I simply cannot compete on price with those living in India and Pakistan. Sorry, I can't do programming for $8 an hour. All these sites are packed full of people who will do the job for less than you. I honestly think the only way to get some decent gigs is by going to a site that is US only or Europe only.
It's possible you can't compete, but you shouldn't just assume it. Based on my admittedly limited experience hiring people on these freelancing platforms, the majority of contractors are terrible. Even ones with 5-star average ratings can be completely incompetent.
Thus, for one recent project, I could have chosen from a dozen C++ programmers, all highly rated, charging around $10/hour, but I went straight for the guy charging $60/hour. He did the job perfectly in 7 hours. My hunch, based on past experience, is the alternative would have been days and days of sorting through disappointing results from 3 or 4 different $10/hour jokers before finally giving up.
I would be very interested in a platform that somehow performed real quality control and only accepted people charging a minimum of $50/hour, so that I was virtually guaranteed to only deal with competent professionals who would reliably deliver.
No, not like that. Thanks for telling me about gun.io, because I hadn't heard of them, but they seem like basically just a slightly hipper version of a contract programming agency, and there are many of those. I don't want to deal with a concierge and sort through resumes (to reiterate, I can already get that exact service from dozens of established agencies) and I don't want to hire people for weeks/months to be "part of the team" -- which seems to be what gun.io is geared towards. I could be misunderstanding what they do, of course.
For my purposes, I like the elance/Freelancer model, where I can post a job and quickly hire someone to do 2 hours or 20 hours of specific work. I've just been very disappointed with the quality of work I've gotten every single time I've used these services (with one exception, noted above).
Yeah, you're misunderstanding what they do. It's like elance, but without the race to the bottom on pricing. You can do everything from very small jobs up to hiring them directly into your company.
Gun helps you find somebody that fits your requirements, which I think is a step up from elance and the like. They even kick freelancers out of the system if they scam customers or produce poor quality work.
I'm not surprised you're disappointed with the quality of work from elance and similar. Anyone and their dog can offer services through that platform, and the reality is that the people doing the hiring often don't know what they actually want and they don't know how to evaluate the quality of what they're given (on a technical level), so it's pretty easy for a bad developer to get a 5 star rating.
