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Comment by Falling3 | Hacker News Reader

What's truly scary about this is the fact that it's attracting serious bidders.

These are not serious bidders. They are robo-applications or blindly copy/pasted applications by cut-rate shops that are mind-numbingly bad at development.

Like I said - truly scary.

Elance and sites like it are crazy uncharted territory for me.

Are there really folks who run bots to scrape Elance, put in a bid for the minimum budget price (someone did bid $750, according to the min/max spread on there), and hope they get picked?

What happens when they do get picked, and they just agreed to build Amazon for $750? At that point I guess $750 is just so low an amount that neither party really cares to fight over it when the "developer" can't deliver?

I too want to know what happens here, I've been working as a web developer for over a year now and am just now confident in my abilities to want to do some freelance, and all I see are these horrible responses all over sites like these.

It's very difficult to get work there, but it is possible, and easier if you don't fall into the trap of trying to game the system (treating proposals like actual proposals will help you stand out more.) Don't bother with their BS about "verifying your identity" either.

But yeah, if you can get real work then run far far away. It is the proverbial shallow money trench where good developers die like dogs (only without money or that many good developers)

I've got a friend who has put several projects on elance. Most of the developers he's used have been from India and Vietnam.

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