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Comment by dinkumthinkum | Hacker News Reader

Oh my, Elance. These sites are horrible. Their goal is simply to turn programmers into sweatshop dwellers competing for tiny scraps. The signal to noise ratio at these places reaches 0 pretty quickly.

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I don't think that's the goal but I think sites like that perfectly faciliate a race to the bottom scenario. Why wouldn't someone bid less on a project in order to win a bid? While price isn't the only factor you have to be crazy to compete with those prices when your competitors' cost of living could be much less, which means you're almost sure to lose.

Depends. I can't speak as a seller. As someone who hires, you just need intelligent filters. I've found an excellent designer and illustrator on eLance.

Have you used Elance before? I've gotten great work there from developers, writers, general admin, data entry, etc.

Me too - oDesk is great. There seems to be a lot of animosity from valley-type developers on here towards offshore freelancers and their clients. These 'rock-star' developers come across as entitled to me as a non-professional junior developer.

Believe it or not, some of us really are building sustainable businesses outside of the valley often using offshore developers instead of local without burning through millions in VC money. In fact, we really have no other options.

The blog articles are great, keep them coming Trevor.

What about the animosity of the local developers who want to make $60k a year plus bennies, but you're hiring people for $15 an hour?

The local developers are all employed (if you're a developer, check your email). Anyways, I wouldn't be able to afford a local developer even if I wanted to at this stage. It's not a just a question of being cheap for many of us, it's a matter of being able to get our projects off the ground in the first place.

That's a wild guess and IMHO very wrong. I get that you may not have a lot of resources, but those places normally pay badly even for 3rd world countries.

Saying they're all employed it's a rationalization people make to feel less guilty.

Paying people to code less than the ones that cut your lawn is wrong no matter what the reason is.

Actually, I'm paying very near my own salary. And I cut my own lawn.

Maybe you are, but in my experience 99.9% of the contractors of those places don't pay well because they don't have to. Most of the time there is someone more desperate that lowers the bid just to get the job. If everyone paid decently that would be a whole new story.

Yes there are great developers and other professionals on Elance. Think about it from a developer's perspective: I can work at one company, on a relatively small variety of projects, probably maintaining some legacy code, with the same people at the same place everyday for years on end and earn $X/year. Or I can work for a few clients that I choose, on a wide variety of products, rarely/never maintaining legacy code other than my own, and work from almost anywhere in the world while earning something close to $X/year (probably +/- 20%).

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