Gadgetopia

I have done it once successfully. I had to bid on a ton of jobs, and I was always being underbid by somebody. I have learned a couple things from that site...buyers will pay the least amount possible, and some people will work for peanuts. It's always kinda funny to see prospective buyers come back to the site and repost a job because the first coder they hired was worth every penny they paid and either didn't do it right or didn't do it at all. I think if you can get one job, and create a relationship with the buyer it could lead to better things. But with this economy, and the state of IT employment, be prepared to work for nothing.

It's just another way to hire cheap foreigners to do the work. See guys getting the jobs for well under a hundred dollars. I personally would never bid that low on a job that should take over a hundred hours to complete, much less 40. So because I don't bid that low, I don't win bids.

Of bids that I have won, but didn't end up accepting, the buyer always seems to throw much more onto the project than previously stated, but still want you to do the work for same pay.

I cancelled an old account because a buyer had done this and was not going to do 5 times the workload for the same pay (which was already too cheap.) Arbitration was a complete joke, the coder seems to have no input into this. The decision to give the buyer a rating a 10 and me a zero was done almost instantly without hearing me out.

Dont waste you time with Rentacoder! Its a place for undereducated foreigners who simply cut and paste from vbcode, planet-source-code etc. You end up talking to some Yahoo who wants to be the next Bill Gates for the Price of an Eggroll or a Rice Lunch. Or some want-to-be coder from india who copies it from the net and gives it to him. Totally Ridiculas dont waste your time!

Hello!

RentACoder.com is my choice. I can say this as one from RentACoder TopCoders. I have completed projects 150+ Here my brief history: http://www.takereal.com/freelance/rating.asp

This site is eBay for contractors. It has many clones, but original is outstanding one:

1. 800+ open bid requests for today
2. no needs to pay subscription (like at Elance, Contracted Work, Telecommute-Jobs)
3. you can't see strange bids: "I can do it for 3$ in 0 days" (like at Scriptlance)

RentACoder has at least two cool features - protections for software buyer and coder :

1. Arbitration process
2. The "Safe Project Escrow" You may want to read "Software Buyer Frequently Asked Questions" : http://www.takereal.com/freelance/article.asp

-- Sergey.

Rent A Coder is trash. I agree with all the comments above accept for Sergey's (probably because he works for peanuts, check out his account at Rent A Coder). You will spend most of your time bidding on jobs, and in some cases you will win, but you will always work for less than $15/hr I don't care how fast you code, or how much you copy and paste coder.

Stay away from that site.

May "penaults" more real then Jason's billions. If you have "many" you are not happy. But I have enough and I am happy. Look at Top Coders list: http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/TopCoderCompleteList.asp If you know school mathematics - you can calculate gross-profit: divide "Top Coder Score" by 10

No needs to copy-paste code. It's against RACs rules. People who already copy-paste copyrighted code - could (in mistake!) thinking this way: "All coders around me copy-paste code too."

Hi Everybody,

RAC is a free place to work. This is the essence of this site. What may be peanuts to somebody could be an apple for other.

Beside all that RAC rating and ranking procedure makes sure that a person gets what he deserves.

Hi All, I usually dont post much comments this way but after seing Some of "Educated Persons " here , I was forced to do so. I am an Indian Engineer , Just out of college.

Peanuts !!!!!!!!!!!!! Well they are apple to most Indians.

Let me give U some stats :

Average Engineer monthly Pay :Rs 10,000 Which is something like :$ 210

See the basic difference. And people getting Rs 10,000 or $ 210 lead a very prosperous or atleast a high standard of living.

So why not work for 500$ a month online ?? Any oppositons to that. Plzz let me know who has and why ?????????

And not all Indians use copy and paste methods. There are exceptions in every community. Can U gurantee that no European Programmer does that ??

Think about the buyers. Everybody is happy with the system except those who dont get a job in RAC

And being doing cheap doesnt points at low skilled work.

I study around 13-15 hrs a day to just get passing marks in my finals. The toper does around 15-16 hrs of study. So will they be called "Copy and paste followers".

I think all Europians have that mental level too.

Do They have ........

Hi there,

just putting some comments here -

lower bidding is a problem, but think like this - you did a job, of type X - you got a good pay

after some days - you get another job, same type just little modifications in your old program will do.... you put a lower bid

but it works sometime - the buyers are from US/Europe/E-Asia and they are not dumb, apart from the bid amount, they check your profile, your experience and then they decide to award the bid.

think when you get 4/5/6/7 jobs of the same type 'X', to win the bid .. you will put a small bid amount - to win

i hope this happens with everybody...

copy paste codes - every one does a copy paste thing - i hope you refer to books,tutorials, documentation,examples .... you start from examples .... and then your apps

just see the top coders and what they have got, specially the amount as BONUS, if someone pays a bonus of $5k, i hope he does so because he is happy ...

if someone asks $100 for a 20 min program .... is it fair ??

Just to try out Rent-a-coder, I picked a Java programming job that I figured would take about one day to finish. I bid $13 ($10 plus their fee) and I did NOT get the job.

I discovered the site in January (3 months ago) and am already rated in the top 1000 coders out of 70,000. For me, as a recent university graduate with a computer science degree, it's great for keeping myself busy, staying in practice, learning new technologies and making a little cash while I look for a real job. You have to do a couple of jobs for peanuts at first to get a rating, but as someone mentioned above many of the buyers are smart and know that if they accept a bid for peanuts, they will probably get substandard code. Furthermore, if you do a good job there's great potential to make contacts for future work. I doubt you can make a decent living at RAC, but I do recommend it as a source of secondary income, or as a way of acquiring IT experience in this crappy job market. (I'm Canadian by the way; my standard of living is about the same as you Americans, although it is nice to get paid in USD as opposed to my weak CAD.)

Hi All Leave apart other comments from top 10s and top 1000s or anti-RAC group. I'm in Top three and have been for as long as I remember. My average bid size is over $800 and I've done over 60 projects so please calculate yourself. RAC can give a decent life to Indians or all others who are living in developing countries. I generally accepts high quality and technology work like PDA, J2ME, Network security and embedded programming so of course, no point in looking for copy paste thing as there are not much on net itself. I have just one problem, arbitration always favor the buyer. They don't care how much you work, how much buyer lied or how long buyer took to respond to any question asked by the coder and you know what's the criteria? If buyer's specs claimed to put a HOME link on all pages and you by chance write MAIN, you are defaulted and case goes in the favor of the buyer. The same thing happened to me but I somehow escaped and got none rating and zero money.

"RAC can give a decent life to Indians or all others who are living in developing countries."

He makes an interesting point here -- maybe RAC isn't for American programmers who are paid much more than the worldwide average. There are a lot of countries in the world where RAC wages are awfully attractive. In a roundabout way, this comes back to offshore outsourcing again.

arbitration always favor the buyer.

My own statistics: I have been involved into arbitration 12 times. I win 11 times - so, in my case, 92% arbitration favor the coder.

maybe RAC isn't for American programmers.

Let's have a look to RAC Top10 coders: 30% from United States. Yes, there are many coders from India, Romania, etc. Official statistics(pulse of RAC) here: http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/About/ThePulseOfRentACoder.asp

I have been keeping a close eye on Rent-a-coder being a hard up freelance programmer from the UK. I am changing career or trying to because the world seems to be going through this crazy obsession with outsourcing everything. I know that the programmers in India are good, no disputing that but its practically ruined my career as it has done for so many other people in the UK.

Hello there ... its again silkroute..

i feel sad about this theory - "its practically ruined my career as it has done for so many other people in the UK." ..

how does outsourcing is ruining your jobs ?? its beause of you this concept has come into existence !

the guys who come to RAC - 70% of them are subcontracting the works they get .... nice concept you see - Mr. X gets a job for $100 from Mr Y, Mr. X puts this job on RAC ... he gets an avg bid of $30 .... so he just choses a coder who has done simmilar as he needs ... bid settles on $50.

Mr. X earned $50 for doing nothing ... although indians get blamed for this situation.

I have noticed that most of the work at RAC and Elance is done by people from India, is there not any local (in India) computer work for people from India? Why not do work in India rather than the U.S.? It is harmful to the average American programmer since the pay rate competition is too fierce. Does this bother people working out of India on U.S. projects at all? If you claim that India does not pay enough, well that is what you (working in India on U.S. contracts) are doing to programmers living in the U.S. Should we go underbid in another country and continue this cycle?

"Why not do work in India rather than the U.S.? It is harmful to the average American programmer since the pay rate competition is too fierce."

That, my friend, is the BIG change in the "global economy." The fact is, when you're dealing with something that can be done remotely (like coding), the Internet has enabled people to bid on it that haven't been able to in the past, and who are often willing to do it cheaper.

As geographic barriers come down, I see this as balancing out quality of life around the globe. The quality of life for Indians will go up as they're able to tap into our markets, and the quality of life for Americans will probably go down a bit, since we have to compete much more aggressively for work.

Such is life. It's like file sharing -- there's no way to stop it, you just need to accept it and make the best of it. Look at it this way: for every pissed off American programmer, there's one really happy Indian programmer. Thus, the Global Happiness Scale remains in balance.

Deane

Good point, but I am still broke and hungry and living in the U.S. Maybe I should move to India.

"I am still broke and hungry and living in the U.S."

I sympathize, I really do. But look at it this way: you still have a better quality of life than 90% of Indians.