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I was sure this was a joke, but I didn't catch a punchline. Why would you want to jam all of that functionality together anyway?
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Good point. It seems like there is a variation on Poe's Law here, but I can't quite put my finger on it. It works as a honeypot either way. On a more practical note, Derek Siver's advice at [1] to ask bidders to post a "magic phrase" of some sort has worked really well for me. I literally just select a couple of random words from /usr/share/dict/words and add something like: To prove that you have actually read this…
This is a very popular tactic, easy to game. Enjoy it while it lasts, because it won't be much longer ... https://www.elance.com/r/jobs/q-please%20include%20the%20wor...
That being said, I think this guys request and offer are both ridiculous. Maybe someone who likes the general idea, contacts him and explains that they could rough out a shitty version to test the idea and hopefully pull some seed money to hire some real crunchers at a true wage to flesh it out completely.
That 'weekend project' took you much longer than a weekend. It took years of research and study. A lifetime of perspective building experience. A performance of Beethoven's 9th lasts 45 minutes. Do you think he released it saying 'this sound took me less than an hour to create!'.
Let's avoid mocking the ignorance of others when our own nonsensical boasting is what is causing these people's misunderstanding.
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These are not serious bidders. They are robo-applications or blindly copy/pasted applications by cut-rate shops that are mind-numbingly bad at development.
Elance and sites like it are crazy uncharted territory for me. Are there really folks who run bots to scrape Elance, put in a bid for the minimum budget price (someone did bid $750, according to the min/max spread on there), and hope they get picked? What happens when they do get picked, and they just agreed to build Amazon for $750? At that point I guess $750 is just so low an amount that neither party really cares…
Elance/oDesk gets ridiculous - but I've heard stories of the Digg prototype being the product of oDesk freelancers and a couple thousand dollars. Never have found proof/merit to this but I still wonder... anyone know?
I think this highlights the interesting lack of fundamental understanding by the general public about software and how complex and expensive it is. Intuitively people understand things like cars and laptops are expensive, time consuming and difficult to build requiring complex tools and machinery. This is not the case with software, where we see time and time again requests like "same as Facebook..." or "Same as Amaz…
Relevant quotes from clients who've commissioned web developers/designers (previously posted on Clients From Hell): --- “I want to create a rival to Twitter. So I want it exactly the same except where it says What’s Happening? I want it to say How are you feeling? ” "There’s one thing that our social media site will have that Facebook hasn’t even thought of… People can rate each other! Out of a possible five stars, d…