Double U Blog

Update: After the blog post announcing this ‘warning’ was inundated with angry and frustrated Pakistani coders, RAC has decided to suspend the site-wide message until they’ve gotten more reliable information on the problem and ground realities.

All,

This is from Ian Ippolito, the owner of Rent a coder.  My sincere apologies if your business was negatively affected in any way.  The message had been removed.

A number of Pakistani coders had claimed that the electrical situation had recently gotten out of hand and asked to be excused from their projects without a poor rating.  We researched the situation on the internet and it appeared true and did so and then posted the warning on the site.  After posting the warning, we then received a number of emails saying that the electrical situation is no different than it used to be for many years, and that competent coders have already made other arrangements and are not affected.

Since there is a big conflict between what different people in Pakistan are telling us, we have removed all messages until we are able to sort out exactly what is happening.

Again my apologies.

Ian Ippolito
http://www.rentacoder.com

———–

Original post

Pakistan’s electricity crises (which has pretty much existed since forever) has just caught the attention of RentACoder.com (RAC), who have posted on their blog warning customers about the issue and advising them to discuss it beforehand with whomever they hire out of Pakistan. The post was categorized under Severe Weather / Other Critical Situations updates.

RAC is a website that allows you to hire freelance ‘coders’ (programmers, designers, writers etc.) instead of having to do it yourself — outsourcing, is what it is. There are many sites for this, whether your purpose is to buy or sell services, RAC and Elance being two of the most popular few. Pakistanis are quite active in such marketplaces and are generally quite good at it (except a few unfortunate cases which give the rest a bad name). The ByteSense blog has a run-down of numbers (written in June) showing the market for and customer rating given to Pakistani coders from various freelance business sites (including the two mentioned in this post).

Granted, the electricity problem is bad - but it’s not so bad as to hinder all business. As Green&White puts it, we still have power for at least 14 hours in the day; and not all parts of Pakistan have to face this problem in the same degree. It is also a safe bet to assume that anyone who is serious about working at places such as RAC and the like has already made arrangements to alternate power sources for their computer and internet — a UPS, generators and laptops are some common ways to work around the issue, and undoubtedly are used by a majority of Pakistani coders.

I can certainly understand why RentACoder would want to caution their customers about this obviously existing problem. It would undoubtedly hurt their credibility–not to mention that of the coder’s–in the eyes of their customers.

The thing that is disheartening is that this message from RAC will surely be taken by some people as implying “steer clear of Pakistanis.” And why not? If I were a customer looking for someone to work on my project and I had two people to choose from, one from Pakistan and the other from whichever other country, RAC’s warning would remain at the back of my mind — I would want the smoothest possible transaction; why risk loosing time and potentially even money? With this mindframe, I think, many people will choose people from other parts of the World over Pakistanis at places such as RAC.

I guess the general complaint with their warning is that it is too harsh, and places yet another hurdle in the path of a Pakistani coder looking to earn pay and experience online.