Mention “outsourcing” to a programmer and you may as well be uttering profanity. The word suggests all
evils that have befallen Information Technology sector since Internet bubble burst a few years ago. We’ve been endlessly regaled with tragic tales of American companies who have closed up shop for many of their I.T. positions, only to “offshore” those same jobs to programmers overseas working for less pay than their American counterparts. A brain drain is taking place in once highly secure computer programming profession.Rather than cursing darkness, however, I found myself recently lighting a candle (or making problem worse, depending on your perspective). You see, just over six months ago, I joined outsourcing revolution. I am therefore writing this article partly as a confession, my own personal “mea culpa” of complicity.
No, I haven’t put myself up on auction block to work for Indian rupees.
What I did was stumble upon several “reverse auction” web sites for outsourcing talent. If you haven’t heard of them, they go by name of Elance.com (the largest site to date) or Guru.com. Both of these sites give companies an opportunity to outsource their projects to freelance workers like programmers, graphic artists and writers. Freelancers from all over world compete for open bid requests, offering to do these contract jobs for a fixed price.
I happened upon a site called Rentacoder. Unlike two sites mentioned above, Rentacoder didn’t require a subscription fee. Their take was a straightforward commission out of each project cost. Within minutes I posted my resume and profile. Then I had a choice to make. Which projects to bid on? In addition to programming projects, they also listed writing jobs as well. I decided to bid on some of writing jobs first, just to see how it went, and because I had always wanted to do some freelance writing on side.
Within my first week, I won a bid to write a document on Policies and Procedures. I completed that assignment, got paid, and then won another bid—a series of articles on stock market investing. Very soon I was addicted. I kept doing more writing…a technical white paper…web site content…economics articles…sales letters…a chapter in a novel…on and on. My payments were electronically transferred to my bank account, in New Economy style.
