J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

Slave Wages

This item came up in my RSS reader: Web to Excel. It's a listing at a site called Freelance Projects, where people post their needs, and others reply. This request is:

I have 161 links that I need the contact info taken from and put into Excel. Should not take longer than 2 hours to complete. I will pay via paypal. Budget is $12.00.

Assume that the job really does take two hours (45 seconds per link). By the time the successful applicant places the bid and handles all of the upfront details, it's at least a three-hour job. Do people really work for $4 an hour? Apparently, so. The job has dozens of bids.

The Freelance Projects site has quite a few listing for Excel projects. It's interesting to see what people are using Excel for. Some people could save time and money by consulting the Excel help, or a quick web search. For example:

I desire an Excel spreadsheet which can count the number of characters including spaces written within a cell. In addition, I should be able to derive the number of characters for EACH of the cells framed up within one column on the Excel spreadsheet and get this from any other columns too.

And, not surprisingly, Freelance Projects attracts lots of spammers. For example:

Hiii, We need 100000 real email address, not fake. We'll check them and then make the payment through GAF. Max budget for this is $30.

Bids for this job range from $30 to $300:

Guys i just need an email list of around 1-5 million email accounts.. These email must be accurate not bogus emails. I dont want to get a list of email that are not working