I was in a process of analyzing market state in SW outsourcing field and unexpectedly got an article (http://www.yegor256.com/2015/10/27/outsourcing-doesnt-work.html) on why outsourcing does not work anymore. The main thesis in the article is that outsourcing business' needs contradict with their customer's targets. To be more concrete, outsourcing company wants to get as much money from their client as possible, while customer wants to maximize quality/cost ratio. I am in this outsourcing world as end-programmer for quite a while and have seen many of bad things about outsourcing mentioned in the article. However, I continue to be part of all this. Then I asked myself the why I do so?
As author mentioned, there are several alternatives, like UpWork (tm) etc. Have any of you Codeforcians tried these alternative ways of getting in touch with customers who need your software? What are your feelings about all this situation?
As alternatives go, there is also crowdsourcing, the business model of TopCoder. Looks like you know that already though.
Yes, I tried to participate in TopCoder SW Development contests. It looks to me that I am weaker there than the top players, and there is win-or-lose scenario of participation. Like 10% of winning prize and 90% of loosing time. This is mainly because usually only 1-2 solutions are paid, the rest of participants end up with nothing. Thus, if we multiply that 10% probability by 1000$ prize and 1-2 week timeline, the expected win is quite low (at least for Latvia).
As for Marathon-like sponsored events, they look promising. The only thing with them is that the amount of work spent on the problem (and the amount of stuff TopCoder sponsor gets) is usually much higher than the prizes again. Understand me correct, I participate in these contests from time to time, primarily to keep the pace of technology, but making crowdsourcing challenges as primary income does not make sense (at least for my vision).
Note that I made all calculations compared to this.