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Comment by fest | Hacker News Reader

/non-related rant ahead

From a perspective of person who is (pro)actively looking for more work, freelancer.com is full of projects along the veins of "write me some software". It does not make sense to even bother applying to projects like that, as the time spent writing an application letter exceeds potential income.

~6 years ago I did a fair number of small projects on rentacoder.com - the quality of average project description was much higher (did they do any vetting on incoming projects?).

odesk.com on the other hand has a lot more projects whose authors understand a thing or two about how software development works (i.e. reasonable project description among other things).

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Hi fest

I'n the Chief Executive of Freelancer.com.

The employers from RAC are all on Freelancer - and they are a lot more active than they were on the old site (which had a use interface from 1995 and was very difficult to use).

Regards Matt

Man you can't be a very busy CEO if you keep popping up on forums all the time.

Freelancer is terrible for hiring people compared to Odesk, just like Warriorforum is a bunch of "guru's" are trying to sell you ebooks claiming you will make $1352523 a day for "only $79". If the method was that good, why aren't you doing it yourself?

This thread is a good laugh about the sale: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/blackhat-lounge/66...

I am both very busy and also care about user feedback. This is why I participate in the forums. I am also probably the only CEO in my industry to do so, so you have to give me a little bit of credit for that.

Yes the BHW thread is quite funny, I even appreciate feedback from 15 year olds.

The difference is that RAC protected both the interest of the coder and the buyer. Freelancer seems to be only interested in taking money from both sides.

If a buyer cancel his credit card used to pay for a project, the coder is not protected in any way. Freelancer support will simply send the coder to the TOS :). In other words the escrow payment is not guaranteed by Freelancer.

None of the freelancer sites protect against credit card chargebacks.

Try Elance :). The escrow is guaranteed for most projects.

Same goes for oDesk if you work by the hour.

Read the fine print on those "guarantees".

Hi Matt - I'm an employer from RAC and quite frankly I've hated freelancer ever since you acquired vworker.

I had so many "points" from my rac account usage I could buy time to skype call the freelancer CEO - so I did - and it was never fulfilled, even after me trying to contact support about it multiple times.

The gamification angle? please it just gets in the way (although the new site design it's less obnoxious)

The quality of freelancers is garbage and freelancer.com just doesn't have the same level of targeting rac/vworker had to weed out the useless people.

Sorry for such a negative post, I could say worse, but it's just been very painful experience for me ever since that acquisition. To the point where I barely post jobs anymore and find alternate ways to hire.

Jarrad, what's your username? I get a notification for the Skype calls and I do them all the time. I am happy to look into that and line that up.

You are incorrect about the quality of the freelancers and the dominant ones on the site are all ex-RAC.

You're going to need to name names if anyone's going to believe you. I've only seen ONE employer from RAC at your scamtablishment. Perhaps exaggeration is your strong point?

We acquired 2.5 million users from RAC. Your comment is ridiculous, to say the least. And no, I am not going to mention specific employers, that's also ridiculous.

Ah, I know who you are now. We had a conversation when we acquired RAC because you wrote that book "Outsourcing Through RentACoder" and were upset we shut the site down.

I've done a little bit of work on Freelancer, and I did some work on RaC years ago - you just have to pick carefully. With the low-quality projects, there's also alot of low-quality developers, who copy and paste the same response to every project (are are often front accounts for development sweat shops). If you're in the same area as the project owner, and can write up a decent proposal (meaning you spent 2 minutes reading the project description and 5 minutes writing why you're best) you can win a large amount of work.

There are alot of projects where you can tell the project owner is "just outsourcing it" and thinks they'll get $25,000 of dev for $250. The overall volume is high enough, however, that you can find some quality gigs.

What I do have a problem with is nickle-and-diming the site does, especially with regard to their "tests". For instance, the ColdFusion test is probably 8 years old, and pretty embarrassing. (and despite some attitudes to the contrary, the language is quite current) Even "modern" tests like the HTML 5 test seem off with regard to content covered. They almost seems as if they were written using $25 contractors off the site.

Why do you even take tests though? I took one when I joined back in 2010, but since then I haven't taken a single test. It's a waste of time.

Just because. I did like a little bit of work for $50 (basically just a "rails new" with a theme the project owner purchased), which doesn't move the needle, so thought I'd take a few to supposedly boost my credibility. The fact that they're a waste of time doesn't change the fact that they're pushing a borderline-scammy and low-quality product within their offering.

Took a test or two because the other bidders have that to show. I assume they create a few accounts and copy over the answers. Some of the questions were so old and irrelevant I didn't even come close to what the other users scores were, so I couldn't even show it in my profile.

Completing tests and getting the accreditation greatly increases the earnings of freelancers.

The tests are optional. We charge for them so people don't cheat. We crowdsource the QA of tests, among other things. The Cold Fusion test is probably rarely done so I can't attest to the quality of it.

From the contractor PoV odesk (and maybe others as well) really sucks - rates are rather low. I've seen quite experienced engineers applying with rates in $15-30/hr range. And clients hiring history also shows that they are cheap.

From my experience, it is much profitable to stay out from these sites and search/apply to remote jobs independently - you get by order of magnitude higher pay.

You need to turn the paradigm around frankly, and hire through these sites rather than bid for work in a big pond.

I work as a Rails consultant exclusively on oDesk. How do you guarantee payment when jobs are found independently? Who's to say you aren't scammed out of money you're owed especially if you're not even in the US (or client country)?

You can't. And you shouldn't trust some John Doe and deliver the full solution upfront. I personally look for long-term tasks from "legitimate" companies. After some initial collaboration, you and the company naturally begin to trust each other. E.g. I'm paid hourly, but I don't use any control mechanism for that (like that odesk screensnapper and keylogger, ridiculous...). I just state how many hours I worked for some task and that's it.

If I were a web developer, I definitively apply for many remote web dev jobs you can find on HN's Who is Hiring thread. Try next month - and double your odesk rate.

I'll definitely try that, by the way - you don't happen to be looking for a full-stack Rails developer would you? :) Native english, expat from boston. I'm looking for a long term commitment project at the moment (40hrs/week).

Not me, sorry. I'm still on the contractor side of the life so far :)

You can also find bunch of Rails jobs at WeWorkRemotely. I'm for C++/core engineering jobs, which are quite rare in REMOTE space.

> like that odesk screensnapper and keylogger

Wait, what? Can you expand on that because if it's what it sounds like oDesk should be on every freelancers' shit list.

You open an application that measure keyboard and mouse activity and takes a screenshot of your desktop every ~10 minutes. Personally I like it. Guaranteed payment and no hassle over time tracking. I just work and get paid, what's not to love? I don't even need something like HarvestApp or PaydirtApp. I just work.

And if activity (nbr of keypresses and clicks) is below certain threshold (50%?), payment is not guaranteed.

You may want to look at sites with curated projects, like LetsWorkshop.com or Gun.io.

I believe Freelancer makes you give a credit card or a down payment before accepting bids.

That's incorrect.

I make a living off oDesk and the merge had me worried for a bit but so far it's been business as usual.

Haven't the two merged?

" Freelancer.com, which was founded back in 2009, has acquired several companies over the years — including tech freelance jobs site vWorker/RentACoder and IT marketplace Scriptlance, both in 2012. More recently (this March) it picked up Polish freelance marketplace, Zlecenia.przez.net. "

They're buying everything http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/15/freelancer-buys-warrior-for...

Yeah, they have. That's the other reason I am referring to rentacoder.com in past tense- or at least I think I am ;>

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