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Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

I tried Freelancer.com when I was starting out, I was really happy when I got my first gig, I did a good job, the client was pleased, I got paid an equivalent of £1 an hour but accepted that as my foot in the door... I tried to keep going down this route but quickly realised that this kind of competitive race to the bottom in terms of price is not just the the entry level experience, it's just generally expected.

This guy is in the top 0.5% and while i'm sure he's earning much more than I did on freelancer, I expect he would be far better off on his own or under full employment. Clients go to freelancer to get cheap labour, for workers I think that it's a great place for someone to go to dip their toes in the water for one of the types of work they advertise, but it's not a place to make a living.

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Same here at vWorker. Did great work, ranked in the 100s, but it was not sustainable.

To top it off I got a job to implement a forex trading algorithm. He had a system to buy/sell on signals.

But when it came down to it, it didn't trade profitably. He wouldn't believe the code worked, and I couldn't convince him his scheme was flawed because it worked when he did it manually - and I've watched his youtube videos of him trading live. Obviously his scheme on paper didn't capture his feel for trading visually. (And I know now it is very challenging to make it work at all).

Went to arbitration and they decided I'd get 50% of the fee.

Sounds like the time I decided to try one of these sites and ended up with a client who wanted software written to pick winning lottery numbers based on some system he'd devised to analyze past winning lottery numbers. Of course such a thing will never work in a fair lottery.

Guy refused to pay the $10 price after the "work" was done. Validated my suspicions that those types of site are a total waste of time even if he had paid the fee.

Genuinely curious: why would you accept a job to do the impossible? Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding and his refusal to pay was totally separate from the fact his whole idea was flawed?

Refusal to pay is directly related to the lottery "system". Buyer was an idiot.

One reason I never hire from freelancer sites. Every coder has been burned by some idiot and it affects my purchase ability.

Where do you go to hire freelancers then?

Local network, same advice others give. Don't need to pick one from 10k ransoms, pick 1 from 5 in extended network.

I'm glossing over the details. The actual description of the software the guy wanted written was very straight forward. That said something like, Python program that imports the historical pick-4 results from the North Carolina Lottery and allowed the user to look-up the last date those numbers were picked regardless of order. The job had a fixed price of $10.

This was a long time ago but I think my thought process was that doing the hourly rate jobs at $2.00 per hour would never be viable so I was trying to find fixed price jobs that were miss priced in the sense that I knew I could perhaps do them in 30 minutes but the purchaser assumed it would be several hours of work. This project fit the bill. The job description didn't actually explain that the guy wanted to use the software as part of his nutty system to game the lottery. That only came out later after the work was done.

That makes much more sense. Thanks for satisfying my curiosity.

The more they haggle the more unlikely it is for them to pay

$10 price?? Why did you even start the work?

I dealt with a pair of founders that prided on having grown their company without needing funding.

Turned out they deliberately forced every freelancer and supplier into arbitration. Complained about the quality and just withheld payments. It always ended up in settling, which meant that in the end they paid less.

Of course they had to find new ones every time but hey, the market is huge.

Ended up settling too.

That's why I'm friends with lawyers. It is like using a nuclear weapon to kill mosquito -- mosquito dies.

Next time just tell the person "No problem. Keep the money. I will publish the software for free online since you believe it does not work, let's see what others think."

Am I the only one seeing the irony in this being posted on Trustpilot, a website letting contractors and other businesses pay hundreds of dollars not to destroy their reputation?

lol, I did not see that... does that mean the author would potentially get a cut of that? just thinking he sounds pretty desperate for cash.

Some of it may also depend on where you live. A pay rate people in Western countries would scoff at may be a perfectly comfortable living wage in less fortunate countries.

There's probably some dip in the quality of products you get, but sometimes clients view shoddy and affordable as good enough... If they are even aware of the difference.

Yes I totally get that, It's actually something I considered if I ever had an extended stay in a part of some part of south Asia or something... You would get to live in an interesting part of the world, you get paid crap, but relative to the local value of goods it would be fine.

I also get the "shoddy is good enough" thing, and while I hate to write junk code, I know it has it's places such as proof of concepts... that in fact is exactly the kind of work I did on freelancer.

I agree with the race to the bottom part.

Never.. ever.. catch yourself in a race to the bottom.

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