Ask HN: Elance for software designers/architects?
I am interested in starting doing contractorship work in addition to daily job. I has been working as a leading software engineer in several latest projects, and it included a lot of software design and software architecture.
The problem is, I recently moved to relatively remote location (from even more remote location, but that's a different story), so my professional network did not yield any local business yet.
Hence, the question: is there a Elance-like place with much higher barrier to entry for both sides?
You can try TopCoder. They're not quite the same as e-lance. My company used them for a little while. The Quality of work we got was amazing, with bills to match. As long as you're confident in your abilities, feel free to give it a shot.
From talking to a couple of the guys that work for TopCoder, unfortunately, the dynamics work out in a way such that a small percentage of the community there consistently win and actually make real money, while the other 90+% linger.
If you're confident in your abilities then I'd definitely give it a try.
I also wish there were something like this. The projects on elance and odesk are very often asking for tons of work at sweatshop wages/prices. Someone needs to create a better freelance network.