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Having found myself recently in a situation where I'm simply not getting the contracts out of my network that I used to , I decided its time to start hitting up the contracting sites out there to try and rustle up some iphone/ipad development contracts. And boy was I in for a surprise at what these sites actually entail. Generally for iphone dev contracts I'm used to charging between $50 to $100 , and sometimes even higher per hour, depending on the project and depending on the difficulty. This is about normal for the IT industry for someone of my experience, although in truth, I could be earning more. But lately the bottoms fallen out of the market a bit. So I finally decided to sign up with ELance. To bid on almost anything you first have to pass an Elance aptitude test. This loving test doesnt actually test any job specific skills, but rather its for questions like "Where can I find more information about how to succeed on Elance?". Well I dunno ELance, YOU TELL ME? Then it wants me to physically mail it Identification and on and on and on. OK, Hurdles, fair enough I'll be taking peoples money off them, a bit of fuckery is to be expected. But thats not what this thread is about. This is what this thread is about;- quote:Sell mobile solutions to small business owners (i.e. mobile apps, mobile websites, text messaging. This is actually a big budget offer for this site. $5000 to create what appears to be a smartphone emulator that can do android AND iphone simulation. Sure thing buddy! quote:Develop an app that does your homework for you. All subjects. Touch subject, type in problem or question, and your answer is right on the screen. Its a bit of a shame they specified under $500. I think this is achievable if they can stretch their budget to buy google, and then engage on a multi decades long research project into AI with no guarantee of completion! Of the other sites, GURU.COM appears to have even worse projects, and you have to pay absurd sums of cash to to bid a few hundred dollars to write apps that display omnipotence quote:Job Description Applicants: 19 (avg $31.31/hr) Interviewing: 9 (avg $16.70/hr) Hourly - Est. Time: Less than 1 week, As needed - Less than 10 hrs/week Three platforms. ios, android and Mac (but apparently not windows), and using the techniques of "genetic algorithms" and "benefits". Under 10 hours. What could possibly go wrong? I think I need a career change.
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| # ¿ Feb 3, 2012 06:43 |
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| # ¿ May 22, 2013 02:05 |
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That Turkey Story posted:Only because it's somewhat relevant... ahahaha. For fun and games, have a read of the unity forums for all the MMO projects people want to start with free labor. People genuinely have no idea about the labor this sort of thing takes.
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| # ¿ Feb 3, 2012 08:51 |
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Hammerite posted:I'm not sure which is stranger about things like this - the lack of insight into how complex and time-consuming a task they are proposing, or the presumption that they can hand off the actual work of creating the thing to a bunch of willing minions and then sit back as a sort of creative director figure and take all the credit. Actually I'm going to go for the latter, because when you consider how computer programming and related concepts are portrayed in mass media it probably does (if you know literally nothing about it) seem like it must just be a case of waving your fingers over the keyboard and chanting a few well-chosen magic words. For serious. Big MMOs will take obscene multiples of millions of dollars to develop over DNF like development lifespans (well sort of) by seriously experienced game megacompanies and still fail. The idea that some modder kids on a forum could do it is loving amazing. I mean maybe some REALLY dedicated dudes could pull off a late-90s era isometric thingo with a lot of spare time and a big enough scene, but something that anyone is actually going to play is another matter altogether. I mean gently caress, just generating 3D assets can be amazingly more labor intensive than most people realize. Eve online makes giant anouncements when they just give some new spaceships a skin-job. God help anyone wanting to get their buddies and craft skyrim-the-mmo over a bunch of weekends.
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| # ¿ Feb 3, 2012 12:54 |
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From oDeskquote:Videogame surfer skit Budget: $250 tl;dr of project: I have no loving idea.
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| # ¿ Feb 3, 2012 13:21 |
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quote:Console Game Programmer / Developer Applicants: 2 (avg $28.62) Interviewing: 1 (avg $1.67)
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| # ¿ Feb 3, 2012 18:16 |
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floor is lava posted:(Imagine the entire quote being bold.) Ahaha, thats less than welfare where I live. But a 15% cut of the profits!  We're in the money now lads!
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| # ¿ Feb 3, 2012 19:44 |
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genki posted:
Thats the problem though. The kid was a freak, and he probably was at it for months and months. I remember when that came out and was facepalming at the fact he had sold it for a few hundred K, because if it did what he claimed it did, he'd solved some fairly major AI problems in the process and could probably add a couple of zeros on that sales price pitching it to google or bing. The idea isn't new, folks where talking about it in the 90s, but I could never remember any of the attempts at doing it succeeding. This kid, if his gizmo works is either some sort of super-genius doogie howser kid, or accidently stumbled on something about Natural language processing thats been sitting there sticking out like a sore thumb whilst a couple of decades of experts where walking around with blindfolds on. Truth be told, it probably runs like poo poo. But of course thats what you see "16yo kid invents magical article sumarizer" and think "Well I can throw a few hundred out there, get someone to make ME one and maybe I will sell it to google and get loving rich "Folks just dont always understand that behind simple things lie ridiculous complexity and sometimes behind complex things theres a striking simplicity. Take as an example a bit of an illusion re window sizes and value that I had pointed out to me in the 90s. When writing desktop software you should never make it a small window thing that lives in a tool popup if you intend on charging money, because people will see the window and think "This is a small program". But if it has a really big window with lots of widgets and dingles they think "This is a BIG program!", and adjust their perception of value accordingly. So people didnt want to pay too much for virus scanners that just had little windows and lived in a tiny icon on the tool bar because they where "tiny" despite the fact that virus scanners are some of the most complex bits of software and research on your machine. But when Norton et/al started using bigger windows they found they where able to charge more money because people where all "Woah this is a big program here!". Of course it backfires if your TRYING to seem small. And if your computer is chugging you'll prefer things with tiny windows than bigger windows because the bigger windows seem like they'd use more CPU. But in reality the difference between a program with a big and small window is precisely nothing in terms of code complexity or CPU load. And this is why these loving sites dont want to pay more than $1K for an iphone app or dipshits on app stores wont pay more than $2 for an app. Because they are "little" programs, and from a user perception point of view it simply doesnt matter that writing the loving things are a lot more dificult than writing a website because its god drat C and "C" stands for "stinkyhole". Which is why you should write ipad apps. Bigger screen = Perceived as "bigger" app = Bigger $$$ End rant...
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| # ¿ Feb 4, 2012 11:12 |
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Huragok posted:Also found a pretty slick site the other day at http://gun.io, but there's not a lot going on except recruiting for companies. $60 to add highlighting support to a a text editor? They have to be pulling the piss.... gently caress, most of that $60 would get eaten up by bank transfer fees ffs.
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| # ¿ Feb 4, 2012 13:44 |
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unixbeard posted:It's not that hard to make a summarizer using nltk or something, IBM has a bunch of papers That won't work on any newspaper article written inverse pyramid (ie , prettymuch all off them) and anyway news articles are one sentence per paragraph anyway.
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| # ¿ Feb 5, 2012 05:20 |
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Aaand I hit the jackpot. Just had a guy contact me on oDesk with an offer of regular work at $60 an hour because I'm in the same city. I'm also getting spammed by a dubai company that wants my services at $10 an hour doing "project management". Uh, thanks but no thanks dubai dudes.
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| # ¿ Feb 6, 2012 05:08 |
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Huragok posted:You'd think that with all the cash sloshing around Dubai there'd be some reasonable wages on offer. And plenty of philipinos and indians in enough poverty to take $10 because its better than the alternative (starvation). These sites are pretty exploitative really. Theres no good reason why a philipino coder should get less money than an american except western privelege. The earlier comment about how as a western dude I'm automatically project leader seems correct. I'm getting the project lead offers despite having 0 hours racked up on the site because it has "Australia" and a white late 30s professinal looking face on the profile. If my name was Ahmed and I was a 20yo pakistani guy, i'd be getting offered the hack jobs. But am I any better than Ahmed? Probably not. But they still want it for $10 lol. gently caress no.
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| # ¿ Feb 6, 2012 07:58 |
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genki posted:Yup, pretty much! Awesome. Its kind of a shame that the lolbertarian history of coding means most programmers are alergic to the idea of trade unions, because I'd love to see an international trade union that waged jihad against companies exploting indian kids for $10 an hour by basically signing up all those indians and saying "Look kid, if enough say NO to the $5-10 offer then eventually we can get all you guys on $40 an hour. Believe me the companies hiring you can can afford that sort of money". If nobody works for $10, these clowns owuld have to either start paying us all proper money, or gently caress off and go bankerupt. Either outcome works for me. Sadly it'd never work, because a lot of these guys are in poverty paying off terible university debts in lovely third world countries and have to take anything offered to them, and it'd require solidarity from first world workers who frankly are too busy rubbing one out to pictures of ron paul or ayn rand to give a gently caress about their brothers in third world countries. But nobody is winning this picture. The indians lose out because ultimately they are not getting paid what they are worth, and I lose out because I'm getting drastically undercut by sweatshop labor. Put us on a more even playing field and coders as a general rule all win. duck monster fucked around with this message at Feb 6, 2012 around 08:06 |
| # ¿ Feb 6, 2012 08:03 |
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OK. Protip, kids: oDesk. Sign up, do a few of the tests and just spamming out realistic price quotes on everything until you find someone who recognizes you have talent despite not charging $10 an hour. Its taken 3 days but I'm innundated with offers. Some hilarious, but a few have been actually really good and this guy in my city is just overflowing with work at a good solid price.
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| # ¿ Feb 6, 2012 08:15 |
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The odesk client software is an owellian nightmare though. It lets employers take screenshots of your desktop to make sure your doing your work. Remember to switch it off when you go to rub one out@
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| # ¿ Feb 6, 2012 08:40 |
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Prepare to vomit blood. This is from the dubai company that was trying to hire me for $10 an hour http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAWT8Vd88Tk Ignoring that IT has spent the past 30 years trying to get away from the "henry ford" approach where any hold up grinds the rest of a team top a halt, or ignoring the fact that software development is more like R&D than assembly line (well web dev can feel a bit assembly line since 90% its the same loving site over and over again) I wonder if they are telling their customers that team of experts from around the world are mostly third world 20yos on $10 an hour working under orwellian conditions with software monitors alerting management if they so much as alt-tab to facebook.
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| # ¿ Feb 6, 2012 09:10 |
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pigdog posted:Back in the day, in the dotcom era I totally programmed a couple of projects at $5/hour. For a highschool kid in Eastern Europe who didn't pay taxes or anything, that was pretty good money. Western Union all the way. Of course in the hindsight the sites were horrible Perl CGI monstrosities, but I remember the dating site I made charged some Nobody really knew what the gently caress they where doing back then. Its a lot more mature market now however. With that said , there are still ratfucks trying to shaft ukranians for $7 an hour and whatnot. My suggestion to any young eastern european is shaft the ratfucks back.
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| # ¿ Feb 6, 2012 13:18 |
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for access and probably made good profit.
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unixbeard posted:I got hired as a webdev when i was 19 with no qualifications and no experience and there's no way that would've happened if I needed to have some dumb ACS membership. Most professional white-collar bodies can die in a fire for all I care. I want a union, not some industry gate keeper protecting grey-hair jobs by keeping the kids out.
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| # ¿ Feb 7, 2012 08:49 |
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Otto Skorzeny posted:I want a square, not a rectangle huh?
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| # ¿ Feb 7, 2012 09:17 |
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kalleth posted:he's saying the two are basically the same thing, afaics Right. Thats a kind of wierd assertion to make. v  v
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| # ¿ Feb 7, 2012 12:03 |
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Contero posted:Back in school in real-time graphics class, students could present their game ideas to the class in hopes of gaining enough people to form a team and complete the game as their term project. The unity development forums are hilarious like that. Tonnes of kids, and it can only be kids because no adult with any experience would think like this, declaring they are working on MMOs and they just need "some coders and artists" to do the programming and art. Absolutely in idea how massive these projects are, and just how much man power is required just to make up a useable human model with clothes and basic animation let alone building an entire world with enough content to keep people playing for months. Or RPGs. Lots of RPG projects. No kids, your not going to build Skyrim II on unity with a teem of 3 teenage concept "artists". e: I'm getting lots of offers in my contracting work to make IOS games. I really loving want one of these projects , but god drat people run off screaming when I give them even a cut-rate quote. I think the guy I work withs idea of building a proc filter that automatically /dev/null's any email with the word "game" or "social network" is actually a pretty good one. duck monster fucked around with this message at Apr 8, 2012 around 04:37 |
| # ¿ Apr 8, 2012 04:35 |
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quote:I was thinking of a video game that would be similar to james bond but instead you have a choice of characters. Like a woman with large breasts and a petite body like laura croft. We could have an alien or something as another character. If you get a certain achievement then you can unlock that character. We could have different guns and different levels. An abandon house would be good or a titanic sized ship. You start from one side and try to make it to the other while fighting different enemies like ninjas and what not you must tap on the enemy to fire at him. they would pop up behind barrels and other thing. This is just a layout of how I would picture this game. Theres many games out there but bringing a first person shooter game would be a big change.
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| # ¿ Apr 9, 2012 06:45 |
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2nd Rate Poster posted:How do you end up responding to requests like that? Like I did for my recent enquiry that wanted an app that turns iphone/ipad apps to a literal mirror not using the camera. By bsaically writing to them and mocking the gently caress out of them.
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2012 13:56 |
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God I'd have a few entries on that. One guy owes me at least $7K and I'll probably never see it, since my last interaction was cops turning up after I offered to Kneecap him (hint, dont offer to kneecap clients)
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2012 21:10 |
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Suspicious Dish posted:Uh, I put in things that I've been owed ($60 for website design, I was a kid), and there was no validity checking at all. What's to stop someone from putting in bogus data? Lawmakers can easily throw it out because it's just meaningless numbers with no actual data. Its not really the point. Its not a legal document. Its simply just an illustrative document stating that theres a FUCKLOAD of us contracters out there getting raped by dodgey clients and we wants something to be done about it. Any lawmaker finding quarrel with that will lose votes on account of "being a dickhead". Remember us indies are businesmen too, we're constituents of BOTH the big end and the labor end of politics.
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| # ¿ Apr 30, 2012 04:55 |
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hobbesmaster posted:So I didn't see anything on the website about it, but what exactly are you expecting them to do? Small claims court improvements (I dont actually know if you have one in the US, if so, awesome) , federal pentalties for shafting contractors, theres lots of legislative ideas that can be come up with to put the power back into small contracters hands to make sure bills are paid. The problem as it stands, is that taking a company to court over a $500 bill costs a hideously large amount of money and certainly more than $500. The end result is companies can feel relatively safe hiring contractors to take jobs and then not paying them for the work. That needs to change. All the list does is demonstrate that the scope of the problem is a large one, and for every fake entry, theres probably a hundred not on there (It'd represent a fracttion of a percent of bad debt, at my guess)
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| # ¿ May 10, 2012 05:17 |
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More fun! Cheap games, courtesy of Guru.com! quote:Project ID: 878414 quote:Title: Mobile App Similar Style to Angry Birds quote:Title: Need Game Developer for Mobile App duck monster fucked around with this message at Oct 5, 2012 around 09:29 |
| # ¿ Oct 5, 2012 09:27 |
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Its a pretty good bet! Either you get your $1000 or your friend invents a loving powersuit. Either option kind of owns. (Your probably getting your $1000)
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| # ¿ Oct 6, 2012 22:11 |
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Suspicious Dish posted:"mini-Adsense websites" means "spam", right? Yup. Although bobthecheese's youtube bot ad is probably more disturbing. Linkfarmers are bad, but spam botters have a special circle of hell reserved just for them, and maybe hitler.
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| # ¿ Dec 12, 2012 11:06 |
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:Has anybody had success with using elance to contract cheap coding or css work? I want to create a website and I'd need to learn/relearn php and jquery, but I'm wondering if it'd be easier to pay someone to do sections and various grunt work (e.g. set up a payment gateway + confirmation system that ties into a generic DB, and then css and graphical designs for tables etc that must conform to mobile formats). The idea is that it'd be self-contained and functional within that generic context, and I'd request they comment it reasonably and not produce unintelligible code (regardless of functionality), and I could just modify it into my site's context, or look at how they've done it (e.g. form data in payment processing system) and expand upon that as required. Wildly bad successes. A lot of these guys put in *very* half arsed jobs because frankly the money is poo poo. Add to that the big grinding coder sweatshops where they are pretty much made to hit stupidly unrealistic deadlines, and the results are rarely satistfying. I got to befriend a couple of dudes working these places and most of them are miserable working 15+ hour days , 7 day a week, often being cheap import labor from the philipines or india into places like Singapore where they cop a lot of racism and bullshit from the local companies. On the other hand, contemplate a headhunt. If you *do* find a good coder at one of these sweatshops, buy the kid out. We had a Sri lankan guy we found in one of these joints who was having a horrible time in this Singaporean sweatshop for about $8 an hour whilst his wife was raising 5 kids back home alone. So we told him to move back to sri lanka, get a big old house in a nice burb for his him and his family and we'll pay the rent (It came to about $70 a week for a McMansion. ) and we put him on $700 a week and good conditions. He was loyal as gently caress to us and did great code, even if his english was pretty shithouse. e: The boss called it the "Pimp out the poor plan". Basically you find an awesome quality third world coder and you pay him like a first world junior coder to set up his own office and arrange his life so poverty or bad conditions are not distracting him. He's making stupid money, hand over fist by the standards of the local cost of living , and will make heaven and earth move to keep earning that sort of wages , and you pay less than an undergrad. Plus the warm fuzzy feeling of turning a poor dude into a rich dude. Admittedly his term for it kinda had an awful ring of prostitution, he was startled when I pointed that out. duck monster fucked around with this message at Feb 11, 2013 around 14:30 |
| # ¿ Feb 11, 2013 14:21 |
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Mandalay posted:Is this a reasonable eLance request? I just posted it and am not getting any bites Don't exploit poor dudes bro. Pay them like they where local to you. You'll get great quality work and get to feel good about it afterwards. If you offered $40 an *hour*, you'll get an indian guy whos making more than decent coin by his local rates, and he'll do a great job (Avoid the big companies, find an underworked little guy with a portfolio).
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| # ¿ Feb 11, 2013 14:32 |
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| # ¿ May 22, 2013 02:05 |
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Mandalay posted:Holy poo poo man *I* make a fraction of $40 an hour. Like half that. Maybe I should elance. Then your getting ripped off badly. Get a new job. The only time I'll ever do $40 an hour is for a client who I know is really broke but I want to maintain a relationship with them, and I've got nothing else on.
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| # ¿ Feb 15, 2013 11:15 |
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