Bidding for work is now a waste of time. I used to use elance and developed a working relationship with people I still freelance to today but I would never use any of the current sites.
Two years ago the big holiday job for american kids was to launch webhosting companies, get a reseller account, a template monster design, an account with 2checkout and modernbill to run it all, total outlay around $300, they would run the company for the summer and fold the company when it was time to go back to school.
This years gimmick (and wintertime, ie in school) is posing as php coders. Php is a scripting language that can be picked up very quickly by anyone willing to supply a little time and effort and mysql is no different. There are none of the problems usually encountered with a high level language, no memory to be allocated and freed etc, as interpreted languages go php is the easiest syntax for a newcomer to pick up.
The problem arises when somone asks for the like of a dating site with member logins, credit card gateway integration, rate my photo features and a personal messaging system and the kiddies hop on it saying
yeah, easy man, my compny did 1 last week, no probs, we can fix you up for $150 or if you want uz to code de ting from scratch it will take uz 2 dayz. ps that price includes 10 years hosting. (They are easy to spot, they are the ones who have sold most of their keyboard keys to buy something to eat)
No programmer worth his salt is even going to try and compete with the above (if you think I'm joking check out devlance/scriptlance, heck pick a word from the dictionary and add lance.com to it and theres probably a freelancers site behind it.)
For a start a dating site is mainly dynamic content, you need to consider what is static that you can target the search engines with, if you are using sessions to track user logins then you need to make sure not to assign session id's to the search engines.
The kiddies just have not been around long enough to know or even consider the bottom line is getting customers to the site and when there entice them to sign up.
I wont even get started on internet security, googling for how to connect to a mysql database is not going to teach them the first thing about security. Ask them what measures they have taken to prevent sql injection/url tampering attacks and you wont hear from them again.
If someone asked me to design a dating site from scratch off the top of my head I'm going to say 6000 thats five weeks of my time (I have twenty years programming experience, a mortgage and I pay taxes on my earnings) gathering the info to be posted, optimizing the content for search engines, researching geographic competitors, designing a site that uses colors to reflect the mood of the target audience and making it aesthetically pleasing so as the visitor actually reaches for the credit card, then I will get down to the nitty gritty of coding a site that works with php safe mode on php_suexec on and register globals off, ie a site that will work on any php enabled webserver rather than come back to the client saying, oh its your hosts fault for securing their servers that my code wont work.
The fact that people bid $150 for such jobs really angers me, the unsuspecting client is in for months of frustration trying to understand jargon that they should not be subjected to and running around asking the fifteenth $150 coder why it doesnt work by now.
A decent programmer is like a good guitar player, everyone wants them in their band and they draw a crowd everytime, the poor folks get listened to once and never again.
Hrrm, I think that qualifies as a rant. I better end it, before I get started on template sites :)
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"I have not failed. I have found 10,000 ways that don't work" - Thomas Edison.
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources" - Albert Einstein.
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