Does anyone have any particularly good/bad experiences to share about using freelance programming sites like elance, rentacoder, scriptlance, odesk, guru.com, etc?
Would you recommend using them? Does any freelancing site stand out from the rest or are they all pretty much the same?
I've heard horror stories about people not getting paid, projects never getting finished, etc.. how representative are they?
Scanning through the listings on some of the sites, it seems a lot of ads are looking people with many years experience and a buzzword-compliant resume to work for them for next to nothing. Are there some good jobs to be had through these sites, or are they pretty much a waste of time?
However, there are caveats:
1) Best used with very small, very well-defined jobs.
2) You must put in a fair amount of careful work to specify what you want done, in a way that leaves no room for interpretation.
3) Best used with low-risk (experimental / proof-of-concept) type projects.
4) Don't bet your company on getting good quality. You'll usually get something usable, but it often won't be exemplary code.
If "usually get something usable" sounds scary, see point #3.
5) Don't expect to save yourself time. Instead you spend the same amount of time as you would have spent had you already known how to do what needed to be done but you instead spend the time on communication, and you get your job done by someone who knows how to do it.
A corollary to #5 is for some small jobs, you might be able to learn how to do the task and then do it yourself, all in the same amount of time you spent directing the freelancer.
So why do it at all? Because of #6:
6) Using such a service can move an item off your to-do list, because having a person at the other end of a job bid (and having your reputation on the site as a buyer on the line) you get forced to finish the item. So effectively it's an anti-procrastination tool.
This is my experience, which is biased toward small jobs. But then, I wouldn't use one of these sites for a big job.