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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?
But the problem isn't the 3rd world developers, its the unrealistic buyers. They aren't companies that understand tech, they're mostly individuals who don't understand that programming is work and want the sun, moon, and stars for a hundred bucks. Worse they don't know what they want or need, they just know they want/need something. You have to be designer, project manager, and developer in one, for a 3rd world salary. I don't think very many of the projects there are successful, and those that are tend to be the very simplest ones. If you have access to any job in the US, its just not worth doing. You'll make more per hour job hopping or putting the extra time into your real job in hopes of a raise/bonus.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Letting all the people with all the knowledge go is indeed not so smart. You better have a development team with both employees and freelancers. So knowledge about the software keeps inside the company. Working with employees only has the danger of getting tunnel vision: "This is what we always did and it works for us". Working with (experienced) freelancers has the benefit of bringing in new knowledge and new insights.
Of course you also need to have some code standards, but there's no difference between employees and freelancers in this respect.
Me
Serious freelancers who try to make a decent living out of it don't use those sites, for several reasons, some of which I'll go through.
1: Overall(note the word, overall), they cater to simple projects in oversaturated fields.
2: They get flooded by unscrupulous or simply cheap people who offer pay way below what is decent.
3: You get no way of building up a decent reputation.
4: As a combination of the above factors, you have to churn through lots of contracts constantly, increasing risk of burnout, failed contracts etc.
On the other hand, to make a decent living, both in pay and in the way of hours you work, you want to work in specialist niches, one contract at a time, maybe two overlapping at a pinch, if they don't interfere with each other(Starting the design phase of a new project as you're working on the testing/debugging/deployment phase of your previous one works ok usually, while starting a new project while in the development/coding phase of the previous one is usually not so good...)
You want to establish a good reputation and a wide contact network. And always make sure that you have a lawyer of your own go through the contracts, and the help of a good accountant. In fact, the more familiarity you get with your clients, the better, since you will get more leeway in case of sickness/family issues/issues beyond your control etc.
Avoiding the use of those websites, and working via agents instead, also gives you better options for negotiation(especially if you have the advise of a lawyer and/or an accountant, depending on the issues you need advise on), and can better structure your life. It also allows you to check out potential clients much more easily. Some of your contacts, or your contacts contacts, may know about some issues that have not made it into public records for example. Point in case, a contract was offered to my agent once, which he immediately blacklisted. Why? Because he checked up on some of the people running the company, and found major financial discrepancies, such as the company nominally running at a loss, CEO supposedly earning only 20k euro per year from that post and a total yearly income of 40k euro per year yet still owning a yacht worth about 2M euro etc.
I have freelanced for about 15 years now, and while I initially had to take risks with many contracts, I can now be far more careful, and choose the contract offers that will benefit me not just financially, but also what best suits my health and family.
Now, by no means do I earn any extreme amounts. Last fiscal year, I earned about 50k euro after taxes, which may not seem like much, but in terms of swedish living costs, that's well above average. However, as a freelancer, I do have to set money aside for courses, seminars etc.
(OK, I'll take that question from the clueless nerd in the peanut gallery)
Why do I set aside money for courses, seminars etc, when I could just use google and study on my own?
Well, as I pointed out above, contacts and reputation are everything if you want to be successful, and don't want to be screwed over. To the intelligent AND wise people, it also means exchange of experiences, those things you can't teach via text tutorials etc. It means getting in touch with new people who can forward things your way, as you forward things to them. In terms of reputation, one of the way it helps is that participating in courses etc lets you be seen as still keeping in touch, still able to learn, that you are not stagnating and too heavily wedged inside a niche.
Indeed, one of the benefits us freelancers can bring to a project is the lack of internal politics and development baggage, as well as experience from other projects, which can counteract the drawbacks of not being as in-the-loop as the long-term employees.
Also, if you're a specialist, keep in mind that that's the reason you're brought in, in case the long-term employees get arrogant and dismissive: You're a specialist on something they need, and they don't have the knowledge or experience on that in-house.
Further more, out of experience, especially for bigger projects, taking in freelancers is a very bad idea : - You lose the knowledge about the project : - in case of evolution you need to find the same freelancer hoping he/she will be able and have the time to do the job
Only if the hiring party is being cheap and/or is relying on "wishful thinking" documentation (what if one of your in-house devs with a lot of knowledge gets hit by a bus?). A well-run project will have documentation requirements that the freelancer has to implement.
- If there's a problem, - your own developpers will be pulling out their hair because it's not compliant to their way of working (or worse unreadable spaghetti code)
Why would you pay a freelancer to develop code that isn't compliant to in-house standards?
- no garantees, you've already validated and payed the freelancer, yer on yer own.
need to go on?
And again - why would you hire a freelancer under a contract with no warranty if you feel that is important to your business (because you don't trust your initial validation and acceptance)?
I actually work as a software contractor. My contracts have all kinds of stipulations for the situations mentioned - including an arbitrage and jurisdiction clause. Having a good contract is great for both sides. Don't skimp on it. Clients can be a little intimidated at first (it's not a short document even in draft form) but when they read it they realise that everything that's in there is in there for a reason, and it's really not just to cover my own arse.
My experience is that freelancers - at least those with a good few projects under their belt - tend to have higher coding standards in the first place, and are more adaptable to different coding standards than permanent staff. Good freelancers are used to, and skilled at, learning and adapting to new stuff.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
If sites like those are your primary sales vector, you're better off at a counter at McD's. Seriously.
As a freelancer, a website (your own!) is mostly or even - most of the time - *only* an amplifier for contacts established in person. You want to do projects for people who couldn't be bothered to look into the internet. You talk to them, give them your card and when they check you out on the web they find this awesome site that underlines and emphasises every positive impression you made. Then they grab the phone and call you. That's what you want. Anything else is non-sense.
Project websites are scooping territory for shady headhunters at best and at worst and most of the time the software developments equivalent of a used-car-sales lot or a flea market.
Exception (sort of) / When registering with a project site might be feasible:
There is one thing were some of the more respectable sites - often those that cost a monthly fee to joing - are a good sales vector: When you are a specialist who's exotic or rare field can easyly be searched for. For instance, if you're particularly good as a Java Developer for some specific environment like JBoss or an SAP ABAP developer or some ultra-certified Oracle person, then the more professional project sites might get you the one or other Gig and the one or other stream of projects going. But even then, these are only a side-orchestra.
Never rely on such sites as your main soucre of income. Stretch out your feelers and get in contact with folks in the real world, that's where the money is anyway. As a specialist freelancer - and in IT you always are a specialist - networking, paperwork and relations is at least 50% of the work.
Good luck from a fellow (former/semi) freelancer.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
I would agree.
I glanced at these requests. I have 30+ years of developing experience, and a lot of these requests are red flags request where you are expected to read the guys mind, to give them something that is often simple to explain, however requiring a lot of completed development process.
I need a program that takes some input (from the User, from the network, or from a file) do some processing, then provide an output. Sounds easy, you can do that under $1000 right?
In general for this type of work, we need to stop the idea of Fixed Price development, and go to hourly. For the US you need to expect to pay between $50-$250 an hour for this type of work. The easier the job the higher the hourly rate. The requester is out to make money with this product, so is the freelancer.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Funny thing is, even as a very experienced developer, I often fall prey to my own version of that: "All I Wanted To Do Was..." Things that seem simple on the face of it almost always turn out to be some of the biggest time sinks. Combine that with a general ignorance of how much time programming takes to begin with, and the situation turns toxic quickly.