Homeworks going freelance
I am a regular customer of freelance services. It’s especially useful when you need to translate your website or when you need open source developments because confidentiality becomes irrelevant.
Usually, I am browsing the freelance websites on the buyer side; yet I only recently gave a try to the provider side. Most freelance websites include tons of job like
- Simple sort in Java, NEED HELP
- JOIN, INNER-JOIN, LEFT-JOIN in SQL
- Solving a puzzle in C
- …
Those jobs are clearly student homeworks, and I have been stunned by the fact that those jobs may represent one job out of two on most freelance websites (yet those jobs are tiny on average; thus the business impact is probably much smaller than 50%). Western IT companies might not already exploit outsourcing to its full potential but US IT students seem to be really good at it.
Reader Comments (1)
[…] Do not trust ratings for IT projects. Many freelance jobs are actually home works submitted by US students. Since 1st year college home works do require much skill (think of Hello World style exercises), many poorly skilled freelancers ends up with tons of positive ratings. Also, non-technical people submit loads of trivial IT jobs like converting CSV data into Excel data. I mean “trivial” for IT professionals, not for your Uncle, the divorce lawyer, who is also buying IT services occasionally. At the end, I have found that positive ratings aren’t reliable for coders. […]
May 31, 2007 | Joannes Vermorel’s blog