Any experience with Rent-a-coder...

[Mambo.ie]

Has anyone got development done through this forum or got work?

I'm using Rent-a-Coder for some small custom development jobs and they seem to be a good setup. Does anyone have experience?

They offer an escrow service (they hold the money until the job is done and agreed by both parties) and validate buyers carefully. They rang my home number in the UK from Florida to validate me!

Coders can offer them selves and get rated after each job they have done. Bids seem quite low (must be a buyers market) and I got over 100 bids for a small-ish job.

Many of these were from eastern Europe, Russia and India and were the cheapest. They still came with good records but as the site says the problems of dealing with people whose native language is not English may offset the savings as things could take longer to explain. They suggest that if you have more time than money you should maybe go with someone with a good record who is cheap and if you are in a hurry (more money, less time, as they put it) go for someone who speaks your language well.

Having said all that, some of the overseas bids where in excellent English and some of the native speakers where indecipherable so...

I have since considered if the Mambo community needs such a service specifically for Mambo coding work and I think in the future we may. We still seem to have only one full time developer. (According to himself :-)) But in fact setting up such a system may be fraught with problems. Rent-a-coder outlined some of the fraud attacks they had been subjected too and I for one would not want to get involved in such a high stress operation.

Never the less there obviously is a need for a rent-a-mambo-coder service at some point but in the meanwhile I guess I will post future work to RAC with maybe an announcement here and at mambers to the Rent-a-Coder site.

(Yes this is an affiliate link - so if you value any of the information and time I have put into this small introduction to Rent-a-coder for the community do click through. if not I'm sure you can find the site and cut me out :-x )

All the best Dave

[adminjim]

I use it both ways and never had a problem with them. Have made some good money from there and got some thigs done that were way out of my league for cheap. A good deal Definately.

[gettor]

Yeah, rentacoder is a kewl place to outsource. I was searching for job posting sites. I found ELance and rent-a-coder to be really well.

Be carefull when you start business with the buyer to have prompt communication and to do a bit more work than expected. Your next jobs depend on your current grades.
Dont sell your 200$ work for 10$ and always deliver within deadline.

I also read an analysis regardingoutsourcing where the author describes the way you could do outsourcing with RAC.

[James Anek]

Yes, rentacoder is a great place to hire coders or to work as a coder but there are some dangers too.

As a buyer of work, there are many dishonest and incompetent coders on rac. If you do not know which is which then you may find you were scammed or shared your company secrets with someone you should not have who posts your code to a forum somewhere when you realize they are incompetent and cancel the project.

Before you use rentacoder or elance or any of the similar sites that are popping up you should check out rent-a-coder.y3s.net
They offer a hiring guide that will really help you avoid problem coders, find good coders, and if you are a coder you will find out what buyers are looking for in a bid request.

I would not recommend that any new member post a job on rac without reading this manual first. It was a real eye opener for me and helped me with my job postings a lot.