Online job boards

techuser — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:17:19 +0000

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Last year I spent an inordinate amount of time bidding on jobs on guru.com and elance.com. I did win a few jobs and managed to make a small pittance (which was completely wiped out by subscription costs, escrow fees, commissions and taxes - oh my god, taxes: double my calculations... why do I continue to put up with life in the UK? It's the best I've got I suppose).

The win rate was tiny. 3% or so.

Towards the end I started placing bids at an equivalent of 3 or 4 pounds per hour and was still being undercut. Incredible. The rates in the UK for software development are 40 to 150 pounds per hour, even more for specialist work. The absolute minimum to live on and provide the infrastructure for doing the work, given a 50% utilisation rate, is £30 per hour (equivalent to perhaps £6/hour at a normal salaried job excluding any holidays) - but the utilisation rate with online boards ends up as just a few percent as incredible amounts of time is spent writing quotes to disappear into black holes.

Normally it'd be time for a sales person (which would be me, again) to make a follow up call, sell the quote and get the job - but no, not possible. You can continue to drop messages into private message boards all you like but you'll not get a response for most bids - 99 in a hundred.

I've ended up back on the boards. They've changed recently. Elance.com I no longer understand. I can't find where the jobs are listed. Guru.com has started revealing win rates in the job listings for those leaving bids. Posting on these boards really is soul destroying and I wish I wouldn't do it.

What I need really is an agent to find jobs for me - I've seen many examples of people working full time like this, one guy brokering the sales and acting as the support/contact point, the other the programmer/implementor. I don't have the time to both find and do jobs, and unfortunately work simply isn't going to fall into my lap.

It isn't just to keep me in work really, there is some altruism in my words. The quality of work I've seen from these hundred or thousand times underpriced projects can be quite shocking. Some of the jobs I've won are to add features to existing sites, often originally built from job board postings. I've found most to be dangerously badly written. SQL injection, even code injection, unencrypted critical data, etc.

I did once post a job myself. If you can't beat them, join them - I'll get a chap in Pune to write my software. Well, the quality of quotes that came back were very variable. I suspect many people, including those receiving the bids, have never seen a professional services quote. There were perhaps one or two from thirty that appeared to know what they were doing. The prices quoted also varied widely - I'd estimated the project at a day's work perhaps, say £500 worth of time from a developer or small team. I had quotes from £10,000 to £100. Disturbingly modal average was around £1000 - double what I'd have quoted. The cheaper quotes were much cheaper, putting the mean average well over £1000. From this I concluded that most employers are going with the lowest bid, no matter what. Eventually I didn't go ahead with the project, and stopped bidding from that point on. Until now.

Technological Wanderings - guru.com

Online job boards