|
|
I seem to remember hearing about a website for programmers where there are problems posted for you to solve, and you can bid on being the one who gets to do it - a sort of contracting hiring site, I guess. A friend of mine is looking for "work I can do at home in my PJs on my own time because f*** working for a boss" - and this seems to me to be the sort of thing which would fit the bill. Anyone have any idea what the website might be? Cursory searches on Google seem to return a lot of information about who's willing to separate you from your money in order to teach you to program, but not a lot else.
Thanks.
|
|
|
|
|
Dan Sutton wrote: A friend of mine is looking for
AKA "asking for a friend". C'mon, admit it, this is for yourself... 
|
|
|
|
|
LOL - no, in this case it really isn't - it's a chick in Germany...
|
|
|
|
|
Graus tried one of these sites, and got ripped off.
As amusing as that might be to most of us, probably best avoided I think.
|
|
|
|
|
|
If it doesn't link back right to CP, how much faith would you put into that site...
OK, maybe CP isn't about "hiring the best programmers", but it sure is where you'll find them hanging out...IMNSHO
|
|
|
|
|
No - this was sort of from the opposite point of view: like an exchange, except for skills. You could put together a team, virtually - quite an interesting concept, really. The site handled all the payment and money and everything.
|
|
|
|
|
Rent a coder?
I think the general consensus was that highly-experienced first-world developers will always be undercut by lesser developers in Elbonia.
|
|
|
|
|
They got taken over years ago - it's Freelancer dot com these days, I think.
Still the same group of chimpanzees bidding very low to get any work (and then probably posting loads at QA and SO) and charging large for "spec changes"; the decent developers get lost in the noise I suspect.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
|
|
|
|
|
yup its freelancer com and its very crowded.
cheapest labor + ambitious project = horror story
[Signature space for sale]
|
|
|
|
|
Freelancer dot com. I got one job for there for $1200 bux to make a one page scrolling website with lazy load and video backgrounds to make a site to request someone to make a prayer for you. It was called Divine Inspirations and it was awesome! #Random
|
|
|
|
|
Rent-a-coder was a very large site and market leader for a while. I was top-ranked UK-based developer on there, and got well over a hundred contracts. It was later taken over by vWorker and then Freelancer.com. Freelancer is virtually useless as there seems to be no way to contact a buyer with any clarifications prior to making a final bid. So even if they give a detailed spec (which they never do), but omit to mention that it has to run on version x.y.z of whatever tool and you can only deliver version a.b.c. then you're stuffed, they'll give you a low rating and you'll never work again.
PeoplePerHour.com is better, but more recently trying to clarify tasks with the seller has become difficult, and there's no way to review a buyer's feedback and ratings until after a bid, so you're working completely blind and again could fall into the trap of working with a lousy buyer and recking your reputation.
Reputation is absolutely what it's all about; with hundreds of thousands of workers available, it's absolutely essential that you get a perfect score each and every job. You need to be able to not just do a fantastic job 100% of the time, but also convince your client that what you've delivered is exactly what they wanted, so they give you that perfect score and good written feedback. For one thing, that also means replying to EVERY message within a couple of hours MAX, regardless of time of day or day of week, or some buyers will downrate you for being "slow to respond". Once you've started building your reputation, forget about competing on price - you will NEVER succeed that way. Your bids need to be near-perfect and you need to be on the right job at the right time to be first to bid. The biggest problem is getting the first handful of jobs to get reputation in the first place; you'll need an outstanding portfolio off-site, remarkable bid-writing skills, and an enormous amount of luck. To reduce the amount of luck you need, you'll need to be able to turn your hand - confidently - to a very wide range of tasks, and have access to every product and version you can even vaguely claim to know.
This is all very negative - and it's meant to be. There are too many players in the market (both websites and developers) and the quality has plummeted. Quality of jobs, that is. Far too many are along the lines of (and I quote verbatim here) "I want a website a bit like a mix of eBay and Google. Willing to pay up to $250. No time wasters please". That was literally the sum total of the spec, but it had several dozen "experts" bidding on it within minutes.
Although negative, the potential is - or was - enormous. As mentioned above I did scores of jobs via Rent-A-Coder and was very highly ranked, earning good money on very interesting and varied projects, working as much, and when, I wanted. When I switched to PeoplePerHour, my first project ($200 for a couple of hours' Javascript work) led to an ongoing relationship with the buyer over the course of several years. With my help the client became very successful indeed, and was paying a 5-figure sum each month as a retainer, plus introducing me to his associates several of whom put major projects my way. As a result I was able to semi-retire several years early and no longer need to trawl the auction sites. (I have also had a number of other "large" clients through the auction sites who have more than equalled the financial rewards of more traditional freelancing arrangements).
Do NOT go this route if you're dependent on the income. If you want to get some fantastic experience across other tech and industries, and be in with a small chance of getting lucky, then by all means use the sites as an extra income. Just don't expect them to even cover the subscription fees to CodeProject. 
|
|
|
|
|
Interesting. I must admit it's been a long time since I've even thought about these things, but I guess it's not surprising that it's gone the way of everything else that gets over-saturated.
|
|
|
|
|
I hope you'll post this thoughtful essay on a forum where it will not get submerged: maybe the "Work" forum: [^]
cheers, Bill
«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali
modified 19-Sep-19 12:55pm.
|
|
|
|
|
Thanks for that suggestion, Bill. To be honest, I'd never even come across that forum before!
|
|
|
|
|
So i got a rush from creaming microsoft's highly optimized hashtable class at >= million items.
just sayin.
MOAR like this plz.
maybe i'll make my own hashtable class and see if i can't do better.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
|
|
|
|
|
honey the codewitch wrote: creaming microsoft's highly optimized hashtable class
honey the codewitch wrote: see if i can't do better
Sounds like you already did better, if I am not mistaken. Perhaps you can create an article about this?
|
|
|
|
|
Well, it only beats it for item counts >= 1000000
What I mean is, i wonder if i can make a hashtable that beats out Microsofts, which performs far better than my b-tree (of course) with just a few thousand items or so - because it doesn't have to sort the keys.
a b-tree is one of the primary mechanisms for providing indexed searches in databases, which means the rows must come back in order (sorted, unlike hashtables) and quickly (b-trees that are implemented on disk can optimize disk access because of the way a b-tree is structured) no matter how many items.
A b-trees height stays relatively constant as items are added (it grows, but slowly)
so searching lots of rows still takes few comparisons.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
|
|
|
|
|
So the problem is that hashes are designed to avoid collisions/comparisons
but b-trees are optimized for comparisons.
The reason microsoft probably loses above 1 Million is the collision rate.
And usually this is a known threshold, so there is often a way to specify a bigger range.
(it wastes memory in the general case, but if you KNOW you are going to handle a large # of objects, it's worth it for the speed improvement as you have just learned!)
I would check there first.
|
|
|
|
|
Forgive me for saying, but I think you misunderstand the situation.
Whoops, it was me that misunderstood you. It's early here and I lost the plot. I should have a second cup of coffee.
I'm not drawing any serious conclusions by comparing it with Dictionary. i was just happy that I actually beat it and you're right, i could specify the capacity, just like i could specify the Order of my B-Tree and B+tree but i left them default
deleted swaths of this because i thought i was replying on a different thread and i confused the overarching discussion for another one
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
modified 18-Sep-19 10:12am.
|
|
|
|
|
I dialed in to say (to the original reply), that I apologize, I must have missed something.
LOL.
Don't let me dissuade you. It is usually the STACKING of technologies that makes huge changes.
Think about a balanced tree, it was a HUGE breakthrough. I've implemented hashing algorithms in the 1980s on PDP-11s... (Perfect Hash, no collisions) and the speed improvements were stellar. It wasted space for time. And was disk based.
No worries. Good luck!
|
|
|
|
|
if you saw my edited reply it was me that lost the plot.
i was running on fumes, early morning, too little coffee.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
|
|
|
|
|
Your programming realm seems to be basically the opposite of mine.
- Parsers and dictionaries and such are extremely context dependent.
Most of what I make (that's useful) perform abstract operations independent of context. As small a footprint as possible.
Yet, interestingly, they both can be classified as engines. Hmmmmm.
| Ravings en masse^ |
|---|
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
|
|
|
|
|
well, parsers are specialized, but data structures are not necessarily.
i write components and tools for other developers.
data structures are useful in the general sense.
parser generators are useful when you need parsing.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
|
|
|
|
General 
News 
Suggestion 
Question 
Bug 
Answer 
Joke 
Praise 
Rant 
Admin 
Submit an article or tip
