| General > General Technical Chat |
| Is freelancer.com a cesspool? |
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| peter-h:
Not at all. Over 40 years, Z80 onwards. I've designed probably 100+ microprocessor based products. What doesn't impress me is typical Western attitudes to East Europeans (of which I am one) who are trying to make a bit of money on FL. As I said, the site doesn't work well, for various reasons, but the "cheap = crap" argument is just typical 1st World stuff where everybody needs to make a packet to fund their relatively lavish lifestyle. And everybody is on linkedin.com to look for the next (higher paid) position. I've never worked for anybody since leaving univ in 1978 but employed enough full-timers to know how it works. If you pay a fixed price, the guy has to fix bugs for free. The bottom line is that fixed price works for good people (the coder has to be good, do good testing, and occassionally has to fix unexpected things) and it doesn't work for the rest, who are the majority (the customer nearly always gets shafted then because he gets a 90% "done" job which is full of holes). When I have someone working for me now it is nearly all fixed price and I make sure they have the right expertise before they start, because (like with lawyers, etc) almost anybody will take on almost any job... It's great you know all about LWIP but you are an example of those who learnt it in company time and aren't around to help others. For example here https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/any-experts-on-lwip-and-the-netconn-api-(not-looking-for-free-can-pay)/msg4334593/#msg4334593 Not a whole lot... Actually LWIP is a good example of nearly all real expertise being offline. Lots of people knew it in its early days, 15 years ago. Now most work is done in company time, the mailing list is dead... The posted project of mine which somebody found on FL was not a fixed price thing. I was looking for people who knew it. I found nobody useful. |
| tom66:
Nobody wants to do fixed price work because estimating project durations is an entire job area in itself; the contractor exposes themselves to a huge amount of liability if they estimate it incorrectly. I'd argue that it's not the "best" contractors who offer fixed price quotation as contract work is about building an overall relationship with your clients, not jumping around from customer to customer on short fixed term projects. I don't think this is a good or bad programmer thing, it's just good luck when things run just as predicted. We work closely with a firm in Cambridgeshire for contract work, and they've generally been very reliable and their estimates are on point. They are, however, expensive (over £100 an hour), because they build that liability in on their end. One way or another it has to be paid for. And clearly your experience with fixed price contracts is just like that, nobody really likes the outcome. I mean, it's even uncommon in larger projects, pretty much the only area you see this kind of thing is industries like construction where timescales and material costs can be estimated easily enough. R&D is not the kind of thing where you can say that's a 1,000 line project and I write 100 lines a day. I envy contractors for their ability to deal with clients every day. It's not something I'm yet comfortable enough to do. A salary is good enough. |
| nctnico:
--- Quote from: tom66 on October 14, 2022, 03:55:17 pm ---Nobody wants to do fixed price work because estimating project durations is an entire job area in itself; the contractor exposes themselves to a huge amount of liability if they estimate it incorrectly. --- End quote --- The truth is somewhere in the middle. If a project is well defined, then it definitely is possible to do this fixed price. Most of the projects I do are fixed price because I know precisely how long it takes me to develop something based on the requirements given. For projects that are less well defined, I quote a 'research' part of a project and go from there. In the end open 'blank cheque R&D' doesn't exist. Companies budget for having a product developed for an X amount of money. If X is unknown, they can't know how to price a product c.q. know it is commercially viable. Most projects that start with a blank cheque simply fail because at some point it turns out they are no longer commercially viable. I fiercely resist taking on projects that are not well defined and do not have a clear budget. My experience with developing with a 'blank cheque' are not good (both projects I have taken on in the past and projects that I have been involved with somehow). In the end nobody was happy and it is not how companies should conduct business (both as a contractor and contractee). It is much better to chop a project with unknowns into pieces that take the unknowns away one by one. Or put differently: make sure there are points in a project where you can pull the plug before expenses get out of hand. --- Quote from: SiliconWizard on October 13, 2022, 06:13:24 pm ---Some people have an elastic sense of ethics. A good freelancer for low rates? Sure a lot of guys from poor countries have dead-low rates compared to westerners. Taking advantage of that, some may call this exploitation. Others will get a clear conscience by claiming that it's actually a favor to those poor engineers. Which is an argument that has been used extensively for exploiting people. So, pick your side. So anyway, if you want quality work, pay for it. --- End quote --- If someone is living in an area with low cost of living, then the rate that person is working for can be lower while still being able to have a comfortable life. Earlier this year I worked (remotely) with a brilliant PCB engineer from eastern Europe that created a design in Altium for one of my customers (found the guy with the help of this forum BTW). His rates are fair for sure but lower than you'd likely find in west Europe or the US. In the end what matters is whether you can live a normal life from the amount money you are making. |
| peter-h:
Exactly; it is down to understanding the technology involved and drawing up a clear spec. Then it can be done fixed-price, and there is no need for a huge uplift to cover extra work. In fact the way for the customer to end up paying an uplift, sometimes a really huge one, say 10x over budget, is to pay by the hour :) --- Quote --- It's not something I'm yet comfortable enough to do. A salary is good enough. --- End quote --- Indeed ;) That's why most people are hourly paid. They could not survive otherwise. And even most computer contractors are hourly paid while being nominally self employed. --- Quote ---His rates are fair for sure but lower than you'd likely find in west Europe or the US. --- End quote --- He may also be a bright young chap who didn't go to univ so can't easily get his first job, or the country's economy is f***d so there aren't many jobs, and you are giving him an opportunity to make a living. Most people I saw on FL were pretty young, but some are damn fast with MS VC/C++ (which was what I was after for little win32 command line or GUI utilities). Attached is a screenshot of a utility which I got written for something like $100. It displays a 256x256 matrix of sprites, each one showing one byte of a 64k RAM block used for my FreeRTOS stack area. Specific bytes are specific colours and the rest are mostly unique. Mouseover shows the byte value. It instantly shows which task stacks are a bit tight and which are too generous. My board writes out a ccm.dat file into a USB FAT12 filesystem (FatFS) and this program just looks for that file, every few seconds, refreshing it if changed, on a logical drive which I specify in a config menu. It took a Ukrainian guy roughly 3 hours! A perfect example of where FL works. But strangely enough the same guy, later, was unable to understand my spec for a COM port loopback program (I suspect he was google translating all messages) and eventually somebody else did it (it was a struggle, mainly due to language). |
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