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Which Freelance Developer Sites Are Worth Your Time?
Nerval's Lobster writes: Many websites allow you to look for freelance programming jobs or Web development work. (Hongkiat.com, for example, offers links to several dozen.) The problem for developers in the European Union and the United States is that competition from rivals in developing countries is crushing fees for everybody, as the latter can often undercut on price. (This isn't a situation unique to software development; look at how globalization has compelled manufacturing jobs to move offshore, for example.) With all that in mind, developer David Bolton surveyed some freelance developer marketplaces, especially the ones that catered to Western developers, who typically need to operate at price-points higher than that of their counterparts in many developing nations. His conclusion? "It's my impression that the bottom has already been reached, in terms of contractor pricing; to compete these days, it's not just a question of price, but also quality and speed." Do you agree?
All of these "marketplaces" typically suffer from what I call "Chinese restaurant syndrome".
Every month or so, a new Chinese restaurant opens in this little office park my area. The undercut prices by as much as 20% the existing Chinese restaurant in the same office park, and attempt to lure in customers with a lower price. Which they do successfully. The restaurant that was already in that little office park goes under, not having any float to carry themselves over, since they spent all of it establishing themselves the same way.
Then you end up with one Chinese restaurant in the office park.
Then, having established customers, and eliminated their competition, they raise their prices. Which is OK, they are the only game in town, and their prices were absurdly (read: loss-leader) low in the first place. They surprisingly believe that in establishing a customer base, they have also bought those customers future loyalty - which they have not.
Then a new Chinese restaurant opens, and the cycle repeats: a long daisy-chain of new Chinese restaurants. I imagine them stretching, down through time, until Deckard from Blade Runner eats at one of them.
The point is, that the "consultants" on these sites are all new Chinese restaurants. There is always someone who will take a loss on a project in order to "establish themselves", and then try to raise their bid price, based on whatever passes for a "reputation scoring system" on the site in question.
Consumers of the site, however, look at everyone who bids on their job as fungible, and unless someone with a terrible "reputation score" is stupid enough to believe they will ever be hired by anyone, ever again, the lowest bidder always wins the bid.
A long chain of Chinese restaurants, stretching down through time...
And the only kind of jobs that are on that site are going to be jobs where the outcome is "nice to have, but not required", meaning they'll be happily surprised if the bidder produces something usable, but they really don't care if they totally screw up, since it's a slot machine pull anyway, and they only invested a nickel in the slots to begin with.
It's basically a sucker bet for the bidder, and a sucker bet for the person bidding, with the only winner being "The House" - the site hosting the arrangement.