Ask HN: Are there any high-end rentacoder type sites?

4 points by skeen 16y ago ↗ HN

I make good money at my job, but I want to buy my own place and I'd like to make an extra few hundreds pounds a month on the side.

I've looked at rentacoder type sites, but the bids on there appear from the outset to be quite horrendous.

Are they as bad as I'm making them out to be? Do others do work on these sites? If so, what sites can you recommend, and can you share some figures?

I'm a web developer by trade: php, mysql, postgresql, js, photoshop, etc.

Thanks. :)

6 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 26.6 ms ] thread

icey 16y ago ↗

The problem is that as soon as a site shows up and allows bids, there will always be people willing to underbid. It's a race to the bottom; and the people coming from places with lower costs of living will always be able to underbid you.

fugue88 16y ago ↗

It seems that the more the site focuses on bids, the more likely this is to happen.

Bidding systems inherently ignore distinctive qualities of at least one side of the transaction. In this case, it treats programmers as commodities, and so the prices tend toward commodity prices.

jacquesm 16y ago ↗

Would be nice to have a list of all sites of this type and a general indication of their quality.

It's certainly an interesting way to get stuff done.

cruise02 16y ago ↗

I found a recently published list of 20 of them. This is by no means a complete list, and there is no indication of quality that I can find.

http://acrisdesign.com/2009/08/hello-world/

jacquesm 16y ago ↗

thank you!

byoung2 16y ago ↗

These rentacoder or elance sites make money by being the middleman. You can do the same by hiring these same workers overseas and reselling their services to local companies at a premium.