I’ve been told by many folks that RentACoder and eLance do a great job I’m skeptical of these services since folks claim that it’s just “cut and paste” coders on the site and they take more management time then hiring a solid person through your own network.

Anyone have experience with these two sites? Good? Bad?

Looking at the feedback out there:

A bunch of comments good and bad (I’ll keep updating this as I do my research sorry if you’re up late and in your RSS reader :
http://dev11.otherworks.com/theotherblog/Articles/2004/08/18

This guy says he hired folks from eLance to make dry wall content for him and the stole itouch!
http://www.drywallsecrets.com/2005/08/19/content-theft/

This guy says Guru.com and eLance.com are better for finding writers (not sure I would outsource blog writing any time soon but interesting place to perhaps find bloggers!):
http://all-about-web-content.blogspot.com/2005/08/outsource-

This Infoweek story mentions TopCoder.com, a site I wasn’t aware of:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?artic

Just found another site: http://www.scriptlance.com/

The other side of the coin a freelancer complaining about folks wanting 600 word stories for $1.
http://www.website-content-writer.com/archives/2005/09/05/pl

This guy groks the space and mentions GetaFreelancer.com
http://www.rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2005/09/the_ri

Nice this guy came up with 10 rules for using outsourced coders basic stuff, but interesting: get a code inspector I like that one. I wonder if the code inspector+overseas outsourced coder=the price of a solid US programmer?
http://tomdean.net/Marketing/?p=20

A breakdown of eight diffent rentacoder type sites includes PHPCareer.com (never heard of that one!):
http://helpdeskportallinks1.blogspot.com/2005/08/answering-e

This site feels a little icky they are talking about low-cost content production (ugh) in relation to making money off adsense and mention all these odd sites:
http://webcontentprovider.blogspot.com/2005/08/what-adsense-

Someone who hates RentACoder and suggests GetAFreelancer.com
http://spaces.msn.com/members/networkprogramming/Blog/cns!1p

Liam debates spending $500 bucks on off the shelf software or spending $30-100 on software created on RentACoder that he will own all the rights too that debate has to be happening all over the place.
http://liam.xerasoft.com/?p=9

Google Answers on RentACoder:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=245339
Google Answers creates a list of RentACoder solutions (for $50! Heck, I would have done it wait, I’m doing it right now for free!):
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=281390

Rick talks about Fletcher using these services to help build Bloglines (I think the Bloglines notifier was done by a freelancer for $500 Mark said that at eTech I think ):
http://ricksegal.typepad.com/pmv/2005/03/elance_vs_renta.htm