Scriptlance rant

I decided to give scriptlance a go and posted a few projects. Total I think I opened about $2k worth of projects. What probably would have cost me more like $8k to have done in-house. I figured what the hell, they're not critical projects so I'll give it a go.

The work I was posting was work that needed to be hand coded from scratch, with no use of premade scripts or copyrights attached. I got some reasonable offers by people who obviously spoke good English (or at least they had someone make some pregurgitated sales posts who spoke good English), and was all set to proceed with the total of 6 pet projects.

I kid you not, out of 5 different Indian programmers (one project was picked up by someone from the UK and was completed ahead of time and with great communication) whom all had 10's of feedback - all good - ALL 5 were complete unable to fulfill my extremely detailed requests. I would get nothing but constant questions about aspects I had already covered in the readme I had sent them. This went on for 4 days until I contacted scriptlance and had them cancel all 5 projects for the same reasons, with 5 different developers.

My initial thought is that I am some sort of statistical oddity. I know for a fact there are quality programmers in India, but I was so irritated I wasted the time I felt I needed to waste a little more time to rant.

Perhaps if you have a good experience with scriptlance you could brighten my day by posting it. But for now, no more shortcuts for me.

 

It can be a great place. What you need to do is post a ton of small ass jobs, weed out the losers from the winners. After you find the winners, just keep them as a contact and skip SL all together.

Eventually these winners will turn sour by disappearing, jacking up prices with every job until you mise well be paying americans to do the job. Or other reasons. When that happens, go post another 10 jobs or so and get a new starting lineup! lol

 

I was working on Elance around 4 years back and there were a lot of good companies listed there. I dont know how Elance is doing right now, but at that point it had the best companies.

And greg, I think it is sheer bad luck of yours that you got 5 companies which could not do your work. There are a lot of scammers on websites like scriptlance, but there are more good companies from India. I personally do not have any kinda experience with scriptlance. I have worked only on Elance, Prosavvy and RAC.

 

@ly2
I like your style.

@sumitbahl
I've used RAC. Always had great experience. Never tried Elance though. I'll have to give them a go.

Thanks both for taking the time to hear me bitch.

 

A few months back I went on scriptlance to bid on a few projects during a quiet period and was amazed at how low the other bids were. I was quoting 10 times the average bid with my charges of about $50 per hour for php work.

One guy was perpared to do a full paypal clone for about $30.

After a few days I stopped and never went back.

 

I had my 2 projects done at scriptlance perfectly.

But couldnt deny that the are many not-up-to-par coders there ... however, i found a good one and gave him 2 projects for a reasonable price

 

I used Elance quite a few years back before switching to Scriptlance, I always ignore those cut paste "pick me!" bidders and always ask for example completed projects. So far so good for me

 

After posting about 8 projects I now have three programmers (2 from ukraine and one from russia) who are very good and I will be sticking with them for future work.

 

You wouldn't want to refer them to me would you

 

lol. I'll ask them when the are finished with my current projects

 

no offence, but NEVER use Indian programmers, all the ones I worked with were useless, they say they can do everything, but can only make it worse. They are good for easy jobs though, like posting etc..

If you need good quality cheap programmers, look for the people from the former Soviet Republics, Ukraine,Russia, Moldova etc... They all are excellent programmers and ready to work for you for cheap!

Also there's one little secret..
Everyone has excellent feedbacks, because the webmasters know if they don't give good feedbacks to programmers, they won't get good feedbacks themselves, so when you check feedbacks, don't hire people those feedbacks are just "good", hire only the ones where it says "excellent", if you see the webmasters say they'd love to work with that programmer again - it means that's a quality programmer!

Also add to every project something like don't bid if you can't do it, no time wasters and that you want to hire programmers with lots of good reviews etc.. - people will know you're serious and experienced..
Also first time, if you have some reviews, better don't use escrow, the work may be delayed if you do..

I've posted quite a lot of projects there and now I've figured out it's a great place to find programmers!

I now have 2 good writers and couple programmers that I usually contact every time I need something..

 

There are bad developers everywhere. I've been burned using Ukrainians. You'll find horror stories about coders from anywhere. It's all about the weeding.

 

ok.. hmm just my experience
also make sure to see the programmer's previous works and portfolio site..

 

None taken. I think you've had bad experience with India programmers. Some could be bad, but makority are good.

Indian programmers are working in the biggest companies in th worl from Microsoft to Google to Bridgestone, you name it.

 

Yeah, I agree, but it was just my experience in scriptlance as I said and I did dosens of projects there, but of course I can be completely wrong..

 

Actually, you are absolutely right at your place, It was just a bad experience.

 

I also had better experiences with programmers from ukraine and romania on scriptlance, the usual suspect are the one from India so I'm quite carefully when picking an indian programmer.

 

The programmer that completely customized Oscommerce for me was from the US and did it for dirt cheap. My recommendation is do some research by looking at their portfolios and getting them to speak to you on the message board. It helps with making sure they will do everything you want.

 

Actually everywhere there are good and bad coders. Leading software companies around the world have a good percentage of Indian Programmers as well as Eastern European Programmers. Its obvious. On the other hand there are "kids with modems" everywhere who flood these freelance sites. A rule of thumb is a freelancer who keeps on working and working on a freelance site has definitely some problems with work. For the good ones settle with regular clients very soon.
Regarding Scriptlance, I have used it a few times. One word that defines it perfectly is "crap". First of all 95% of the programmers are inexperienced. Among the remaining 5%, half are dishonest. They will most probably resell a script developed exclusively for you or if given a server access steal something from your server (if found). The rest are honest, sincere and perfect. But they are busy and take it for granted they will hardly come to bid on your project. Finally the site itself is sort of a fuss. Unclear TOS. Very Very indecent support, biased decisions etc.

That was my 2 cents