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It's easy enough for us to say that people don't appreciate the value of what we do but really market value is set by supply and demand.

Not everyone lives in San Francisco or New York where they feel they must bill $100 p/h just to make rent. A smart person in an emerging economy where $500 per month puts them on a higher part of the local income curve could certainly realize that they can compete in a global marketplace on price. This does not necessarily make them incompetent, in fact it's not a bad way to "hack" oneself out of poverty.

Besides, many software applications are alternatives to excel spreadsheets or to handwritten HTML websites and don't necessarily require the hippest programmers who are well studied on the latest technologies. A customized rails scaffold can go a long way to solve a lot of real business problems, and doesn't HN often talk about the value of producing an "MVP"?

There's truth in the idea that a first world salary might go further elsewhere in the world, and that lots of people get by on less ... But I suggest you look at getacoder.com et al. and see what I was really talking about, because it can't be explained only that way with no other explanation. I once saw a project similar to something that took a former employer 10 years to iterate on and finally get right, with a long tail of bug fixes and crazy corner cases because it is a difficult problem. The rentacoder "cost" was 2 weeks and less than $1000. I did not follow up with that particular guy's project but I'm going to guess that they did not have success with those expectations and that budget.

Its interesting that those sites are flooded with "create" but never "update". Version 0.00001 of "a copy of ebay with facebook integration" (true example from getacoder) will only cost $5K... What is the site for "OMG we need version 0.00002"? Oh we already have those, they are the established $500/hr contracting sites.

There's a Hollywood movie trope rolled out every 2.8433 years where a rich guy goes back to university and tries to buy his way past projects and tests. I always kind of imagine some rich kid in "Web Programing 317 section 7" contracting out his final project. Now that tuition is so expensive, $5K for a final project sounds more or less reasonable for a kid who just wants the credential and not the education/training. There should be some kind of ethical filter where if you're obviously trying to contract for a stereotypical final project around the end of the school year...

Well it's possible that in many cases 0.2 is created by the same person as 0.1.

I guess most of the people posting these one-off coding jobs on bidding sites are probably too flaky to ever need a version 0.00002, they will abandon the business as soon as they realize they aren't getting any hits.

Interesting that you're mentioning the "outsourcing" of academic projects.

While this seemingly has been "popular" in Europe for PhDs / doctoral theses for quite some time (in Germany e.g. some ministers recently lost their posts for that or similar activities), it has become an even larger issue in countries like India across all levels of academic studies - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4610739 for more info on that.

For many Indians, a degree is just a path to a cushy job. That is probably true for many other parts of the world too.

Rentacoder used to have a disclaimer (they may still, I haven't looked in years) that the site could not be used for any thesis or "final senior project"-type project that would determine whether or not someone received a degree.

I always found that oddly specific - they clearly acknowledge that people will use the site to pay someone to do class projects, and get better grades by doing so, and they very much don't care so long as it doesn't determine whether the buyer graduates.

Once I was looking through rent-a-coder and the pdf spec attached was a homework assignment with the class and professor's name on it. Emailed it to the prof as my good deed for the day.

I once read of a prof that was on a rent-a-coder site, did a student's assignment, and then failed him.

This is caused by the fact that the online markets for freelance coding are open to anyone. Since anyone can post, naturally you will see a lot of impossible jobs.

Since anyone can bid, naturally you'll see bids on these impossible jobs, too.

But, underneath this superficial layer of incompetence lies a good selection of developers and clients in each of the freelance sites. Having done some work on more than one of them, I can say that as a developer, the key to finding actual work is to take the tests, have a portfolio, and wait for clients to contact you. If you must bid on the jobs by searching, search hard for the realistic ones and bid appropriately. The clients that understand their work will not usually go for the lowest bidder just because. They'll go for the one they have the most confidence in.

this is where github helps. or stack overflow.

There was an article in the NYT recently about companies exploiting underpaid interns in non-software engineering fields. One of the sentences said that the dream employee the companies were looking for were "Triple 22s" - 22 year olds willing to work 22 hours a day for $22k. So its not just software engineering.

anyone doing rent a coder should follow some oldie but goodie advice:

create a few small tasks to get started. rent out a few coders for a week. make all of them code the given tasks. pick the best quality and continue.

you will get good quality out bad, whatever you prefer... And waste little money.

the only flaw is if all the coders who are participating are not the quality you wanted.

And then you become the PM and integrator too? That overhead will start to stack up. Don't forget Brook's Law.

Sounds to me more like "throw away most of the initial work, keep 1-3 people that do the best work"

For every Facebook-clone-for-200 dollars there's someone (several, actually) trying to solve some basic business problem or wanting to test out a product idea.

And willing to pay bottom dollar to do it, even if it means terrible results

I've heard mixed reviews, it would be interesting to see some comprehensive comparison.

Rates are going to be driven by cost of living as much as expertise, so it's not unfeasible to imagine skilled developers in Malaysia / China / Russia / India who didn't get a green card (or didn't want one) being able to comfortably sell their services for < $10 per hour.

for an mvp? hell yaah.

tbh, there should be a price picker. you specify a timeline. you specify quality, and then price is calculated for you.

this communicates that your want mvp, or real development. And for each the site can provide heuristics. that's where the site's secret sauce can come from.

I'd like to see that "Bug per 1K LoC" drop down list. There could even be an ISO rating and you could fail coders for not meeting their minimum bug counts. As a dev I could just skip over problems as long as I was on target for my bug count.

Genius!

Well. Listen, you get what you pay for.

However I think BUG count is not the issue. It's code quality. What if I told you:

"I need a POS implementation of Foo, it doesn't have to be maintainable but has to work with a taaaaad bit of ability to patch it up. I am trying to prove a concept is viable and show it off to like 50 people. I will rewrite this code if I decide to implement the concept. Also I want this done in ~ 1 week"

Should that not drive down the price and time required?

That means probably minimal tests, minimal abstractions, lots of copy-pasta, but still within decent coding guidelines and meets the needs

Sure, and for every ten or so of them, there's someone more reasonable. ;) I'm not sure what the next babushka doll is, but my point is that the jobs are not completely uniform and that within the variation lies _some_ value.

The part of reading rent-a-coder that always depresses me is the rampant contract cheating. It makes me wish that by facilitating that activity and taking a piece of the action, sites like rent-a-coder incurred civil liability to the colleges and universities whose assignments are being bartered.

I'm not quite sure how to work that - maybe sue them as some sort of accessory to fraud, though that would probably first require the university charging cheating students with fraud.

Well, university assignments are at least doable. For an experienced developer easily so, which makes them quite profitable. The profit goes down the drain if you need to explain to the student how your code works (if he knew, he wouldn't want you to code it for him).

if you see a fun project but underfunded, send out a note saying your hourly rate, approximations, and offer to review deliverables on a weekly basis.

most people don't understand the costs and what you get for $100...