Well, no, maybe you shouldn't be surprised.   I have been programming computers since age 11, and I really love the work, especially when it's all about Linux!

Here's the surprise:  I have only done five jobs on RentACoder.  Five jobs in four years.  Not a lot.

Why so few?  Because most experienced software developers in "mature economies" like North America, Europe, Japan and Austrailia get brutally outbid by people in extremely low-cost countries.  Or put another way, small-time outsourcing.    Or instead of 10,000 full-time jobs all at once, thousands of little one-off projects going overseas individually.

I don't spend much time on RentACoder, obviously because I have an easier time finding fun side work elsewhere.  RAC has a feature where a buyer can "invite" developers to bid on something, but most of those invitations are worthless to me.  They want me to do something with Windows (me, hahaha!), or search engine optimization, outright scams/spams, and stuff that at least twenty million Indians have already been trained to do.

What surprised me was that after such a small track record, RentACoder has ranked me 7,025th out of 273,839 coders, or "higher than 97.43% of their peers".  This results in my RentACoder profile being adorned with the TopCoder badge. 

And they never told me. I just stumbled on it, because someone actually sent me a rare interesting-looking bid request.

Maybe RAC is worth a little more attention.