General > General Technical Chat
Is freelancer.com a cesspool?
Dankoozy:
I only signed up a few days ago and all the jobs seem to be like:
"Make me an automated AI trading bot so I don't have to work anymore. Budget $1000
Do my college assignment for me so I can spend a few nights partying instead. Budget: A couple of Indian Rupee
do any good ones turn up periodically or is it literally all cess?
AndyBeez:
Yes, it's one of many budget turd digesters. Go where the grown ups go. LinkedIn, Reddit or even Github, for example.
There is a similar people for hire site where paid opportunities include sitting other people's SAT exams. I even came across one guy advertising Oxford University entrance exam passes or your $1000usd back. It makes one ponder just how many useless rich kid morons are in well paid engineering jobs because they paid someone else to do their homework projects a decade ago? This said, if you pay $10 for an RF amplifier design, then expect a $10 RF amplifier designer.
There are similar posts on this forum too; I know nothing about electronics so someone write me now an Arduino script to fly a drone to the ISS and deliver pizza as this is my summer project that must be completed by next week... [later]... Why is no one doing this for me?... [later]... Bump.
mariush:
I started working on rentacoder.com back in the day, when I was a student, before they rebranded it as vworker.com and then sold it to freelancer.com
Freelancer monetized it after a couple of years or so after they bought it ... and all i had left was a badge of sorts to show that it's old rentacoder account, which lots of clients don't understand what it means. Basically, all the "reputation" I built and tons of 10 out of 10 I got for clients got lost, and my account was suddenly just as good as the average joe from any random country
They started charging for all kinds of things, you basically have to pay now to offer your services to someone so I gave up, have a full time job now and less time to deal with it.
When I started as a student, I did small Visual Basic 6 programs, utilities (import excel sheets do some mass processing, filter duplicates, remove invalid phone numbers or blacklisted numbers stored in some other sqlite / text file etc stuff like this) , small games, and more recently (maybe up until 2-3 years ago) did audio transcription, subtitles, video editing (preparing podcasts and small advertising clips) and other things.
It's harder these days, and there's loads of people that pretend they're programmers to win jobs but basically win jobs on freelancer then turn around to upwork or other websites or assign job to other freelancers they have recurring projects with and pay them outside the freelancer website. (person located in US or UK asks 25$ an hour for a project then turns around and offers 10$ an hour for a Romanian/Bulgarian/Ukrainian student)
If you're lucky, you can score a client that pays well - in my case several times I had clients I worked for several years in a row, and they paid me decent amount of money, every couple weeks, outside the website (directly through paypal or through mailed checks) ... but it's really tough until you have some reputation, until you get established and can afford to be more picky.
When I checked out Upwork last, it was full of transcription jobs and market research jobs (here's a list of 10k websites, go to each website contact page and take email address, phone and fill excel spreadsheet, 1$ for 100 links ... stuff like that) and AI/OCR traininig jobs (1$ for manually drawing a border around an object in 100 pictures so that their optical recognition software can improve)
AndyC_772:
--- Quote from: AndyBeez on August 05, 2022, 11:42:28 am ---I even came across one guy advertising Oxford University entrance exam passes or your $1000usd back. It makes one ponder just how many useless rich kid morons are in well paid engineering jobs because they paid someone else to do their homework projects a decade ago?
--- End quote ---
Almost exactly zero, I'd expect. If you can't even pass the entrance exam, you won't last 5 minutes on the actual course.
Miyuki:
--- Quote from: AndyC_772 on August 05, 2022, 12:47:47 pm ---
--- Quote from: AndyBeez on August 05, 2022, 11:42:28 am ---I even came across one guy advertising Oxford University entrance exam passes or your $1000usd back. It makes one ponder just how many useless rich kid morons are in well paid engineering jobs because they paid someone else to do their homework projects a decade ago?
--- End quote ---
Almost exactly zero, I'd expect. If you can't even pass the entrance exam, you won't last 5 minutes on the actual course.
--- End quote ---
Plenty of Noname universities have a way to pay for a degree. It is common all over the world.
But those people do not do engineering jobs then. Maybe some small minority.
But it is good for a nice warm place in some government offices, and various management positions where you can show how many degrees you have.
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