Rent a coder; does this really work ?
If you're a programmer, you certainly already created a little program or website for someone and get paid for it. This is a normal thing; you have a talent that some others don't have and you can help them, charging something for your time and effort.
On the web, there is this kind of thing too. You can pay someone for a specifig job you want to be done. There is websites that exposes this principle like RentACoder and GetACoder. These websites look great, there is a lot of projects awaiting for bids and plenty of coders ready to code ! Fine, this seems to be a great place to search for custom jobs or to post a project you don't the time (or knowledge) to do by yourself.
So, let's take a look to both sides of the medal...
Being a coder, bidding on projects
When you signup on websites like RentACoder, you can search for projects you want to realize. There is plenty of different categories: .Net, Java, SQL Server, MySQL, graphic design, bug fixing, etc... so you can find a perfect project for you and bid on.
Now that you've found the project you start to bid on and you think about a price (between the price range). You than have your price in mind but you find that 50 indians have already bidded on this for 10% of the price you thought of charging... Damn ! This is the reality, in india, being paid 5$/hour is big. Here, if we work as a freelancer we can easily charge 40$-100$ per hour. Every single project you will find will have indian bids on it. Maybe the project manager don't want cheap indian code for a fraction of the price, but wants someone who will charge a lot more but do a great job so with those projects, you may have a chance on winning it.
If you win the project, you will have to realize it so you will need specifications, you will need to talk to the project manager often to really understand his needs. This can be hard. Remember what you do at your day job... you're near from the client, you ask questions anytime, you do meetings, you chat, etc... The communication is easy, but if the client is about 1000km away, will you spend hours on phone ? Paying bills will kill all the profit you can make out of the project itself. Will you chat everyday ? Chatting is good for easy questions, but don't make serious decisions using MSN. Will you have the opportunity to meet up with the project manager ? Maybe not if he lives far from you, and I'm sure no one of you will pay 200$ for a plane ticket on a 400$ project !
There is also another thing that may scares some people... will you really get paid for you work ? When you give your source code, the project manager can stop talking to you, stole your work and don't pay a dime for it... it's a danger. I don't know if this happens often but, it's not risk-free.
Being a project manager, awaiting for bids
Being a project manager is not very different from being a coder because the real problem with coder rental is the communication, and this is a problem for both sides. Even if this problem is the same, there is some other things that are different... Like I said previously, there is a lot of indians that want to work for peanuts so you will be able to buy something that fits your needs for a small amount of money.
So you decide to take someone for your project (whoever he his and where he's from). You send him the specifications of the work to be done and he starts to work on it. You communicate everyday to have a feedback about the way the developpment is going... eveything seems to be fine.
Then, you get your work, you pay for it and do what you have to do with your project (put it on the internet, use it on your intranet, etc...). Everything seems to be fine but soon you discover some bugs and you open the code... What you find is not, and absolutely not following any existing programming best practices. You're not able to follow the code logic (if there is a logic...), you find weird things and... Damn it ! You can maintain this code without rewriting a big part... This is normal, you can't control someone else's code. Personnaly at my day job I check my coworkers code barely every day and find things that I tell them to change or fix it the best they can, but I will never be satisfied until I do it myself.
Conclusion...
Personnaly I think that you can't rent a coder... at least 90% of the time. I think sometimes you can rent someone to create graphical content or database design, but I don't think you can have success with programming. So in general, I don't think it's a good idea being a coder and not a good idea being a project manager (on rent a coder).
Be paid to fill surveys online; can we really make money with this ?
If you read this article it is because you are thinking about filling surveys online to make an extra cash every week. Like many other people, making money online is a thing we want to be able to do. If you think you can make money online, you're right, there IS a lot of ways to make money online, sitting at home and working only a few hours per day.
To day I will explain what is all about be paid to fill surveys online.
Is it hard to fill surveys and hard to find surveys to fill ?
Non, it's easy to fill, you only give your opinions about some products/services. You have offers everywhere on the internet, so you can find some good surveys only by surfing on your favorite sites. If you don't trust me, just spend about 5 minutes on facebook and you will see ads for "surveys money".
How much money can we make from this ?
It will depend on how much time you want to spend online filling surveys, but for sure, you will not become millionaire with this ! If you spend a few hours a week doing this you can make from 20$ to 100$ per week. You can make more than this but it general it will look like this. It always depends on current offers and the time you want to spend on it. I presonnaly don't know people who do 1000$ a week, even in a month.
Is it right or me ?
If you want something you can do every week (maybe everyday) because you're tired of spending your time on useless websites playing online little flash game or reading jokes or whatever you do to spend your time on your computer, this can be a little sideline. You will spend time, and be paid to spend it.
On the other hand, if for you time is money, don't fill surveys online, you'll lose your time. At the begginning you will say "Wow ! it's very easy to make money with this, I will do this all weekends and every evening when I comeback home from a day of work", but 3 or 4 days after you will say "Ahh damn it, I'm tired of filling these, I don't want this anymore".
Is it all legitimate or I can really lose my time with this ?
Like any other thing on the internet, you can be fooled if you trust anything you see. There is a lot more scams in online paid surveys than legitimate one so don't be surprised if one day you don't receive your paycheck of even worse, if you get frauded.
Conclusion...
Personnaly, I think that online paid surveys are only for a small audience and whoever you are you should think about starting to fill surveys online to make money. You can lose more time than money you can get.