I disagree (although perhaps I'm one of the shoddy developers bidding low to provide total crap :)

I think that the online sites are a great place to get started if you have nothing else. Do a few good quality jobs and you've got a network of contacts who would prefer your good work to the other scam-artists they've worked with from the site. Also, a number of the buyers are savvy to the problems with low bidders and choose realistic people who bid five times the low bid.

I wouldn't recommend doing that forever, but as I said, it's a wonderful place to start, and get some experience and contacts. The most important part is to *not* be one of the shoddy scam artists - if you made a mistake and bid low (as I've did more than once at the beginning), see it through anyway. Your client may be your biggest source of work in the future.

Cheers! James Beninger


In reply to Re: Re: [OT] Freelancing advice? by jbeninger
in thread [OT] Freelancing advice? by Withigo

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.