I’ve accidentally stumbled upon a page (RentACoder in my case) where freelancers can find jobs that others have posted. As I was curious, I’ve browsed a little and to my surprise, some projects were actually quite interesting. Being curious (and cautious), I’ve searched for other similar pages. It turns out, there are tons of them. However, I’ve quickly realized the following:

  • on all pages that I’ve visited (roughly10 or so), 80% of the bidders are Indians.
  • there are lots and lots of “kids” making offers with comments like:”Get it done !!”, “Sir see pm plz”, “Hi.. We are interested in your project. Please check PMB. Thanks”, “Ready to start now” and “Hello, We offer best Quality”. There’s seriously a shit load (pardon the expression) of stupid comments like that. How is someone supposed to trust you with a project worth 10.000$ and more, if you can’t even spell a single sentence right, not to mention the fact that you have posted the exact same message on just about every other project there is. It’s just unbelievable.
  • a lot of buyers are posting projects that are clearly out of this world:”Please, I need a clone of Twitter, urgent, start right away, 5 days deadline, 50$ budget”. I wouldn’t even take a piss for 50$ (pardon again), yet this guy wants me to do a major website clone overnight. This is a real project request, I didn’t make it up, and if you’ll browse through some of them, you’ll see that it’s certainly not the only one.
  • all the pages usualy take 10%-15% of your profit for themselves.
  • if a page doesn’t at least offer (if not enforce) an escrow payment, don’t (and I really mean don’t) bother with it.

The point being, you have to look really hard to find something worth considering (unless you’re into web pages and iPhone, as just about every project seems to be about one or the other).

I did find the RentACoder best of them all, though. It seemed to have the least number of phony projects and didn’t seemed to be swarming with Indians. Not that I have anything against them, but posting bids on freelancing pages seems to be a national hobby over there. It’s also impossible for me to compete with them, as their prices are generally half as low as mine, yet most of them are equally capable as me or other coders from the rest of the world.

After looking for a while, I’ve found a project that required the implementation of the A* algorithm. Since geometry and algorithms are one of my strong points, I’ve quickly jumped on it and my bid was actually accepted. I was thrilled. Two days later, I’ve earned my first 100$ (minus the 15% they took) and the buyer went even beyond and gave me a bonus as well. It was simply fantastic. Yesterday, I’ve found a project that needed some text translated from english to slovenian. I’ve gotten that one too and I’ve just finished it an hour ago. Wonderful.

I’ve preety much given up looking at pages other than RentACoder. I really do suggest you start with it first and once you find that there is nothing left for you to do at the moment, go check the others. In case you’re wondering, here are the top three I would recommend:

You probably won’t be making a living from them, but a little extra money never hurts. Just be sure to pick something that you can accomplish in a reasonable amount of time (and of course finish it as well).