So how does rentacoder.com (Rent-A-Coder) work? Simple. As a buyer, you sign up for a new account, post a bid request which offers details about your project and service providers place bids on the project. There are all sorts of terms and options you can choose from to make sure your project goes as smoothly as possible. There are also help documents throughout the site on what to do to help your project along and what your options are if something goes wrong. Sound good? Well, what no one tells you up front is that all of this is irrelevant once you have accepted a coder’s bid and have put your hard earned money into rentacoder.com’s escrow system (a system they put in place because they were robbed).

When something does in fact go wrong with your project, the “arbitrator”, some non-technical individual (arbitrator confirmed they are a non-technical arbitrator), gives you two options. The first option is simply a time waster that will no doubt cause you to loose the arbitration and your money (i.e. lets spend weeks going over what the coder has done so far, just to have us decide they’ve done alright in our eyes because we can’t do what they can do). The second option which seems to be the true standard with rentacoder.com (Rent-A-Coder) is the “wait until the coder fails” option. This option forces you to continue with a coder even if they tell you they can not do what you are asking them to do or if it’s very clear that the coder doesn’t understand a word you are saying. What that translates into to me is that there is no arbitration. When you pick a coder, you are stuck with them. It doesn’t matter what it says on their website. When you pick a coder at rentacoder.com (Rent-A-Coder), you are STUCK with them!

Alarm bells should be ringing in your ears right now. If the obvious is evident when you start the arbitration and it is ignored by the arbitrator or deemed “O.K.”, how will they make the best decision for everyone when the deadline comes? To make this a little more clear… if you see a gaping hole in the road and no way around it but to take another road, how can you trust the navigator to do the right thing when they tell you to keep going on the road with the crater until you fall in?

In addition, the website pumps buyers up, telling them to make sure they are diligent in making sure their project is going the way it should. The rentacoder.com (Rent-A-Coder) site throws around phrases like “It’s your project”, but in the end, it’s the coder’s project in the eyes of rentacoder.com (Rent-A-Coder). If you ask the coder to give you an “accurate” mock-up (a requirement for the project that you choose when you set it up) and the coder fails to deliver this mock-up, “So, What?” says rentacoder.com (Rent-A-Coder). If you ask the programmer to confirm understanding on various important aspects of your project (the rentacoder.com (Rent-A-Coder) site strongly suggest buyers do this to make sure they get what they expect from their programmer) and they do not do this at any time , “So, What?” screams rentacoder.com (Rent-A-Coder). If you ask the coder “Hey can you add this link to the front page?” and their answer to that is “I like apples on Tuesdays with cheese and crackers.” because they don’t understand a word you said, “Pay them!” says rentacoder.com (Rent-A-Coder)!

This is the bottom line rentacoder.com (Rent-A-Coder)! When people post projects on rentacoder.com (Rent-A-Coder) and pay their money for that project, it is absolutely unacceptable to force them to use a coder who clearly can not do the job. It is also unacceptable to make buyers waste time and wait for the coder to fail especially when you have an arbitration system in place. Currently at rentacoder.com (Rent-A-Coder) as a buyer, you have no control over your project once you choose a programmer and the only thing you can count on is your time will be wasted with a high probability of your money being stolen from you (Yes, if you force me to pay for a box of coal when I’ve asked for a box of diamonds and the money I’ve given you is in fact the appropriate amount for a box of diamonds, then you have stolen from me).

*Note* A similar site is scritplance.com. They do the exact same thing only they don’t make you wait until the coder fails, they just make you wait and wait and wait. Deadlines don’t matter at all at scriptlance.com. Eventually they do give you your money back but they make sure they punish you sufficiently first.

Update:
In light of some of the hostile comments and mail being left about views expressed in this article, I felt it necessary to add a little more. There seems to be a misunderstanding here. Some seem to think I have reading and comprehension problems or that I have not tried the magic formula that would have surely made my experience better. However, these are mere misunderstandings. I do not have reading and comprehension problems and did in fact read all of the help documents provided by the site before getting started. There is so much to choose from while setting up a bid request you have no choice but to jump over to the help pages to make sure you are choosing the best option for your project. Also because I was coming from a rather insane experience on scriptlance.com, I was definitely all over the information about how the site works and the mediation/arbitration feature. It all made sense and sounded good as written. However, Rent-A-Coder is not following their own documentation.

As for this magic formula…. it made me laugh. The magic formula is: Look at the programmer’s reviews, at their portfolio, how many jobs they’ve completed or didn’t complete, the details of any disputes they may have already had, etc. This is very helpful and one would be a fool not to do this. However, it is not the magic formula to success. Project success relies on all involved. There are many ways to create programmer accounts with all of these in order and still not be a the best programmer or the best programmer for every job applied or bid on. Some issues come not from deception or incompetence but from poor judgment. It seems many programmers want to do the projects they bid on, but for whatever reason, bid with completion times they can not meet, unreasonable rates (too low for the amount of work they have to do) or just become “yes” men/women and later after they’ve accepted a job, realize it is more than they can handle.

However, this article wasn’t directed at programmers or buyers, although it seems those who are angry about this article are programmers or those who provide outsourcing who use Rent-A-Coder. So because they rely heavily on it, or it works for them, how dare I talk about it not working for me. *Smile* There are less than honest programmers out there, just like there are less than honest buyers or buyers who don’t know what they want or who haven’t read the site documents. There is no arguing that. However, you can’t assume that everyone who has a complaint did not understand what they were getting into or did not use the magic formula.

Let me restate the issue. Rentacoder.com does not follow it’s own documentation. Rentacoder.com has a faulty and useless arbitration system. Both of which makes their services not worth using.

Update: 2
Rentacoder.com chooses to be the robber instead of doing the right thing. I’ve been forced to pay the cancellation fee because the programmer doesn’t have any money in his account (he lost the arbitration). How convenient! So any lousy programmer can open an account, never keep money in it and fail to deliver what they agreed and never have to pay for it. And if they want, they can go ahead and open a new account under a different name (yes I had a person message me and say he works with two different accounts on Rentacoder.com. It doesn’t matter if they say it’s not allowed they need to have a way to keep it from happening). Rentacoder.com could easily make the programmer’s account negative or even be smart like odesk and require everyone to have a registered form of payment and make these deductions when the arbitration is lost. It is just unacceptable to make the winning party of an arbitration pay a cancellation fee because the loosing party doesn’t have the money in their account (especially if nothing is in place to make sure Rentacoder.com can get their fees in such a situation). What a pathetic business this has turned out to be.

One thing that threw me off was the feeling that the story was about just the woman and possibly the young man; until I realized the story was actually about the woman and her husband. I believe the young man was a younger, nicer version of her husband and represents how he was when they were dating or first married. One thing that first lead me to this was the golf. What are the chances of this drifter coming into her home who happens to also be good at golf? Perhaps she was trying to stop him from playing golf because it may have been the first thing that caused her husband to become the man that he is (for instance, golf symbolizing business and affluence that her husband obviously strives for, (the ball hitting the woman in the car was to show how his goals in life have hurt people and have been destructive) Then there are other things; like with the police when they checked the young man’s background they said he had a degree, etc. (I also noticed that while this guy was a drifter he drove a nice BMW bike, his character was almost to say there was a balance between the finer things and being humble (i.e. hand washing clothes when you don’t have to, yet driving a nice vehicle). And once this guy was locked up, the woman’s husband tried to be much nicer but this is what lead me to think that the story is also just as much about him. I thought the husband trying to be nice once the drifter was “locked up” represented the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personalities of a lot of abuse spouses/significant others. It reminded me of when abusive persons beat their loved ones then try to act nice or remorseful afterwards; claiming they will never do it again. In this case, the husband was trying to reassure his wife he was a changed man.

I asked myself, why would the husband be able to interact with the young man? His interaction with this young guy is a war between the mean person he is and perhaps the good person he used to be when he was younger. His current self is so determine to stay on the path to what he thinks life should be like, it drives him to fight the more carefree side of himself. I mean the end is like “I know that nice part of me is somewhere around here threatening to ruin all that I’ve worked hard to get at his expense.”

The zero on the scale is pretty straight forward. Who they used to be when he was a different person, doesn’t exist anymore… If you want to get more silly you could say, when he fixed the scale, he weighed 60 she weighed 40 = 100 which could be taken as together they are 100% or that their relationship is uneven with him being more important than her.

One could also see that this young guy was just in the wife’s mind also because he seemed to do some dumb things that if you are a seasoned drifter, you probably wouldn’t do. Like, just hanging up the phone on the dead guy’s son AND still staying in the apartment like nothing is wrong. I mean, I’d like to think that a seasoned drifter would know he should bounce. Or always leaving his bike right outside the houses they break into. I mean really? But if this man is created by this woman’s mind, I can see why these mistakes were made because its really her who is making them.

I also think that whole prison scene again was back to being directly about the husband. He was trying very hard to cage that part of himself. The nice part of himself or who he used to be. So the nice part of himself, learned to be there stealth-fully(and in the end, the wife learned to relate to him as if he were still that nice guy he used to be. i.e. see past the abusive person who he’d become like so many abused women do). The cops were a part of the husband’s reality. They kept his nicer self in check.

I also think the couple who’s home they went back to and just let her sleep, represents what they could have been. Those two were shown watering or tending to plants whenever they were in a shot, representing two nurturing people; which would be required for a good relationship.

In the end, the wife decided to stay with the husband because as the scene would show, she was determined to hold on to the person he used to be (i.e. the young caring man). By the end of the movie, the husband had not changed. So this movie was simply a glimpse of the dynamics of abusive relationships. It covers some of the common behaviors and decisions of both the abused and the abusers.