vWorker (Rent A Coder)

» see vworker.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

rent a coder is a name i knew without ever holding an account. in a turkish computer engineering department in the mid 2000s it stood for an idea more than a website: that somewhere out there was a place where a person in another country would pay you dollars to write code, and you did not need a company or a work visa to get at it.

ian ippolito started it in tampa, florida, in 2001, as rentacoder.com. the design was mostly about distrust, which was the correct instinct for the period. a buyer posted a project. coders bid on it without being able to see anyone else's price, so it did not collapse into a straight race downward the way an open auction does. the buyer put the money into escrow before work began, and the site released it once the work was accepted.

the whole thing ran on ratings. every finished project left a number on both sides, and after enough of them your rating was the only credential that counted for anything. a self-taught nineteen year old with a clean record outranked a graduate with none, and that is the part of the era people are correctly nostalgic about.

the reason i never signed up was not the code. it was the money. getting dollars out of an american escrow account and into a turkish bank account in 2004 was its own project, with its own paperwork and its own fees taken off the top, and paypal did not work properly in turkey until much later. the platform solved trust between two strangers and left the harder half, moving a few hundred dollars across a border, to whoever happened to be on the far end.

~ the record ~

~ the blind bid ~

closed bidding was the interesting design choice and it aged well. on an open marketplace every bidder can see the lowest number and undercut it, and the price falls until only the desperate are still standing. rent a coder hid the numbers, so you bid what you thought the job was worth to you. it did not stop the global price of an hour of programming from falling. it did slow the mechanism down, which is more than most of its successors bothered with.

there was time tracking for hourly work too, so a buyer could watch the hours accrue instead of taking a freelancer's word for it at the end. every part of the product assumed the two sides had never met and never would.

~ the rename ~

on 15 april 2010 rentacoder became vworker, short for virtual worker. the reasoning was that the site had long since stopped being only about code and the old name capped the addressable market at programmers. the reasoning was sound and the new name was worse. rent a coder said exactly what happened on the site in three words. vworker said nothing to anybody.

this is a specific kind of self-inflicted wound and it shows up all over this site. a company outgrows the name that made it legible, picks something abstract enough to cover the new ambition, and quietly hands away the only free advertising it ever had.

~ how it actually ended ~

freelancer.com announced the purchase on 19 november 2012, for what the press release would only describe as a price in the millions. the numbers made public at the time were 2.5 million registered users and $139 million paid through the site across 1.3 million projects, on roughly $11 million a year in revenue. users were migrated over the following days and vworker.com turned into a redirect.

so it did not fail. it got bought by a bigger version of itself and switched off, which is the ordinary ending. what went with it was eleven years of ratings. a reputation built one project at a time on rentacoder was worth real money to the person who owned it, and none of it transferred. every marketplace since has done the same thing to its own people, because a portable reputation is the one feature none of them will ever ship.

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