Exhedra - RentACoder
Must read for buyers and coders!

On April 10, a bid request for a Super Debugger was posted on RentACoder by a buyer named ATuring. The bidding was scheduled to close on April 30 with a deadline of 90 days. It was in the Medium Business Project price range. The specs were as follows:

I require a program that can accept source code in all the major languages (C / C#, VB, Java, PHP.net), analyze any loop structures within the source code, and determine whether the program will run from beginning to end or will run in an infinite loop. It must be in the form of a windows application with a file input control and status bar messages.

For anyone who isn't familiar with this project, it's a manifestation of the Turing Halting Problem. The Turing Halting Problem is to find an algorithm that can read programs as input and determine whether or not there will be infinite loops. This was proven to be impossible in the early 20th century by Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science.in other words, the project cannot be done, even by a reasonable and competent coder.

The point of the bid request was to see if coders in RAC were smart enough to ask questions related to the project and conduct research on their own BEFORE agreeing to do anything. My findings were rather disappointing. Not only have coders posted bids on the project without reviewing the specs, but some of them were ranked 9 out of 10 or higher with as many as 72 successful projects to their name. Here is a list of the coders who (with consent) participated in this experiment:

Coders Who DID NOT Bid (The Good)
wataylor
Realtime Engineering
jpapp
isidor
-Ajay-
akamaus
biotech86
ClassiX Soft UK
bitdonkey
GVahe
BGDN.net

Coders Who DID Bid (The Bad)
Al Wonderer (Rating 8.4)
Umbraco (Rating 9.07)
outsourcing guru
samia21
Asad Inc. (Rating 9.98)
Rjavier (Rating 8.44)
Soft-AX
CodeXp3rtS
Claudiocordera
John Doeish

Coders Who Asked for More Money (The Ugly)
Cyclone Soft (Rating 9.55) (Asked for $50,000)

Although there are more coders who did not bid, their names will not be mentioned simply because they implied interest and competence in being able to code the project without figuring out in advance that it was impossible. Those coders are advised to conduct more thorough research in future projects BEFORE they comment on any bid requests period. If this project had an expert guarantee and you accepted the project, then you would have been screwed.

After a thorough review of the buyers who actually bid on this project, I have noticed several trends. The most obvious link is that most of these coders are from Pakistan and India. I'm not sure what it implies, but it sorely discredits the quality of the coders from those areas. I work full-time with Indian coders and they would be embarrassed to see their brothers and sisters displaying such unprofessionalism.

The second commonality is the overwhelming amount of cut-and-paste responses that fail to address the bid request. Stop trying to TELL a buyer that you can do the job and SHOW him you can do the job by asking relevant questions and providing related demos if possible. If you were a buyer and had 10 people simply stating that the project can be done while one coder provides a demonstration or a detailed explanation of how it could be done with a time estimate, who would you pick for the job?

The third, most disturbing thing amongst the people who made outright bids on this project comes from those who have a high ranking. Some of these guys have done work for only one or two buyers, yet have a ranking of 9 or better on every project. For these supposedly Very Good or Excellent coders to bid on a ridiculous project as the Super Debugger, their bids deeply put into question the legitimacy of their ratings. I'd hate to suggest the use of meat puppet RAC accounts which fabricate bogus projects in order to inflate ratings for a select group of buyers and coders, but their project history strongly suggests such a practice. As a result of this potential fraud, ratings and job counts should not be the ONLY factor in picking an appropriate coder.

I hope this will help buyers weed out some of the more honest and competent coders from some of the bad seeds. Don't allow a few incompetent coders leave you with a bad taste in your mouth about RentACoder. Learn to tell them apart so you don't receive deliverables that are below your standards. As for coders, if you heed some of my above-mentioned suggestions, then you'll find yourself winning more bids and receiving higher ratings LEGITIMATELY.

Educated Guess
Niagara Falls, New York
U.S.A.

Company: Exhedra - RentACoder
Country: USA
State: Florida
City: Tampa
Site: www.rentacoder.com

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