Words

I’ve been happily using Rent A Coder for almost two years now. I’m not completely satisfied with it, mainly due to the huge fees, but I guess this is how it works with intermediaries, and to be frank, I doubt I would have been able to find so much (interesting) work as a freelancer by myself.

I’m quite omnivorous in choosing what I do. I don’t take freelance programming jobs, only writing, but that’s not much of a problem; I have written about software development, Web 2.0, marketing, philosophy, history, playing the guitar, medicine, chemistry, gardening and, at some point, penis enlargement.

Despite not being too picky with what I write about, the amount of jobs I actually consider out of what gets posted on Rent A Coder is incredibly small. I think I’ve bid on less than 5% of the jobs that get posted, and frankly, it amazes me to still that people are actually bidding on some. There are so many bids which are just plainly dumb.

They Don’t Really Know What They Want

Too many bids start with ‘I need a coder to write me TEN 400-word articles on <insert topic here>’. No word about target audience, the reader’s profile or expertise, no nothing. Yes, I know most of these articles are intended for article directories and do little more than increase your PageRank, but this doesn’t mean they should be devoid of any planning.

This situation by itself is bearable and not something that keeps me from bidding. Most buyers simply answer “I don’t know, make it as you think” — although I immediately cancel my bid for answers like “I don’t care” (why not just randomly insert 400  keywords then?) , “None” (no target audience? Cool!), “Too many details, keep it simple” (Ask a fourth grader to write it for you). However, it gets intolerable when people want full books.

I know it seems hard to believe (especially if you have only written Cease and Desist or (very bad) sales letters), but writing a book is more than putting enough words to make it worth of printing. There is a plan I need to follow; the content needs to be logically split into parts, so that someone who wants to read the whole book can have a clear picture in the end, without making it useless to those who only want to read one chapter. I need to do some research, the overall style needs to be consistent from one chapter to another, and the difficulty and complexity of the topics must increase gradually.

The story repeats with almost every book I’ve bid for. The buyer knows how many pages he wants. He doesn’t know anything about the potential reader, he doesn’t care about the style of the book. He has no idea about exactly what the book should contain — but he does want the content to be “interesting” and “challenging”.

I’m sorry people, this is not how writing works. Imagine how fun it would be for me to write a book about Web 2.0 which you would sell to absolute beginners, but I would write for programmers. In your terms, it’s like sending a sales letter written in Iraqi to teenagers in Israel. Minus the missiles you will get in return, though.

It’s ok if you do not really know that much about the material you want. In many cases I have worked with people who actually needed the content for their PageRank. But it’s bad behavior to demand a writer to write good content without being able to discuss your definition of ‘good’.

They Don’t Know How Much They Can Pay

These are probably the most tiresome.

There is a reason why Rent A Coder includes “Unsure of project price/Beginner assistance”: when you are not sure about how much to ask, or if you are a beginner and need an expert’s help. Also, there is a reason why there is an “Open to fair suggestions” for the bid amount.

Neither of these refer to the cases when:

• You know what your funds are but don’t want to set a limit. If the absolute maximum you can pay is 150$, put it in the damn box instead of “Open to fair suggestions”. I don’t know what your definition of ‘fair’ is. I may even like your subject so much, that, although I would normally charge you 200$, I would actually work for less. I can’t do that if I don’t have an idea about how you can pay me
• You know how much your job is worth, but you don’t want to look like you can’t pay more. The same thing I said above applies.

There are cases when the above tags do apply. For instance, if you are asking for assistance in setting up a small HTTP server — yes, that counts as “unsure of price/beginner assistance”. They obviously apply; I often don’t charge anything for helping people set HTTP servers. When I do, I usually charge one (1) beer — but I know of people who do. Even I would, in some circumstances.

Another example is when you are bidding for a very complex project, with price easily exceeding 2-3,000$. In such a case, it’s fair to admit that your estimation of a price may be rather gross, and it’s a sane precaution not to put a limit you know nothing about.

In all other cases, if you don’t know what your project’s potential price is, how large it is, what exactly do you actually know about it? Do your homework!

Inconsistent Specifications

If you want me to work on something, I want to know at least what I can expect.

I’ve learned my lesson with this, although not on Rent A Coder. A few years ago, I was asked to extend an embedded application. I had to implement (or rather to finish the implementation that had begun, but was stopped) a few simple protocols, a seemingly trivial job for which I asked a modest sum and a deadline of seven days.

I needed five days only to devise a way to patch the thing up. The application was very badly written, almost inextensible and, seeing the code, I was actually amazed to see it works. In order to add the functions I had to add, I simply ended up rewriting more than half of the code before actually adding my own.

The folks I worked for were amazed to see what I had done (the program was simply crawling before I worked it out, and now it was working at least four times faster than before) and gave me a hefty bonus. However, as hefty as it was, if I knew what they had in mind, I wouldn’t have accepted that job in the first place.

The same applies on Rent A Coder, and it’s the reason why I simply refuse to bid when the buyer cannot tell me exactly what he needs.

It’s ok if an interesting idea strikes you in the middle of the project. If it doesn’t require too much of an effort, I don’t even expect a bonus. I sometimes do it the other way round (some bright idea strikes me and I do it for free). It’s not ok if, two days after the start of the project, you remember to say you also need a couple of other things, then other things and so on.

Unless you can clearly state what you need, without changing this in the process, I don’t want to work with you.

What You Ask Is Not Impossible, Only Dumb

I’ve seen it a couple of times in the shape of “I need ten 400-word PHP tutorials. They need to be original and interesting, targeted at advanced users”.

The web is full of PHP tutorial. I don’t think there is a beginner’s topic that is not covered in several hundred tutorials. Sure, you don’t want the average tutorial. Something for experts would do.

The average “for experts” tutorial usually includes a 400-word introduction. A serious, advanced tutorial on a complex and interesting topic is about 2000 words. Hell, the code in such a tutorial is probably 400 words itself!

If I actually twisted the article to the point of being useless, I could probably cover some advanced topic in an “advanced, interesting and original” tutorial, but that would be extremely dumb, useless and certainly something I don’t want in my past jobs. Unfortunately, it’s not impossible to do either.

Again, this is the typical case when those who ask for such articles don’t really have any idea about what they are asking for. If you need advanced PHP tutorials for your website, at least ask a PHP expert to handle your Rent A Coder job.

The whole thing can be generalized; jobs like these keep popping up. Morale? If you have no idea about the field of the job you are posting, let someone else post it.