RentACoder Losing Street Cred?

Itninja writes, "Having used RAC several times in the past (as a buyer), I was shocked by a recent experience. I did a bit of looking around to see if I was the only one having problems with Rent-A-Coder. Apparently, I'm not." From the article: "This unfairness of RAC fees motivates the majority of coders to negotiate payment outside the scope of RAC which amounts to you and coder getting a better deal. For example, I have several coders that I fully trust willing to work on projects on a monthly basis because it is easier for him to deal with established clients than to have to bid for projects all the time. It saves me time and trouble because I can work with a person that I trust and he knows what is expected." A comment to this posting links a discussion of RAC at Google Groups, and there the service has its defenders. What has your experience of RAC been, either as a buyer or as a coder?

The Middleman

[nmb3000]

This sounds like RAC is facing the same problems any other middleman service does eventually. Specifically:

1) People soon start trying to remove the middleman, saving both the client and vendor time and money
2) There are always a few 'bad eggs' in the basket and there's not much you can do about it (and is one reason people start to do #1 above)

I don't think there's anything wrong with RAC establishing relations between coders and buyers, but they shouldn't complain if people stop using them because they've already found a match. I'd much rather find a trustworthy contact for whom I could do freelance development and then stick with them, instead of hunting through offers and making bids.

What's wrong with going outside RAC?

[UbuntuDupe]

If you already know the person, and you can trust them, and have worked with them before, you no longer need RAC's services, and you won't get their escrow or mediation help either if something goes wrong. But at that point, the Coder is more like a semi-regular employee for you.

Also, I had a bad experience there. It was partly because I rushed to post the program specs, but also because the Coder was a complete dick. He'd always demand payment despite not making milestones. He'd show he understood the specs with an example, and then two phases in, "forgot" that he had to meet that, and had a solution worked out that precluded it, requiring him to start over. He tried to clarify the specs for one of the phases by putting it in his own words. It looked good, so I just made that the formal contract for that phase. Then, in arbitration, he claimed the requirements were unclear and vague. Yeah -- his own words, vague. He's since been banned since the arbitration.

Btw, what's with U.S. programmers complaining about wages? The task was a simple word-processor that handled stuff similar to html markup. It couldn't have taken a regular programmer more than 10 hours, working from pre-existing solutions (open source stuff was okay) and there were no (trustworthy) bids under $500. And none at any price from America.

Re:The Middleman

[Red Flayer]

1) People soon start trying to remove the middleman, saving both the client and vendor time and money

Of course, any middleman company worth its salt would have legal recourse if any service provider of theirs actually went ahead and did this. Every employment contract I've ever seen stipulates that the employee cannot go work for a client without the express written permission of the employer.

Anecdotally, a past employer of mine got sued (and lost) for poaching an employee of one of our consulting firms... nasty stuff, breach of contract is.

Re:Which begs the question

[TigerNut]

From the coders' perspective they would be better served if they could submit sealed bids (or at least, if the bids or statistics were only visible to the organization that posted the job). In that way you wouldn't get people going "$500? I can do that for $400" and progressively undercutting each other right out of existence.

Re:The Middleman

[CastrTroy]

However, the middle man in this case only sets up work for specific projects. So if I hire a coder from RAC to do project A, and they do a good job, I may just decide to go around RAC and get them to do project B also. I may also decide to hire them full time. I don't really see anything wrong with this, as RAC (from my understanding) is set up to provide coders for specific projects. I don't imagine the coders sign anything saying they are only allowed to get work through RAC, or that the people hiring may not hire someone they've worked with through RAC.

Re:What's wrong with going outside RAC?

[Anonymous Coward]

But there's the problem: All the contracts want unencumbered source that you have to give up all rights to. I'd guess a lot of people just ignore that and use code they can find on the internet. If all they want is a solution that they can use, many of them are "no brainers". But if you have to build them from scratch, they're ridiculous.

Re:What's wrong with going outside RAC?

[bzipitidoo]

couldn't have taken a regular programmer more than 10 hours

How do you know that? I think part of the problem with the basic idea is the extreme difficulty of predicting how long a project will take. But even before that, it can be a big problem merely to specify what is to be done. You sound like you were cheated by a coder who was deliberately making specification even more difficult.

You mention pre-existing solutions. That's another thing that makes scheduling software engineering extremely difficult. If one can take existing work and tweak it a bit, it might indeed be possible in 10 hours. But one could spend a lot of time trying to adapt existing software only to discover it won't work because there are fundamental problems, such as finally understanding that the way the data is structured makes it impossible to add a new feature in an efficient way. Starting from scratch, a "simple" word processing project could easily take months. MS-Word wasn't written in a day. Neither was emacs. You may also get a rush job, where the poor programmer is throwing in functions from libraries all over the spectrum, to produce something that meets the requirements but is so slow, bloated, and fragile it must be rewritten.

Yes, I'm in America. I looked at Rentacoder, and decided it wasn't worth my time. Many of the requests had a Dilbertesque flavor of "anything I don't understand can be done in 6 minutes".

Very true...

[mohjlir]

In that way you wouldn't get people going "$500? I can do that for $400" and progressively undercutting each other right out of existence.

This is a big problem, and one that is difficult to address. A lot of inexperienced programmers underestimate the amount of time required to execute a project to an acceptable level of completion. "Text editor? I'll do that for $50".

Re:Very true...

[Metasquares]

My experience is that you agree to create a text editor and deliver it well ahead of schedule. When you deliver that, however, the buyer's expectations change. Now he wants Word for the same $50.