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RentACoder Losing Street Cred?
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Oct 24, 2006 03:14 PM
from the lowest-bidder dept.
from the lowest-bidder dept.
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?
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RAC rates are too low for US coders (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:RAC rates are too low for US coders (Score:5, Informative)
As a rule, it's been my experience that RAC is far better for smaller projects unless you have a support agreement with the coder. But you win some, you lose some. Out of the dozen or so projects listed with RAC during my period of working with them as a buyer, the service was outstanding on about nine of them, and I worked with people I grew comfortable with.
As far as the others, not everyone is a people person, and sometimes projects needed to be re-drafted and re-contracted. Can't really blame someone for my lack of foresight. But you can blame people when they're rude or completely obnoxious for no good reason. And that happened once that I can remember in my dealings with the site.
Being an American coder, I found it to be an extremely competitive market place. There were times when it seemed like everyone in the world was bidding on the projects I was most interested in working on for less than I could consider bidding. Didn't make much money at it, but I liked the way the site was organized, and most of the people that I met.
Just after the service started, my boss at the time found out about it and fired six of us in favor of the "per project gurus" on RAC. Two months later he tried to hire us back, so I imagine that it probably didn't go well. When I went back, I managed the process of working through RAC for him. So it's all relative.
It's a lesson in outsourcing.
It can be great when it works. Or not when it doesn't.
It's up to you.
The key is to work with people who communicate well from the beginning rather than the low ball bidders or incoherent spec writers. Oh, and keeping your project specs, and bid proposals short and simple.
If you're a coder, take the time to read and understand the spec. If it's unclear, ask for clarification before making a commitment to work on the project.
If you're a buyer, it's a good idea to read feedback and make sure that the coder understands exactly what it is that you want him to do. It also helps not to get too friendly with your RAC coders. After all, it is a business relationship, and it's easy to offend or get offended when conversations stray too much from the task at hand.
Just some thoughts.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Same same... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
English as a second language... priceless (Score:2, Funny)
"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.
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Re:English as a second language... priceless (Score:5, Funny)
I don't understand plain English either, if that's what you're calling English.
Parent
Re:English as a second language... priceless (Score:4, Funny)
the rentacoder team took to do class in English grading according their total class spent time!!!!11!
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I get it... But you don't have to use the language perfectly to be comprehensible. There's a big difference between a grammatical/spelling mistake here and there, and completely butchering the language. I think the sentence you quote is better formed than a lot of sentences I hear from native speakers.
Anyway, replace "capable" with "able" and the sentence is perfect. Or, replace "to understand" with "of understanding" and again, perfect. We're talking about nuances of the language here, not terrible
Obligatory... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
What they don't tell you (Score:5, Funny)
The Middleman (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, any middleman company worth its salt would have legal recourse if any service provider of theirs actually went ahead and did this. Every employment contract I've ever seen stipulates that the employee cannot go work for a client without the express written permission of the employer.
Anecdotally, a past employer of mine got sued (and lost) for poaching an employee of one of our consulting firms..
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, any middleman company worth its salt would have legal recourse if any service provider of theirs actually went ahead and did this. Every employment contract I've ever seen stipulates that the employee cannot go work for a client without the express written permission of the employer.
Even your comment proves this point, as both client and employer ar
Re: (Score:2)
Not by much. If RAC puts it in their contract with the coders, they will be able to sue for lost income if a coder does independent work for a client that he met through RAC. And if a client does this, knowing about the contract between RAC and the coders, the client could be liable for intentional interference with contract.
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Except in very rare cases, any clause like that is unenforceable. Regular employees are free to work for whomever they choose, just as their employers are allowed to terminate their employment at will.
Anecdotally, a past employer of mine got sued (and lost) for poaching an employee of one of our consulting firms... nasty stuff, breach of contract is.
That i
Which begs the question (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Which begs the question (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I'm no guru (yet
I lost the bid to an Indian programmer who bid $20 and his bid was a generic "I look forward to hearing from you, and rest assured that the results will meet your requirements and expectations."
Whereas I had just spent the last half-hour talking with the guy about exactly what he wanted, an
Very true... (Score:2, Insightful)
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".
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What's wrong with going outside RAC? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:What's wrong with going outside RAC? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you know that? I think part of the problem with the basic idea is the extreme difficulty of predicting how long a project will take. But even before that, it can be a big problem merely to specify what is to be done. You sound like you were cheated by a coder who was deliberately making specification even more difficult.
You mention pre-existing solutions. That's another thing that makes scheduling software engineering extremely diffic
Re: (Score:2)
RAC has always been a waste of time (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
ifreelance (Score:5, Informative)
So use ifreelance.com [ifreelance.com].
Its free and you and the programmer decide on your own payment method
Up and Down With RAC (Score:3, Informative)
Good designers from GetAFreelancer or Designoutpost.
Good content people from Guru and Elance...
That's it.
Similar sites, and my experiences (Score:2, Informative)
http://elance.com/ [elance.com]
http://www.scriptlance.com/ [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
Google Groups? (Score:3, Interesting)
Has it come to this?
These work? (Score:3, Interesting)
Google Groups?? (Score:5, Funny)
We prefer the term 'The Service Formerly Known as Usenet.'
Eh... (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
Cut Out the Middleman (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
It's a referral service (Score:2)
I use these sites as a referral service. They're great for finding new customers/coders, but once I've established a relationship with the other person, it's foolish to keep on using the sites.
That's also why I don't mind RAC's high fees, since the fees are peanuts compared to what I will gain from my new customers/coders in the long run.
RAC for media? (Score:2)
Re:I make mad money with RAC, and my skillz be 133 (Score:4, Funny)
Glad I could help. That'll be 50% if your revenue please.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
What does that gibberish mean anyway?
"Street cred" is slang, short for "on the street credibility." It basically means how well regarded or how much credibility is placed in someone or something by those who actually work with something. For example, you might speak of the "street cred" of a particular brand of product as how normal people value that product compared to others.
Re: (Score:2)
Which begs the question,
Don't you have to have street cred in the first place to be able to lose it ?
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
That has got to be the most rediculous "requiremet" for an online transaction that I've ever heard.
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like the RAC payment system was coded using some of their top bidders.
The program! She is having bugs!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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