If you're a developer who thrives on competition, TopCoder might be up your alley. If you're the very picture of patience coaching your granny through a virus scan, chances are you have what it takes to be a CrossLoop "Helper" or a LivePerson "Expert." Elance, RentACoder, or Guru.com might be good choices for established freelancers looking to source jobs and market their services.
All sounds pretty dire. If you're a developer looking to freelance, go build your contacts with potential clients personally.
Most of those sites are pretty tough for the smaller independent freelancer, especially Elance, RentACoder, or Guru. The reason being that they are dominated by low cost programming conglomerates in countries like India, Russia, etc.
So, whatever you think you can charge for your work, you're guaranteed to have someone charging 5 bucks or less for the same work due to their massive resources (and thus their ability to work dirt cheap).
I'm sure you can make a go at it, but there is definitely substantial competition.
That was the biggest detractor when I started to try some of these sites out during my latest stint of being laid off. There would be lots of requests for "clone eBay/etc" with 15 bids from outsourced developers offering to do it for < $200.
The signal-to-noise is often too low on these sites.
Even then it's fairly challenging to modify some crappy script for $100. My experience with elance was that development was just a no-go, but you could make some money with other areas, for me system administration. You could get $100 to modify some script, or the same $100 to _install_ it.
A few years ago I hired a guy from the Ukraine, he only wanted 2$/hour. I couldn't believe it and paid him more, but at that rate you have 50 hours to customise. Not too hard.
"Most of those sites are pretty tough for the smaller independent freelancer, especially Elance, RentACoder, or Guru. The reason being that they are dominated by low cost programming conglomerates in countries like India, Russia, etc."
This is an interesting problem to solve though. Just thinking out loud here but if there were a site where only good programmers (say someone with a significant open source project commit) could register, and on the other side, only "good" companies could offer work (say, companies having YC funding) then the quality/price slope might disappear.
I, for one would love to know of a site where there is good work offered at decent rates. Since I work out of Bangalore people assume I'll work for 200$ for a month long project and flood my inbox with such offers.:-D I even have a filter for my inbox to remove such "offers".
The google summer of code program comes nearest to offering good work for decent money (at India rates) but only students can contribute, so that's a no go for professional developers.
Yeah, I mean no disrespect for those companies that can literally take on hundreds of contracts a day at bargain basement prices, but I definitely think there is a market out there for companies who want a little extra attention to detail or singular focus and are willing to pay slightly more for it. Definitely a great idea...
It's a good idea but it seems to suffer from the chicken and egg problem that pg has talked about in the context of dating sites: ". . . no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users, which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem."
In this case the chicken and egg problem is persuading legitimate companies that you have an audience for their legitmate job postings and providing protections against external recruiters gaming the system. It's not a trivial challenge.
you want to find a freelance job? Get in your car, go to the town center, and go talk to all the small business owners there. Offer to build them a site for their business, or redo their current one. Or you can pickup a phone and try to pitch over the phone.
Out of the trip you'll snag a couple of jobs, and you can charge decent prices, since the guys have no idea about all the freelance sites.
That's a very true observation. Being a PHP developer everyone assumes I know how to operate Photoshop and often ask for a portfolio when >95% of my work is subcutaneous. I've never wooed anyone with sexy accounting interfaces. Chances are, I never will.
You can surely show them a portfolio of sites which you programmed that are pretty because of the template and/or designer you use, right? That's no more dishonest than a photographer showing a picture of a beautiful woman despite not actually being a beautiful woman.
"go talk to all the small business owners there. Offer to build them a site for their business, or redo their current one."
Even better: go talk to the successful and plugged-in small business owners. Pick their brain for startup ideas. Create an industry/niche app/web-app that will help them make/save more money. Then turn it into a product.
How much can you charge for building a site for a small business? While that is probably more fun, I suspect "enterprise projects" for big companies pay way better.
Since these guys really don't know anything about the web, you could throw up a simple HTML template and charge them 5K...on a freelancer site that same job would go for $200
5K is not a lot of money though, for freelancing. I mean it is OK, but it would be only one job. You would have to generate lot's of such "small" jobs. With the "enterprise jobs" you can go for months making >10K every month.
Are those "freelancer sites" mentioned those "joke" sites where people bid on jobs, and offer to program an ebay clone for 50$? I would not waste time with such sites. On Jobserve and Gulp the rates I have seen have generally been fair, (supposedly ~70€ per hour on average).
you might want to give a try at http://odesk.com one can work there on projects which pay per hour, the rates are not great, but much better then $200 for ebay :)
All sounds pretty dire. If you're a developer looking to freelance, go build your contacts with potential clients personally.