What's the best way to find freelance/contract coding projects?
I'm looking for paid freelance coding jobs. Almost all of the websites that I've come across are filled with foreigners willing to work at 1/4th the pay, job posters wanting you to recode Microsoft Office for $50, or grey-area coding projects (link generators, bots, trojans).
Is there any way to find decent freelance work?
have you tryed oDesk? (www.odesk.com), you can specify your hourly rate and they track the hours you work with some software they have developed.
odesk.com is decent. The jobs are more reasonable than other places, they have a lot of protections in place for freelancers - and buyers - and the buyers seem more willing to pay a reasonable price for work
I've found that hanging out in IRC channels related to products in your field of expertise can help quite a bit. I have quite literally gotten the majority of my contracts from #ffmpeg on Freenode, for example (both coding and non-coding jobs).
Most decent freelancers feed on the work via word-of-mouth recommendation. And they rarely posts on those job bidding sites.
So you might as well ask around your circle of friends and families. They are not too rare nowadays :-)
And I do believe many great freelancers read FreelanceSwitch. Be sure to check the job board on the site and might as well read the content on the site itself.
I used to be freelance myself and find those job bidding sites a rather horrible place to look for work.
After the dot-com crash, I scaled my full-time freelancing back to simple moonlighting here and there. But I've found that the best leads have come through (1) people who read technical articles on my blog and (2) local referrals.
The online contracting sites are never going to be very useful, because you're just an interchangeable component. But if you focus on building a reputation as an expert (if only in a tiny subfield), then you no longer have to compete with an anonymous lowest bidder. Similarly, if you do work locally, you have an advantage over somebody on another continent, because you can actually walk around a local business, discover the true requirements, and suggest solutions the client hasn't thought of yet.
I can't tell you whether this would scale up to full-time consulting!
I'm guessing you mean short-term closed-ended telecommuting freelance jobs. Having a portfolio of projects you've done, someplace searchable will help. But those sorts of projects on the bidding sites, yeah, you're going to be underbid. Free market at work, bro'.
I'd suggest instead simply putting your resume up on sites like Monster.com, Dice.com and such, and getting in touch with a few headhunte^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H recruiters and letting them know what sort of work you're looking for. But they're really generally focused on contractors who'll be working (mostly) on-site.
I don't think the freelance market has amounted to much yet. I mean, seriously, who WOULDN'T want to work from home (or Tahiti or wherever) all the time if their company would allow it? So why would the company look outside for folks?
(By the way, if you find I'm completely wrong, I have a resume I could email you to pass around...)
I used rent-a-coder.com, and was really satisfied with the service, jobs offered, etc.
try ProgrammerMeetDesigner too, good for css, html psd work
Word of mouth. I currently manage a team of full time technical people and have used free lancers to supplement staff needs for the quick one-off's. I only take people I know or who can be vouched for as generally the one-off projects are the ones that need to go smoothly as no one has time to ride herd on something crammed into their schedule.
Me also I'm facing the same problem, but I found a solution. Try to do something is an excellent quality, a simple thing that 'some' buyers needs in such as quality. The quality will attract the buyers and then they'll hire you to do so. This will need time and effort but you should succeed. There's a lot of people that do Open source Staff for popularity, then you can get hired with a decent $$/hour
I am using freelancetraffic.com for a wile and get paid for my job I am very satisfied
Rentacoder.com is the best place where i was working as Software Developer