Ming the Mechanic:
Rent-a-coder
The NewsLog of Flemming Funch
 Rent-a-coder2003-12-30 16:56
25 comments
by Flemming Funch

This site seems to offer a market for software coders and buyers to trade. People who want something done put up a bid request. And I assume they hire the lowest bidder to do the job. That sounds like a great idea. But, looking over the bids, it all looks impossibly low. Like, $10 for solving some problem, or $100 for a redesign of some website. And I see people asking for an airline reservation system that needs to be done the day after tomorrow. I wonder if it works. Maybe it is only school kids who bid, who're thrilled about $100 even if it takes a week to do. Maybe it is people in developing countries doing the work, in which case I think it is great. Doesn't look like I'll find much that will supplement my living in there, though. Maybe I should just put in bid requests for all the work I have to do this month and put the cap at $200, and take the month off myself.


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25 comments

1 Jan 2004 @ 15:08 by maxtobin : Now your talking
Differentials in needs and ecconomy may well lead to this being a valid choice for you Flemming, however you may find you spend as much time checking code and seing that it fits for use. When you develop modular code it becomes more and more easy to develop fast and efficient programs I believe.  

1 Jan 2004 @ 16:15 by ming : Coders
I once hired a programmer in the Ukraine to do work for me. I paid him $1000 per month for about a year or so. Which supported him and his family great, which he still frequently writes and thanks me for. But, unfortunately, I never succeeded in getting anything very useful out of him. Not that he was terrible or anything, but it was a bit hard to communicate sometimes, and it took about a month before he came back with anything, and in the meantime I had usually found a different solution to what I was looking for. So I know it isn't easy to make distributed programming work. The communication issues are often bigger than the work it takes to do coding. Of course there's the potential for creating a system where everything is more thoroughly defined, like black boxes with clear inputs and outputs, and some of thouse issues might be overcome.  

8 Jan 2004 @ 04:53 by ming : Rent-a-coder
That's good to know. 100+ projects a year, wow. I guess the system works. Yes, I guess that must be some of the keys there: Very clear bid request, a clear way of testing the result, and the right deadline. And picking people who have a good record of being able to actually work like that.  

8 Jan 2005 @ 19:04 by 911guy @67.85.186.186 : Rent A Coder
I've tried RAC, I can't compete with a kid that is willing to spend hours on project to make $10 so he can put gas in his car.

My prices are industry average, but when someone is willing to do work at such a low prices it hurts all of us. Some day these "amatuers" will apreciate my point of view, when they need to make a living.

I truely "enjoy" the coders who make a low offer, without even knowing what they are up against (by asking relevent questions about information left out of a bid request). Allot of times this "lack of information" results in even more work for the coder.  

9 Jan 2005 @ 11:55 by ming : RentACoder
Actually, since I wrote the above, I've recently tried out RentACoder myself, as a coder. Didn't think I would do that, but, well, I needed work. So I did some of those similar low-ball bids, ending up doing lots of work for very little money. But I'm also starting to see a certain balance in it. I got a couple of slightly bigger jobs, you know $1000 rather than $10, which look a bit more like what I normally do. And I realized that for some of the buyers there, it isn't the price that is important. I've had people tell me they would have paid twice as much, based on my experience and level of communication. Wheras again others are obviously only picking based on price. So I realized it could work if I was a bit more choosey and didn't try to compete with kids who work for days for $10.  

11 Sep 2006 @ 12:11 by kamen123 @217.10.251.34 : rentacoder team stupidity
I have very funny experience with rentacodrer

I see some very interesting results that will be useful to share with internet users:

rentacoder team lie even from the beginning with their name rentacoder
the right name is rentapacher, because they are making only patches

rentacoder team lie that their site is safe place to do business
actually rentacoder is suitable only for making patches
rentacoder team will turn every bigger project into patch and this way will spoil it
so rentacoder is not suitable for any serious business

rentacoder team do not understand plain English if is more then several sentences, because they have experience only with patches(with short description)

rentacoder team do not understand quite simple technical questions because their mental abilities allow them to work on only patches

so with different words:
RENTACODER IS SUITABLE FOR MAKING ONLY SMALL PROJECTS(PATCHES for several hundreds)
RENTACODER TEAM WILL SPOIL ANY OTHER PROJECT WITH ENDLESS STUPIDITY. FOR SERIOUS PROJECTS RENTACODER TEAM PROVES THAT STUPIDITY CAN NOT BE BEATEN BUT CAN NOT BE HIDDEN

;-)

there are details at
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.computer.consultants/browse_frm/thread/2b7f5a18ff117f25/0d6086755d0edc87?hl=en&  

25 Sep 2006 @ 11:32 by kamen123 @217.10.251.34 : more interesting facts about rentacoder
rentacoder lie with their slogan: how software gets done
the right slogan is: how patches gets done
rentacoder team probably have paid to the manager of google groups to disable comments in google groups, interesting, they try to hide the truth about them
:-)  

16 Oct 2006 @ 13:06 by kamen123 @217.10.251.34 : mariano
Hi Mariano
Probably now rentacoder team is making special efforts to hide the truth about them with your help.
Please note rentacoder's major defender TakeReal confirmed that majority of the projects are just patches for several hundreds. Also I have watched rentacoder for many years. Almost all projects are patches on this site. Because mental abilities of rentacoder arbitrators turn every project into patch
Please read my conversation with TakeReal
I'm just ordinary wise man watching rentacoder for several years
Please do not try to hide the truth about them
Every ordinary wise man will confirm that I'm right  

25 Oct 2006 @ 09:25 by kamen123 @217.10.251.34 : for TakeReal
hi my dear dog TakeReal
you confirmed that majority of the projects are just patches for several hundreds, please read again your posts at google groups
please do not make another silly attempt to escape, there is no way

you are excellent source of fun

please take your friend Mariano and go to lie at rentacoder, here your behaviour is transparent
:-)  

11 Nov 2006 @ 07:07 by kamen123 @217.10.251.34 : re: Public arbitration record
very funny "Public arbitration record"

again you did not understand so I repeat for you:

everyone knows that the majority of the "projects" done on rentacoder are for several hundreds, takereal/Sergey confirmed too
so rentacoder is not making software, rentacoder is making patches

so the rentacoder's slogan "how software gets done" is not correct
the correct slogan is "how patches gets done"
what can you expect from company lying from the beginning?

of course rentacoder team will not admit their stupidity and will try to blame someone else, the link posted by you is excellent example of such silly inconsistent comments, full nonsense

for everyone is obvious that I'm right

please take your dog Sergey/takereal and go to lie at rentacoder, here your behaviour is transparent
you make me laugh with your silly attempts to escape, you are excellent source of fun  

9 Mar 2007 @ 20:42 by RAC Coder @88.80.130.49 : it's not his fault..
What people like Kamen are doing are only talking.. The sad thing is that he hurts the name of Bulgaria and Bulgarian coders. If I wasn't from here and read about such a thing I was going to think twice before I get coder from Bulgara. I would like to say to the people who are reading here that RAC is a very good place to do business and that in the world are walking many stupid people like Kamen.

Also I want to mention that it's not his fault that he was born stupid.
I really don't think that he has ever done an actuall project as nobody in Bulgaria will listen to him if he talks like that and there wasn't going to be things like this - I tryed to explain but I'm stupid and I couldn't - or - I am looking in my keyboard when I'm writing so I can't see what BS I'm typing

So I encourage you to ignore people like Kamen and not to (if eventually) think that the coders from Bulgaria are like him. All he is doing is to ruin the good name of Bulgaria  

13 Mar 2007 @ 06:45 by Vijay @58.181.110.47 : Too many pimps
I wonder how many pimps RAC have and how they get access to arbitration record. Only buyer, seller and RAC staff can view it.

Also, Aamir Ali Tayyab gave them a good lesson. Search "Aamir Ali Tayyab RentACoder" at google and you get another story.  

11 Jun 2007 @ 05:35 by kj, @220.253.13.99 : sad
dsa  

22 Oct 2007 @ 17:23 by Nobby @124.13.31.146 : RAC is not bad
Stumbled across this site and not sure if I can post but I'll try. I have only ever used RAC as a buyer but generally have been happy. Yes, you get a lot of "paste the same thing" bids and yes some coders cannot speak English well enough to work with (and strangely the worse one was the guy with 27 good rated jobs?). I try hard not to add extra work but you need some flexibility, often as you describe something in detail you realise how much better it would be if you did it slightly different etc. I always offer extra money if doing this. The worse problem is coders who cannot finish and give excuses about being ill, their relative died, someone stole their computer etc. It's not easy but at least there are a lot of coders to pick from in one place. Worth trying anyway.  

9 Jul 2008 @ 12:44 by Ben @203.153.24.22 : RAC is a nice place
kamen,
when you cant get something good from RAC, it doesnt mean everyone are the same.
many people get hundreds bukcs from RAC.

posting bad things about RAC everywhere just showing what kind of person you are.
a profesional person wont do such a black campaign. if you think RAC is doing something wrong and you think they should not do that to buyers/coders, then why dont you sue them? show that you are not only a shit-talking guy but also a gentleman.  

18 Aug 2008 @ 13:53 by ljapin @24.255.110.160 : kamen
I don't know much about RAC. But as a coder I realize that if it were not for these so called patches the software would be useless to most.
Not sure who you are calling stupid but it is obvious by your attempts at English that you are one of the ones spoke of earlier that are "hard to communicate with"
Maybe you think repeating yourself many times makes you seem right. Who knows.
Just an outsider looking in :)  

12 Sep 2008 @ 16:17 by tyughe @59.164.104.7 : stay away from RAC


From my personal experience RAC is a very risky place to work in. I bid an extremely low price for a big project hoping to get a good rating and more subsequent projects. However, the way that it turned out was that the buyer kept on expanding the scope of the project and it would never end. Frustrated I put the project into arbitration, but lost because of some feature that I tried to do but was not able to do completely. Overall, I lost about a months effort to nothing and most probably the buyer got a lot more than the initial project work for free.

On RAC, you need to be very careful about clueless buyers who will make completing projects a pain.

I would advise coders to stick with an hourly payment cycle on something like odesk.com and stay away from RAC.  

19 Feb 2009 @ 12:33 by J @125.209.98.218 : Rentacoder doing bad with users
some time rentacoder baned those how doing business good and took their mony. even they don not tell them why their account is going to close.  

14 Apr 2009 @ 16:37 by ATuring @206.197.236.61 : The REAL Reason People Hate RentACoder
It's not Exhedra's fault (in most cases), it's incompetent buyers (who don't know what they want) and coders (who don't follow the rules and don't do research BEFORE the bid) that's the real problem.

Last weekend, I posted the Turing Halting Problem as a bid request. The Turing Halting Problem has no real solution, but that didn't stop people from bidding on it.:

http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/BidRequests/ShowBidRequest.asp?lngBidRequestId=1146467

I'm pretty sure a guy like karmen123 would bid on a problem like this and defame RAC for being stupid enough not to do research. He would go into arbitration and lose it simply for being hard-headed and uncooperative with the abitrators when he could have clearly won.  

13 Oct 2009 @ 00:17 by techguy111 @66.74.151.29 : RAC
"I agree with you about RentACoder. You take far fewer chances dealing with a service like this. You can look at people's ratings. You at least have an idea of what you're getting beforehand."

 

15 Dec 2009 @ 17:53 by Trent Hill @130.39.0.204 : Rent-A-Coder
Rent-A-Coder allows for communication and connection between employers and coders internationally. It is one of very few platforms which facilitates this sort of international labor market of programmers. This is incredibly useful both to entrepreneurs in need of coding and to coders seeking work.  

11 Jan 2010 @ 07:50 by American Coder @67.54.171.200 : Outsourcing - RentACoder
It's true that RentACoder facilitates businesses outsourcing their programming jobs. However, this is hardly the fault of RentACoder. Rather, it is a natural expansion of the labor market--the likes of which have occurred in virtually every industry. All cars used to be made in the United States, too, but now many are made abroad in order to decrease costs. The same is true of clothing, which used to be made exclusively in the U.S., but is now the business of Indian and Chinese laborers. Despite the fears of American seamstresses, they didn't die in the streets of starvation. Far from it, they moved on to better, higher paying, less strenuous jobs.
That doesn't mean that coders in America are going to go out of business. It just means they're going to have to become more specialized, better at their trade, and maybe charge less exorbitant prices. All in all, RentACoder is a company which provides a service better than their competitors. The company itself doesn't speak, one way or the other, to the pros or cons of outsourcing--it simply provides a service.  

3 Nov 2013 @ 23:01 by KateSawyer29 @31.184.238.21 : re
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19 Dec 2014 @ 21:43 by Yinett @129.207.46.224 : zTWRFuXNQjLhsaP
看到原作者写的：Ultimately I decided to turn down oerffs from two household-name tech companies to join SigFig, an innovative startup out in San Francisco attempting to bring transparency to the investment world to help everyone from new to veteran investors invest better. I'm now hard at work at my new dream job helping to bring SigFig to market.  

23 Dec 2014 @ 17:50 by Jefferson @114.160.59.254 : jITTdowKfYt
这种方式对原作者来说真是很有效。 A week after launching my cgampian I received over 400,000 unique visits and 430,000 YouTube views. My quirky new approach to applying for a job earned me phone as well as in-person interviews with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce and many more. 如果足够自信，是可以参考这种方式的。  

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2007-07-13 23:42: Plan vs Reality


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