Source: Rent A Coder User/Reader Comment on AU Interactive Blog

I think that RAC (Rent A Coder) is `dead` for now. With rates so ridiculously low only providers with very little knowlege or no chances for a ‘real’ job will stay there.

Most of the projects on RAC are for $20-$100USD and the requirements are insane. Eg. $50 for designing a professional website, $400 for youtube and other big sites clones, etc.

On the other side, how “work” done on RAC looks? Like it was finished in 1990’s. Tables, no css, font tags, spaghetti coding, no object oriented programming, lack of any code structure, planning, comments, etc.

I’m not suprised. When you go for a job that pays $1/hour you certainly don’t have time nor skill to finish it properly. And you’ll do everything to do it fast so you’ll end up with $1.50 / hour. It’s still ridiculous, but more than $1 anyway. How insane should you be to devote time and skill to $1/hour projects when it’ll only lower your rate to a couple of cents / hour.

Let’s be honest that RAC promotes bad providers and cheap, crappy, insecure code. When you devote more time to do something right on RAC you get punished for your goodwill.

I could be cleaning toilets in my third world country and still earn more than on RAC. And when cleaning toilets (or doing any kind of work) my government provides me with:
* medical care
* paid holidays
* social care (insurance)
When working on RAC with average projects i would still earn less, have no benefits and have to pay 30% tax anyway (+rac fees, money transfer fees and money conversion fees).

Together with lowest bid limit set to only $3 and “3USD + i give you good rating” projects ($3 to cover the rac fee coder get $0) this is insane.

I got some good projects on RAC but good projects there are maybe about 5% of all projects posted. Most posts on RAC isn’t even worth reading. I think that professionals will move to odesk quickly as I did.

>>When the coders encounter technical issues (which ALWAYS happens), you’re not charged for the overtime of fixing them.>>
When the coders encounter technical issues, eg. because the buyer came up with new requirement and half ot the application need to be re-built you can change the requirement, drop it or proceed and pay for additional time. Thats a fair deal. On RAC the buyers change requirements all the time during the projects and simply don’t care about how much time it’ll take or how you do it, how fair is that?

You are right that technical issues will always be there and i try to include this into the project bid. But there is problem with providers on RAC. Most of them doesn’t know what they are doing. They accept several weeks/months project for $50 then you see all those (repost)(repost). I’m tired of competing on market where all high-school kids can outbid me. I loose time writing serious bids that buyers like but they go for the kids that charge $1 hour or less and hope the project will get finished. Just to get it reposted.

Source Link: Adventures in Outsourcing: Rent-A-Coder vs. oDesk