

Ask HN: Are there any high-end rentacoder type sites? - skeen

I make good money at my job, but I want to buy my own place and I'd like to make an extra few hundreds pounds a month on the side.<p>I've looked at rentacoder type sites, but the bids on there appear from the outset to be quite horrendous.<p>Are they as bad as I'm making them out to be? Do others do work on these sites? If so, what sites can you recommend, and can you share some figures?<p>I'm a web developer by trade: php, mysql, postgresql, js, photoshop, etc.<p>Thanks. :)
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icey
The problem is that as soon as a site shows up and allows bids, there will
always be people willing to underbid. It's a race to the bottom; and the
people coming from places with lower costs of living will always be able to
underbid you.

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fugue88
It seems that the more the site focuses on bids, the more likely this is to
happen.

Bidding systems inherently ignore distinctive qualities of at least one side
of the transaction. In this case, it treats programmers as commodities, and so
the prices tend toward commodity prices.

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byoung2
These rentacoder or elance sites make money by being the middleman. You can do
the same by hiring these same workers overseas and reselling their services to
local companies at a premium.

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jacquesm
Would be nice to have a list of all sites of this type and a general
indication of their quality.

It's certainly an interesting way to get stuff done.

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cruise02
I found a recently published list of 20 of them. This is by no means a
complete list, and there is no indication of quality that I can find.

<http://acrisdesign.com/2009/08/hello-world/>

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jacquesm
thank you!

