"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.
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.