Hello World

Some people bid very, very low amounts for projects. For example, 10$ for something where 100$ might be much more appropriate. Basically they step on the prices so much that it makes it difficult for everyone to earn any money at all. I wonder if even they themselves can earn enough with silly low prices like that?

On the other hand, another group of people bid way over the realistic price range for a project. Say, 1500$ for something that would be 100$ in reality.


This leads to an another thing: Since you usually can't be sure of who is really a good programmer and not just pretending, the one's who bid very low usually tend to win the projects.


I've been working on one project I won there for a while now. It was a task to fix some problems in a CMS system... A system that has the worst code I've ever seen in a system of that scale. Apparently at least two people have worked on this site before me... How do I know? Well, because in many places there are two different versions of code that do exactly the same thing except with different $_GET parameters, so the other code does absolutely nothing... but it's still there! Why? The employer also told me that there were two before me, but neither of them could do what he wanted.


Can you guess what I'm going to ask next? Is this crappy code the work of the low bidders or the high bidders? I'm quite sure it's the low one's. Sure, there are bad coders who bid high, too. This leads back to the original problem of not knowing who is good and who is not, which leads to the lowest bidder usually winning, which leads to really, really low prices that make no sense...


Well, to be honest, if you bid a realistic bid, maybe do a quick prototype of the script to show and display your old works... Maybe you'll get the project with some luck! I for example got one project because the person who posted it had watched some of the anime series that are on my SeriesDB page (more on that some other time). I usually post the SeriesDB script as a reference work since it is pretty good, if I may say so myself.


Bid realistically, give a prototype script (if possible), give examples of previous work. That sums this up pretty nicely.




Since this was an another semi-random posting which is maybe a bit related to the usual topics, I'll just say that I've been experimenting with Flash Lite and I will probably be posting about that (and the SeriesDB script) sometime in the future.