Things I dislike about Elance

October 23rd, 2009 by Chris

So, I post a project on elance, and I get many responses, and they’re all the exact same.

“We are pleased to introduce ourselves as programmers and coders…”

They’re all the same, they’re all from India, even the ones that say they’re from the US are from India, which annoys me to no end.

I’m not xenophobic, but I prefer to work with people from more developed countries. I don’t know if it is a cultural thing or what, but in my experience most Indian programmers lack intuition to do small things that are needed to improve efficiency and user friendliness. They also seem to have a problem grasping the big picture, or understanding what your goal is for what you need. The end result is needing to micromanage them to the nth degree, which requires so much time you might as well do it yourself.

Whereas people from western cultures, you can tend to tell them what you want to accomplish, and they can fill in a lot of the blanks without input from you.

I tend to only consider Indian programmers (or other foreigners) for tiny jobs then, things that I can very discretely define. I have a job right now, directory website, very simple, small, and they’re having the hardest time getting it. Additionally, I’ve gotten 30+ Indian bids, but not one from North America, normally I get more than that. I post a very very specific brief, and they come back with a list of features (shopping cart? Hello?) I didn’t even ask for. It is almost as if they assume I want a directory just like their last job, whatever that may have been. Or perhaps they simply don’t care enough to read my brief and instead are just replying to as many as possible in hopes of finding work.

The problem is there is just so many of these misunderstanding bidders, that I am just completely turned off from Elance at this point and am just thinking about doing it myself. I did a little php last night and this morning, and it was nice to do that again, I haven’t programmed in awhile. Fun even. I could probably crank this job out in 8 hours or less, of course with the Baby that equates to 3 days, but still, I could do it.

Maybe I will, but I think it’ll be awhile before I post on Elance again. If I wanted a bunch of form letters from foreigners wanting to do business with me I could just open up my junkmail folder.

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Posted in: Website Management »  by: Chris

5 Responses to “Things I dislike about Elance”

  1. Dan  Says:
    October 23rd, 2009 at 7:35 pm

    Look into odesk.com it still has a large international reach, however I tend to get a good number of US folks.

  2. Paul L.  Says:
    October 23rd, 2009 at 10:28 pm

    I’ve had good success using ScriptLance. And it has quite a few of American programmers.

  3. Joe  Says:
    October 25th, 2009 at 2:40 pm

    I totally concur! I made a big mistake with one of my projects by hiring an India programming team to do it, ended up spending more time, money and headaches, all for nothing and had to abort it.

    Turned it to an UK programming team, finished in half the time and cost less, all things (and headaches) considered. No more India programmers for me, ever.

  4. Kristi Carter  Says:
    February 22nd, 2010 at 9:21 am

    I agree that it can be extremely frustrating when you aren’t able to find providers that meet your specific needs. I too use Elance providers and what I’ve done in the past is to use their “invite only” function and then invite those providers that meet my precise specifications. When I do this, I already have a good idea of the provider that I want to choose and they take it as a “compliment” that I sought them out and typically submit proposals. Have you considered doing that?

  5. Elance Competitors  Says:
    March 6th, 2011 at 6:40 am

    Try oDesk. They’ve got service providers who are into programming. Mostly they are from Russia. In fact, Russians are the best programmers I guess. From C programming to Php to any programming! And I guess why people from India cannot grasp good information because of the communication barrier. They barely understand and speak english. If I were to choose a programmer having the same programming skills from Philippines and India, I’d prefer from Philippines. They speak better english than Indians.

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