Selecting the Right Coder
By TotalIT Professional
Rent A Coder Buyer

I worked on RentACoder as both a buyer and a coder for more than three years now and during all this time I learned a lot of things about how the RentACoder system works and I managed to optimize my strategies as both a buyer and a coder in order to get as much as possible from my projects. And in this short article I want to share with you some of my experience and tell you what criteria I generally use to select the best coders for my projects.

The main idea behind my strategy is that I want to find the most affordable coder that can fulfill my requirements.

The first thing I do when looking at the list of coders that made a bid/comment on my project is to reject (hide) bids that are posted in a hurry or those which are standard bids (who have not been tailed to my request); if the coder didn’t consider that he should invest 5 or 10 minutes from their time to make a professional, customized bid then I simply can’t trust them with my project. However I have to say that during the last time one can find less and less bids of this kind on RentACoder, which is a clear sign that the average quality of coders is increasing.

Another kind of bids I reject (hide) from the very beginning are those bids in which the coder is violating RentACoder rules, either by posting their contact information or asking for mine or by asking for a one-to-one auction. If they don’t respect and obey the rules of the site that gives them work and they try to cheat the people that help them, then how could I even dream that they won’t try to do the same thing with me as soon as I award them my project?

These steps helped me get rid of the less serious coders and the next thing is to check the remaining coders’ profiles – there I can see not only their resume, but also their work history and what previous buyers have said about them. If the coder has a nice written profile and a good work history (and by good work history I understand almost exactly what RentACoder deems as a top coder – a minimum of 5 successfully completed projects, an average rating higher than nine and no lost arbitration) then everything is fine and I move to the next step. If he doesn’t then I have to analyze what the problem is.

If the coder is new to RentACoder that doesn’t means that he is not good, but just that he didn’t have time to make a reputation for himself, so I don’t disqualify him from the start, but instead I ask him if he can prove his qualifications in another way – for example on content writing I ask them to send me some sample articles they had previously wrote (however, please note that RentACoder doesn’t allow buyers to ask coders to do any work for them before accepting the bid request, so when requesting a sample request something that the coder has already done, not something that they should do now).

If the coder had some problems in the past (lost arbitration or bad ratings) I generally tend to stay away from him, but sometimes I still give him a chance and ask him about what caused the problems – there really are moments when the coder may have a valid point of view, for example I found once a coder that had a great record except three lost arbitrations, all in the same week; it turned out that during that week the coder had some health problems and he was unable to be online and that’s how he lost the arbitrations.

And since I’m on the coder’s profile I also check what kind of jobs he completed, because even if a coder has a top record, but none of the projects he completed falls in the same category or size with my project then I wouldn’t hire him, unless of course he can provide me with further references that qualifies him for that project. And believe me, I saw enough cases where a coder extraordinarily handles small projects, but had problems with big projects that span over a long period of time.

After this step I should have a narrowed list of bids/coders from which any of them might be able to successfully complete my project and I may very well stop here and pick one of the coders. However if there still are quite a few coders, then I take into consideration a few more factors like time zone (yes two people from opposite time zones can still communicate, but the process is way harder), English knowledge (I don’t only need native English speakers, but I want people with whom I can easily communicate both via text or voice via IM programs during the project), if there is any coder that posted an expert guarantee (which really shows their commitment to successfully complete the project) or the estimated deadline (if I’m on a tight schedule).

Finally is the time to pick my coder and since I’m confident that all coders I selected far now are good coders, at this moment I usually go for the lowest bid (except some situations when the lowest bids are very close of each other and when I select the coder based on the number of completed projects or just based on how much I liked his bid). However, if I have a large project then I may consider selecting not only one, but more coders from the narrowed list so I get my project completed faster.

I don’t say that my strategy is perfect, in fact I may end up paying a bit more than I should on certain projects, but on the other hand I really value my time too so I can’t afford to just go on the lowest bid and risk to lose a whole month only to realize that I picked the wrong coder.

I really hope this article helped you and I wish you the very best of luck here on RentACoder – probably the best place for us, the buyers, to find good and affordable coders for our projects.

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