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Comment by skolor | Hacker News Reader

This is actually far more interesting than the article. I tried using Rentacoder for a while, but after getting turned down for ~20 jobs, and seeing what someone the winning bids were, I stopped doing that fairly quickly.

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The main problem with Rentacoder and like websites, is that you need to find very small projects to work on, and bid some pathetic amount to get some ratings going before you can look at some real money, Or severly undercut yourself, and waste a heap of time for relatively no return.

Some of the best people on oDesk are making 80k USD a year fulltime, or 40k working half-time. That's not bad. Too bad there are only a small handful at that level.

I'm an independent technology consultant myself, and constantly struggle to find leads. I've heard mixed results on guru and oDesk ... at the startup where I'm CTO, we've hired people specializing in niche ecomm packages off of elance _dirt_ cheap ... shamefully cheap. Typically from Malaysia.

It's such a mucky business ...

how would you rate the quality of work from those you hired at dirt cheap rates?

For specialized niche sort of work, it typically took longer than expected, but the quality was reasonable. Not guru-level, beautiful code necessarily, but workable where it counted -- when interfacing with various third party packages, being used by other third parties, without support from us.

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