Home > Freelancing on the Internet
1 Freelancer Websites
The advent of the Internet has created new opportunities for freelancing, particularly for software developers from countries with low average salaries, such as Bulgaria, China, India or Romania. A number of popular websites, most notably http://www.script4lance.com or http://www.CMSLance.com and http://www.rentacoder.com , have become bustling marketplaces for farming out software development projects to foreign freelancers at rates generally considered rock-bottom by American or Western standards. Such websites typically provide a convenient central forum for posting job requests, rating and documented history to judge potential buyers and sellers, an escrow system to protect participants from fraud, and arbitration in the event of disagreements between the coder and the buyer. The system for setting prices is usually organized as some kind of an auction.
2 Coders
The majority of the coders at such websites are apparently from India and Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, there are some from United States, England, and other high wage countries. Coders vary from individual freelancers, sometimes collegeA college ( Latin collegium can be the name of any group of colleagues; originally it meant a group of people living together under a common set of rules con "together" + leg "law"). As a consequence members of colleges were originally styled " fellow" an students working in their spare time, to small software companies with teams of developers. The rates commanded by the coders generally depend on the scope of the project, e.g. a rough estimate of the time it would take to complete, their history of past work done when contracted through the website, as well as on financial limitations of the buyers. Coders from high wage countries probably would tend to be high skilled experts capable of working rapidly and able to contract for the more expensive projects.
3 Compared to offshore outsourcing
This kind of Internet-based outsourcingOutsourcing is the delegation of tasks or jobs from internal production to an external entity (such as a subcontractor). Most recently, it has come to mean the elimination of native staff to staff overseas, where salaries are markedly lower. This is despi can be thought of as a small businessA small business may be defined as a business with a small number of employees. The legal definition of "small" often varies by country and industry, but is generally under 100 employees. These businesses are normally privately owned corporations, partner variant of the wider businessHistorically, the term business referred to activities or interests. By extension the word became (as recently as the 18th century) synonymous with an individual commercial enterprise. It has also taken on the more general meaning of a nexus of commercial practice of offshoringOffshoring can be defined as relocation of business processes (including production/manufacturing) to a lower cost location, usually overseas. Offshoring can be seen in the context of either production offshoring or services offshoring. China has emerged. Whereas larger corporations may set up their own subsidiaries in cheaper rates countries, small businesses as well as individual developers, whether employees or themselves freelancers, find it convenient to look for opportunities to get projects done through Internet freelancing sites. A typical project price, as of 2004, is several hundreds US dollars, well within reach of an individual or a small company in the United States. Freelancing can be best utilized for all web related work, where distant is virtually zero to communicate. Freelancing on the Internet has opened doors for many people to use their brain and earn money from any part of the world.
