a custom clone of Winamp from scratch for $500) that it's not even worth bothering.
You could literally make better money by releasing an open source app and putting google ads on the website. Seriously.
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Okay, then I will use a CC I guess. They took the $500, and then sent me an email informing me that I needed to go through some additional 'verification' that went a little something like this:
To do this, please scan the front and back of your card and email it to me at Verify@rentacoder.com. (If you do not have a scanner, you can either take a digital photo of the card or fax a copy of it to the fax number below.) For your protection, I suggest that you block out the middle eight digits (AMEX middle seven digits) on both the front and back of the card before you send me the copy.
The hell?! This is for only $500! Then I had to ask three time to have the whole thing cancelled. I got my $$ back and went to coder directly. Good times.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Discussion on Google Groups? It looks like it was on USENET to me. alt.computer.consultants to be specific.
Has it come to this?
May the Maths Be with you!
I tried out scriptlance as both a renter and coder. As a coder I always got underbid until someone was willing to do a 20 hour plus project for $10 (with $5 of it going to scriptlance). Then I figured if it's so cheap, I may as well get help with my own projects instead of trying to make extra cash with it. As a renter, I got a bunch of bids from people who clearly didn't read my proposal or have any idea what I was asking for and what it involved.
It would be nice to have a silent auction kind of system. You could submit your bid, along with a resume, and they could pick from the person who they think is going to give them the best value for their dollar. They may not always go with the cheapest person, since they may not do the best job.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
10 hours work 500 bucks 50 bucks an hour thats not much for consulting work. The prices on RAC in general were less that what you can telecommute a contract on dice for.
No sir I dont like it.
I used to be a big RAC seller. It was great for a while, I hit the top 10 (as #10), had a perfect score, and thousands of $$ earned. As a US-based worker, English was my best tool available. A lot of US-based shops were very xenophobic, and perhaps rightfully so. I made more money off of failed outsourced projects than anything. I rarely saw any good work out of the foreign shops (usually India, although there were some eastern European ones, too). When it did work, it only did what the original project had asked for, and in the shortest, messiest route. Expanding one of their projects was almost impossible -- no scalability or future design in mind.
Rent-a-coder lost it for me when I bid on three projects over the course of three months. Two of them alone would be been fine, however, Rent-a-coder permitted the buyers to accept months-old bids. I was away at the time and missed my 24-hours to decline the project. I ended up with 3 concurrent projects with altered scopes (much larger than the original bid had been for), but Rent-a-coder leans toward the buyers, not the sellers, in disputes.
Despite my attempts, my account's cred was lost within a week due to the stupidity of the RAC system. This was about two years ago, so it may have changed.
On the up side, I did find a few very nice clients through RAC projects. Dazzle the right guy and you won't need to go through RAC anymore. I got a 2-year consulting contract out of a $500 project, made a few good friends, got a few free trips from helping an unnamed travel website, etc.
So, if you're going to do it, beware that you can find yourself royally screwed. If you're a native English speaker, that is your best asset -- advertise it, use it! Do not paste a form letter. Most buyers would rather see a short 1 paragraph response saying "Yeah, I can do that!" rather than a 6 paragraph form letter explaining what should be in your resume section, not your bid forms.
Another thing to be wary of is if you are a college student. Helping another college student on their homework through RAC is likely a violation of your school regulations, e.g., cheating. $50 is not worth possible punishment for both you and the person you're "helping".
How is this scenario different from any coding "headshop" agency, including giant consultancies like IBM?
Except that IBM typically sells consultant hours fulltime (or more), across projects for years, so IBM can tell whether you're circumventing them to go work for the customer? And that IBM's customers typically rent different coders from IBM across projects for months or years, so they don't want to screw IBM and lose their supplier? And generally, which consumers of significant consulting resources want to piss off IBM, and its army of lawyers?
The coders I know who are placed by IBM get paid about half of the $1-200K per year their project pays IBM. So I don't think this has anything to do with how RAC is especially "unfair", except maybe they charge their customers too little, then have too little left to pay their coders. And RAC is a lot easier to scam^Wcircumvent than is IBM.
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make install -not war
I use (as both a programmer and buyer) most of the major freelance sites. Scriptlance (scriptlance.com) is another major one.
.. but I had very little choice if I want to see my kid grow up.
The market is so flooded I moved to Asia with a can't-beat-em-join-em mentality and its worked out rather well for me, I can offer the assurance of having non disclosure agreements actually binding and enforce-able and folks like cheap Americans.
There is *no way* I could feed myself / family freelancing while living in the US. Absolutely no way. The whole idea behind going Freelance was so I could be at home with my 1 year old and not miss her growing up being an IT slave droid.
While I'm not recommending all US coders get up and move to Manila, I am cautioning you that freelancing should be considered a second, not primary source of income if you have dependents to worry about and live in the US.
I miss the States, terribly