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Freelancer Websites
The advent of the Internet has created new opportunities for freelancing, particularly for software developers from countries with low average salaries. A number of websites have become bustling marketplaces for farming out software development projects to freelancers at rates generally considered rock-bottom by Western standards. Such websites typically provide a convenient central forum for posting job requests, rating and documenting history to judge potential buyers and sellers, an escrow system to protect participants from fraud, and arbitration in the event of disagreements between the coder and the buyer. The system for setting prices is usually organized as a reverse auction. A freelancer or freelance worker is a self-employed person working in a profession or trade in which full-time employment is also common. ...
Software engineering (SE) is the profession concerned with specifying, designing, developing and maintaining software applications by applying technologies and practices from computer science, project management, and other fields. ...
A freelancer or freelance worker is a self-employed person working in a profession or trade in which full-time employment is also common. ...
Gaia Online, the largest English language forum-based community as of April 2005 — powered by a modified version of phpBB. An Internet forum is a facility on the World Wide Web for holding discussions, or the web application software used to provide the facility. ...
Escrow is a legal arrangement whereby a thing (often money, but sometimes other property such as art, a deed of title, or software source code) is delivered to a third party (called an escrow agent) to be held in trust pending a contingency or the fulfillment of a condition or...
Arbitration is a form of mediation or conciliation, where the mediating party is given power by the disputant parties to settle the dispute by making a finding. ...
An auctioneer and her assistants scan the crowd for bidders An auction is the process of buying and selling things by offering them up for bid, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder. ...
When the freelancer websites like rentacoder.com and their owners like Mr.Ian Ippolito themselves commit fraud with their innocent subscribers or coders, the victims are left with no other option except to report it on the major internet forums. However, since there is no global justice system for giving any kind of help to such victims of fraud by freelancer sites. The only solution is left to report it to the global discussion forums and evidently such criminals resort to abusing or violating the other norms that are essential part of running any business.
Freelancer Statistic According to recent studies about 20 percent of contracted websites,software development and graphic designs worldwide are made by freelancers. Customers choose and stay with freelancers because their rate can go as low as 70 percent compared to industry standards.
Coders The majority of the coders at such websites are apparently from India and Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, there are many from United States, England, and other countries. Coders vary from individual freelancers, sometimes college students working in their spare time, to small software companies with teams of developers. The rates commanded by the coders generally depend on the scope of the project, and the coder's history of past work done when contracted through the website. First time coders and code monkeys often underbid those with established online reputations. Current division of Europe into five (or more) regions: one definition of Eastern Europe is marked in orange Eastern Europe as a region has several alternative definitions, whereby it can denote: the region lying between the variously and vaguely defined areas of Central Europe and Russia. ...
Royal motto (French): Dieu et mon droit (Translated: God and my right) Englands location (dark green) within the British Isles Languages English (de facto) Capital London de facto Largest city London Area – Total Ranked 1st UK 130,395 km² Population – Total (mid-2004) – Total (2001 Census) – Density Ranked 1st...
A freelancer or freelance worker is a self-employed person working in a profession or trade in which full-time employment is also common. ...
The term college (Latin collegium) is most often used today to denote an educational institution. ...
A code monkey is an amateur computer programmer who stiches together snippets of code found on the internet and in books and puts them together to make an application, without having an appreciation or understanding what the principles behind the code or the concept of coding are. ...
As an example of the diversity of programmers participating, the top 50 programmers at one popular site are from the following countries:
- India: 13
- Romania: 7
- Russian Federation: 6
- United States: 6
- Argentina: 4
- Bulgaria: 3
- Canada: 2
- Other Countries: 9
Buyers The people hiring freelance programmers via the Internet are probably more diverse than the programmers doing the work. Up to 70% are non-technical. Most are in developed nations. Some are professional programmers seeking special skills to solve specific problems. Many represent companies trying to set up e-commerce on the web. Some are students needing help with homework. Some are business people attempting to automate some business function. Some want to reimplement programs they've seen on other platforms, or translate programs to other programming languages. There are also a number of people that aren't really good at programming, so they find people to do their work cheap, and then just put their name on the project.
A good number hire graphics artists who also sign up for these sites.
Compared to offshore outsourcing This kind of Internet-based outsourcing can be thought of as a small business variant of the wider business practice of offshoring. Larger corporations may set up their own subsidiaries in other countries. Small businesses, as well as individuals requiring software, find it convenient to get projects done through Internet freelancing sites. A typical project price, as of 2004, is several hundred U.S. dollars, well within reach of a small company with a true business need. Outsourcing (or contracting out) is often defined as the delegation of non-core operations or jobs from internal production within a business to an external entity (such as a subcontractor) that specializes in that operation. ...
A small business may be defined as a business with a small number of employees. ...
This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
Offshore may refer to oil and natural gas production at sea, see oil platform. ...
It has been suggested that Incorporation (business) be merged into this article or section. ...
In business, a subsidiary is a company controlled by another company or corporation. ...
Motto: E pluribus unum (1789 to present) (Latin: Out of Many, One) In God We Trust (1956 to present) Anthem: The Star-Spangled Banner Capital Washington, D.C. Largest city New York, New York Official language(s) None at federal level; English de facto Government • President • Vice President Federal republic...
Inherent problems and implications for businesses Internet freelancing raises many issues for businesses involved in outsourcing some of their work. Protection of intellectual property is one major issue. There is little realistic recourse for a company in the event that a coder from another country should publish or resell the code developed for them. The practice of Open Outsourcing completely side steps this sticky issue by explicitly stating that the code is available to all. Other problems may include difficulty in fully communicating the necessary specifications of the project at hand, as well as the risk of the coder failing to complete the project on time, potentially jeopardizing the buyer's business plans. Outsourcing (or contracting out) is often defined as the delegation of non-core operations or jobs from internal production within a business to an external entity (such as a subcontractor) that specializes in that operation. ...
Intellectual property (IP) refers to a legal entitlement which sometimes attaches to the expressed form of an idea, or to some other intangible subject matter. ...
A company is, in general, any group of persons, which are known as its members, united to pursue a common interest. ...
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In engineering and manufacturing, the term specification has the following meanings: Technical requirement An essential technical requirement for items, materials, or services, including the procedures to be used to determine whether the requirement has been met. ...
A business plan is a summary of how a business owner, manager, or entrepreneur intends to organize an entrepreneurial endeavor and implement activities necessary and sufficient for the venture to succeed. ...
Therefore, the projects typically posted on freelancer websites would optimally not represent the core competency of the buyer company. Rather, they would constitute the more mundane and labor-intensive tasks that are much easier to describe accurately in writing than to implement in a complete and polished manner. Outsourcing specialized tasks for which no in-house expertise is available is another good reason to seek a freelancer. Some programmer out there has solved a problem similar to yours in the past, and that hard fought knowledge can save you a lot of money in internal training and discovery processes. A companys core competency is the one thing that it can do better than its competitors. ...
see also Creative Writing Writing may refer to two activities: the inscribing of characters on a medium, with the intention of forming words and other constructs that represent language or record information, and the creation of material to be conveyed through written language. ...
Perspectives on the future of Internet freelancing The neutrality of this section is disputed.
Please see discussion on the talk page. Some developers in developed nations fear the effects of Internet freelancing. Calls for protectionist legislation have been made. How such legislation could even be applied to the small scale outsourcing efforts discussed in this article is an interesting question. The loss of programming jobs in the industrialized parts of the world may have had more to do with the recent recession than with outsourcing. Depressed wages and underemployment are probably more realistic fears. Some studies have shown that more jobs are created in the industrialized world when some jobs are outsourced. However, the quality and earning potential of these new jobs is often less than the jobs that were exported. Image File history File links Stop_hand. ...
Ideally, a symbiotic relationship will be arrived at between developers in the first world and offshore freelancers, with the former being employed primarily to formulate project specifications and integrate the components produced offshore. Such business models may also prove essential for the smaller companies' ability to compete with larger competitors who are capable of setting up subsidiaries offshore or of contracting more established foreign software companies. Common Clownfish (Amphiprion ocellaris) in their Magnificent Sea Anemone (Heteractis magnifica) home. ...
A freelancer or freelance worker is a self-employed person working in a profession or trade in which full-time employment is also common. ...
In engineering and manufacturing, the term specification has the following meanings: Technical requirement An essential technical requirement for items, materials, or services, including the procedures to be used to determine whether the requirement has been met. ...
A business model (also called a business design) is the mechanism by which a business intends to generate revenue and profits. ...
In business, a subsidiary is a company controlled by another company or corporation. ...
The term software company could be applied to; a) a company that produces software or b) a company that distributes software from a third party or c) a company that provides services for software. ...
The one thing that seems certain is that the future of programming is going to be different than it is now. The advent of the Internet, and its ability to directly connect people around the world greatly diminishes the value of face to face communications. Programming provides a way for developers from the third world to make many times the national average wage, and thus raise the standard of living in their countries. The importance of English, both to native speakers and those learning it as a second language, is growing. Successful software developers on both sides of this equation will need to improve their communications skills to remain successful in this new environment.
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