John W. Colby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Thu Sep 29 18:23:49 CDT 2005
Shamil, I signed up with an outfit called Guru.com. I have bid on about 30 or so jobs, and got my first job today. The jobs coming across are mostly just good for a laugh. I literally saw one that went something like: "You will build a web crawler that will find the price of 4 of my books on Amazon.com. You will then find the lowest selling price and then you will replace my current selling price with 1c less than the lowest selling price. You will email me this and log that, and you will track something else. The winning bid for this job will be no more than $75.00" I'm just rolling on the floor laughing. And the sad part is that probably 95% of the jobs that come across are equally ludicrous. This guy knew what he wanted, he just wanted it done by a high school freshman who thought $75 was a lot of money. Most of these guys looking for help don't even know that much. Today I did win a bid for "3-4 weeks work finishing an application to track ...". All I did was bid my hourly wage for time worked and assured them I was capable. This job looks legitimate, and the company looks real - they have an internet site and offices around the country. I have an appointment to meet with one of the partners Monday morning to begin working with him defining what needs to be done etc etc. At least they appear to have a clue, they have something started, that they admit was started by a partner who got in over his head, and which they need straightened out and finished. That is exactly what I do a lot of the time so here we go. Trying to get work over the internet is no picnic. I guess it's just a numbers game, bid XX times and one will come your way. With any luck that one will keep giving you hours occasionally and you go back out bidding for the next job. John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com Contribute your unused CPU cycles to a good cause: http://folding.stanford.edu/ -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Shamil Salakhetdinov Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2005 6:20 PM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: Re: [AccessD] The future of Access, .NET and SQL Yes, Jim I'm betting on Internet - I even try to use RentACoder where "dirt cheap" Romanian, Indian, Ukranian, Russian, ... programmers and students from all around the World are betting. And it happened that after about 30 bid attempts I did get and I did develop one advanced C# project last summer and this project's completion moved me into higher than 97.99% percent league of RentACoder. But this is still 2300+th place out of 116,000+ registered programmers. Not bad but a long way to go... RentACoder is an interesting place to make challenging small projects in the new areas - in this case money do not matter that much - this is how it was with my first project there... Shamil ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Lawrence" <accessd at shaw.ca> To: "'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'" <accessd at databaseadvisors.com> Sent: Friday, September 30, 2005 1:55 AM Subject: Re: [AccessD] The future of Access, .NET and SQL > That is why it might be a good idea to bet on the internet. It has the > ability to expose you programming skills to anywhere there is a PC and > a modem or broadband. > > Jim