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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?
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.
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
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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.
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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So use ifreelance.com.
Its free and you and the programmer decide on your own payment method
I don't understand plain English either, if that's what you're calling English.
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 $$ back and went to coder directly. Good times.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
the rentacoder team took to do class in English grading according their total class spent time!!!!11!
I live in Uruguay, and here you find some programmers working for 500 dollars a month (luckily not all of them), and the numbers didn't add up for me for doing extra work, although I did make just about 700$ back then.
A week of extra work, plus the administrative issues of managing a small project surely is worth much more than 200 dollars to me.
The cost of living should be at least 10 times less than in the US to make a profit working at RAC rates.
10 hours work 500 bucks 50 bucks an hour thats not much for consulting work. The prices on RAC in general were less that what you can telecommute a contract on dice for.
No sir I dont like it.
We prefer the term 'The Service Formerly Known as Usenet.'
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
I used to be a big RAC seller. It was great for a while, I hit the top 10 (as #10), had a perfect score, and thousands of $$ 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".