Slashdot Mirror
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?
First off, both of those links have basically been overtaken by the same two guys throwing feces at each other.
Also, I did try RAC for work during a time when I was unemployed about 4 years ago. Things might have changed since then, but at the time RAC was basically a site where small shops (a lot of spam sites and such) would post projects and get ridiculously low bids from foreign workers. As someone trying to survive in the US at the time, I could not really see myself working on a 10 hour project for $50 or $100, which is indicative of the sorts of bids that were being offered.
"How can you expect to win an arbitration if the arbitrator is not capable to understand more then 2-3 sentences plain English?"
Heh heh heh.
As a coder living in the US, I looked at RentACoder with some interest back in, oh, 2002. These days there's no way any American coder is going to make beer money - much less a living - when the competition can afford to underbid the way they do.
When you "conservatively" bid $100 on a gig, knowing even that's a low price for all they want done, and within an hour there are 10 other bidders, all of them under $10, some of them even under $5... You just can't compete.
Is after several years of payments you actually own the coder outright. You will have to feed them and find a place for them to sleep in the basement. And when you add everything up, you will find that you overpaid massively.
This sounds like RAC is facing the same problems any other middleman service does eventually. Specifically:
1) People soon start trying to remove the middleman, saving both the client and vendor time and money
2) There are always a few 'bad eggs' in the basket and there's not much you can do about it (and is one reason people start to do #1 above)
I don't think there's anything wrong with RAC establishing relations between coders and buyers, but they shouldn't complain if people stop using them because they've already found a match. I'd much rather find a trustworthy contact for whom I could do freelance development and then stick with them, instead of hunting through offers and making bids.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Did it actually ever have any street cred? For as long as I can remember RAC has been filled with insanely low bids being eaten up by foreign coders. I've gone there several times over the years looking to pick up some extra cash and have never seen a bid I thought was worth my time.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
If you already know the person, and you can trust them, and have worked with them before, you no longer need RAC's services, and you won't get their escrow or mediation help either if something goes wrong. But at that point, the Coder is more like a semi-regular employee for you.
Also, I had a bad experience there. It was partly because I rushed to post the program specs, but also because the Coder was a complete dick. He'd always demand payment despite not making milestones. He'd show he understood the specs with an example, and then two phases in, "forgot" that he had to meet that, and had a solution worked out that precluded it, requiring him to start over. He tried to clarify the specs for one of the phases by putting it in his own words. It looked good, so I just made that the formal contract for that phase. Then, in arbitration, he claimed the requirements were unclear and vague. Yeah -- his own words, vague. He's since been banned since the arbitration.
Btw, what's with U.S. programmers complaining about wages? The task was a simple word-processor that handled stuff similar to html markup. It couldn't have taken a regular programmer more than 10 hours, working from pre-existing solutions (open source stuff was okay) and there were no (trustworthy) bids under $500. And none at any price from America.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
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.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
So use ifreelance.com.
Its free and you and the programmer decide on your own payment method
20 GOTO 10
Glad I could help. That'll be 50% if your revenue please.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
I don't understand plain English either, if that's what you're calling English.
Got good PHP coders from Scriptlance.
Good designers from GetAFreelancer or Designoutpost.
Good content people from Guru and Elance...
That's it.
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.
the rentacoder team took to do class in English grading according their total class spent time!!!!11!
Well, I already knew it wasn't kamen who submitted the story. Your summary was far too readable to be him/her.
http://www.kasamba.com/ (they have more than just a "technical" advice area)
http://elance.com/
http://www.scriptlance.com/
Personally these sites really don't encourage a Buyer/Bidder relationship, and I have had my accounts on elance, and kasamba, banned for initiating direct contact with my clients. Ofcourse talking through the vale of secrecy and the worst e-mail systems ever concocted by a webcoder are always the best means of communications with clients.
As these sites want there Buyers to keep posting more projects so they can continue to leech money from both sides out of either in monthly membership fees, posting fees, and percentage of earnings fees.
I live in Uruguay, and here you find some programmers working for 500 dollars a month (luckily not all of them), and the numbers didn't add up for me for doing extra work, although I did make just about 700$ back then.
A week of extra work, plus the administrative issues of managing a small project surely is worth much more than 200 dollars to me.
The cost of living should be at least 10 times less than in the US to make a profit working at RAC rates.
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.
We prefer the term 'The Service Formerly Known as Usenet.'
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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.
--
make install -not war
You didn't through all the requirements then!
...and by "e-mail" they really meant a telegram.
They told *me* I had to mail the card to them so they could run it through their old school credit card swipe. then they'd mail it back. Also, I had to fly out to meet them so they could verify my identity.
Then, when my flight gets back home, I would receive a fexex package containing my credit card and...since this is an online transaction! they'll send me an email when everythign is all good.
In that way you wouldn't get people going "$500? I can do that for $400" and progressively undercutting each other right out of existence.
This is a big problem, and one that is difficult to address. A lot of inexperienced programmers underestimate the amount of time required to execute a project to an acceptable level of completion. "Text editor? I'll do that for $50".