
What are the best sites for freelance Web Dev work? - Apane
Now that Elance.com has merged with Upwork.com, I&#x27;ve noticed that the job listings on Upwork.com for ruby on rails developers are rather shotty. They are really cheap, and it&#x27;s unfortunate because Elance.com was quite good.<p>What are some other great sites for finding free lance RoR web development work?
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insoluble
You can set filters for the price range on Upwork, and you can use RSS or
another type of feed to bring in new listings as they come out. Writing your
own feed filtering can really help to weed out the undesirable listings.

I agree that Upwork has some of the stingiest clients around. _Guru_ seems
more honest overall, despite having less listings.

Edit: I have seen plenty of RoR jobs locally on Craigslist, so be sure to
subscribe to some feeds there as well.

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icpmacdo
How much do you make on average an hour on UpWork? How often/ how long does it
usually take to find work?

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insoluble
I personally cannot tell you since I haven't ever got a job on there. However,
I have found ones on Elance and Guru before. In terms of finding a small job,
it would usually take me between 5 and 10 hours of looking around and
submitting "Proposals" to find (get) one job. Sometimes it has taken me 3 days
to find one. This is while ignoring anything under $20 per hour.

One of the things I've found is that small jobs often become much larger. For
example, if a client merely wants a bug or glitch fixed in an existing system,
doing a quick job will often get you more work from that client (possibly
months' worth).

My average rate in terms of charged fee on those sites is around $22 per hour,
so nothing special. At the same time, I'm relatively new to freelancing
(despite being relatively experienced at programming), so maybe I just haven't
found my groove yet or built enough of a portfolio. The competition in terms
of how many people you compete with over low-paying jobs is mind boggling.
Having an uncommon niche can be very useful here, which is one of the reasons
I recommend using feeds with filters since it can allow you to see any new
listings in your specific niches. Overall, being a jack-of-all-trades is a bad
idea in freelancing since there is too much competition. At the same time,
clients often expect you to be experienced in a cornucopia of areas.

One more piece of advice: Avoid clients whose businesses are obviously based
on flawed value propositions. That is, avoid clients who think their product
idea is good when you personally know it's not. Freelancing is similar to
investment in that you don't want to get involved working for someone who
doesn't even know what they're doing in terms of running a business or
starting a startup. It may give you work in the short term, but it's going to
run dry before it gets you anywhere interesting. This all is assuming you have
enough experience to recognise obviously flawed product ideas.

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icpmacdo
I appreciate the reply :)

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stevejalim
A friend runs [http://lancelist.com](http://lancelist.com) \- points to a
bunch of sites

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kull
Nasty self promotion ahead: I run www.area301.com

