As long as oDesk does not change at all, I'm happy. The only reason I hire on oDesk is because it is NOT elance - have had horrible experience with elance both with providers and the company itself and how it conducts business (or what it calls business).
Although this is called a merger, it is only that in name. It seems elance's CEO will call the shots.
"Who will lead the new company?
oDesk executive chairman Thomas Layton will continue in the same role at the combined company, and Elance CEO Fabio Rosati will serve as chief executive officer."
There's a huge wave of consolidation in the industry in the past 5 years. Just last year freelancer bought vworker. It is ripe for disruption as the dominant sites grow bloated and complacent, only seeing acquisitions as the way to grow.
It is like Google merging with AltaVista and AltaVista CEO becoming the new CEO. We depend heavily on oDesk for our support team so this is a very scary news.
- saying they are from the US or EU but actually being from India, obviously lying about it to appear more credible,
- starting a project with (1 or more) seniors to get the project and trust and then switching those for the random people dragged in from the street (the worst juniors you can imagine),
- blackmailing withholding parts of deliverables,
- working (with different accounts on different sites) on 10+ projects at a time,
- disappearing without any recourse (yes this can happen in 'real life', but it's extremely rare; on oDesk it's not)
- making up the most insane lies why they are late/more expensive; most common and very morbid; cancer of close family or themselves, but so badly researched that after 3 questions you already know it's not true
and other types of scamming.
Most of these things are preventable if you are really really paranoid and are on top of the 'workers' 24/7, checking everything they deliver with a fine comb, however, that's not really what I would want to do. And for all cases reported to oDesk they just said they couldn't do anything as the screenshot tool was used and the workers 'worked' according to that.
There was an IDE open and code was typed in; random copy/paste code from the web, but that was not the point.
I have very good experiences with both as well and a lot of successful projects, but yeah; this stuff delivered a lot of pain and energy and we seem completely unprotected as buyer.
What we do these days is actually building a team at the outsourcing location, sitting there in the office, training etc; it takes more upfront effort and cost, but it's much more effective. So much more that I would never use these sites again. And we build value instead of work with and train people who will leave in a blink of an eye for a better paying client.
i built sucessful teams in the Netherlands, Ukraine, Poland, India, Spain and Portugal.
I built a team in Vietnam two years ago together with another company, but i'm sorry to say we were badly scammed there with the most common scam; as soon as you are happy and the machine is well oiled, juniors replace the seniors for the work except in Skype calls where the guys you recruited and know still show up to play the part. We should've stayed on location maybe but I find it very uncomfortable to work with that level of distrust.
Hope you fare better! I met great coders there. Almost all played along with the charade; one of them contacted my recently telling he was sorry and explaining that it is common practice because they make more money that way and clients usually don't notice. Had this over the years in all Asians countries we worked with, however except this one it never happened after actually being on location.
I imagine oDesk is fine as long as you don't have any problems. They don't see blackmail as breaking their rules though, e.g. a contractor blackmailing you for a good rating. That contractor gets to stay on the platform. I have had this experience.
Surely that guy isn't selling ratings, as he's the client so he's the guy paying the low fees - presumably to get work (just cheap work), otherwise why would he spend $829 just to give contractors ratings. (Unless there's more going on than meets the eye, for example behind the scenes he's selling the chance to get a positive rating for more than he pays on the site.)
Or the company via a different means is paying this "person" more money than he is spending, to make it look legitimate -- the only loss then is the fee (%) that Elance / oDesk takes, which further incentivizes Elance / oDesk to allow this behaviour, though that is minor in comparison to having a lot of "high quality" / highly rated contractors on their platform.
Yeah. Elance / oDesk aren't incentivized to prevent this behaviour. They want a site that looks busy, and full of "high-quality" / highly rated contractors.
They could easily allow for filters to weed, though instead they allow for details to be hidden.
Or just the final code or maybe have access to your servers or other assets - and without a full security check / wipe, you can't know if they created a way in - or they threaten to release your code publicly, or sell it, etc..
People actually accept executable, possibly backdoored code and/or assets from random-internet-site-freelancers – then install it on their production sites _without_ security auditing it?
(I know - I _shouldn't_ be surprised, I suspect significant double-digit percentages of WordPress sites have themes installed which have some mysterious "<!-- Don't remove this! required for mobile menu to work! --> <?php echo eval(base_64_decode('foobazbah')) ?> type thing in footer.php…)
Most people I know who have used odesk/elance simply don't have the ability to perform an audit.
They are mostly writers, photographers, non-technical entrepreneurs and so on who have outsourced some development tasks related to their online activities. They personally have no ability to assess the code apart from how it looks in the front end. They could hire a second person to do the audit for them but now they have two people to worry about getting screwed by...
Just to balance the concept, usually people who have maintained good ratings for a long time, don't do this. I have worked for like 5-6 years at odesk part time, done around 40 jobs of varied sizes (hourly as well as fixed prices), never even once held back code or any thing, and barely once received some what negative feedback in which case i believe it was still my fault. So all sorts of people exist and work online. Those who have build reputations over years value it far more than the money, and an employer can easily trash the reputation with feedback. That being said employers from the western world are generally nice or may be it was just my experience :)
I don't understand how they would do this. On oDesk, both employer and employee only have the opportunity to rate one another after the work is completed and the project is closed.
Would you mind elaborating on your experiences with elance? I had a family member who does freelance marketing/writing called me a few years ago and mentioned he was planning to sign up there and asking what I knew about it.
I could only tell him about a comment I'd browsed on HN that referred to it as a "ghetto" of poor paying assignments. He went ahead with it and now seems to be doing quite well as one of the top 5 providers of marketing and writing services.
My experience is with hiring technical freelancers: design, network, security, development, etc.
It is entirely possible that elance is great for non-technical jobs.
The issues I ran into were providers who have great ratings but who can't do the job! Later I found out that elance has a loophole where buyers who disputed or cancelled projects are not able to leave feedback. So you're not getting the full story when you look at a provider's history.
elance doesn't really care about this. So you have a huge portion of freelancers on elance who cosmetically pump up their ratings to get more jobs and then either farm them out to others or do a shoddy job themselves. when/if the job goes into dispute or is cancelled it disappears from their history. if the client is dumb enough to be happy with the crap work, they get a nice rating in exchange for turning over the final code.
> Later I found out that elance has a loophole where buyers who disputed or cancelled projects are not able to leave feedback.
That is not correct.
You can dispute a project and as long as the freelancer received a single dollar for any work, you can leave feedback. Why should you be allowed to leave feedback if there hasn't been any payment made?
There are just as many clowns on the client side, as there are on the freelancer side. Many projects never get off the ground because the client has no money or is just an idiot. People like that should be allowed to leave feedback?
If you're having trouble finding quality help on Elance, try creating a private project and invite only those in your geographic region. So if you're in the US, that means US freelancers.
In the end, you get what you pay for. Don't expect miracles from India.
Yes, it is absolutely correct. A provider can waste my time, lock me into dispute resolution and even if I "win" and get a full refund, I can't leave public feedback so that the next buyer knows how shitty they are.
> Later I found out that elance has a loophole where buyers who disputed or cancelled projects are not able to leave feedback.
The mistake many clients make is to request "cancellation". You should request a refund instead (and in the common case where a contractor goes silent, you will get back 100%.) Then mark the job as "complete" and leave feedback, which will be visible in their history (though it will not affect their average star rating.)
Requesting a refund and getting a refund closes the job as not completed, without the ability to leave feedback. The only way to leave feedback is to pay them either full amount or at least for 1 milestone.
> There's a huge wave of consolidation in the industry in the past 5 years. Just last year freelancer bought vworker.
I really hope oDesk - Elance won't go the same way freelancer - vworker went.
I used to have an account of RentACode, a long time ago. It was mostly a good experience, considering the state of freelancing back then. When my significant otter got fired, I dug the account and handed it over to her -- it had a bunch of good reviews and some of them were for tech writing jobs, so I though it would be useful to her (she's not a programmer, she does marketing).
RAC had, in the meantime, become freelancer.com. The first thing it did was chew through the money I still had in my account -- two or three hundred dollars the withdrawal of which I had procrastinated for a long time, keeping them there in case I'd suddenly decide to take new jobs on RAC (then vWorker) again. I didn't get anything other than automated answers from their tech support, and eventually settled for that being dead money.
Now freelancer.com is a scammer's heaven. It doesn't have escrows by default, the rounding of of fees is done quite liberally, there seems to be no mechanism to stop automatic bidding (with ridiculous sums that do nothing but bring the average bid price down, since it's obvious that whatever is behind those posts is never awarded a project), and their support for disputes is unhelpful at best.
My gf is actually still unemployed and still gets projects on Freelancer every once in a while, but after being scammed twice -- with copious help through lack of reaction by Freelancer -- both her and her clients generally eschew its payment system altogether. She usually insists on a 100% milestone on Freelancer.com the first time she works with them, and then it's PayPal all the way.
The eschewing of the payment system seems to be quite generalized, because their lack of reaction and real buyer and seller protection basically means people end up paying fees for something that is then little more than a glorified job advertising website, since it otherwise fails to offer anything for the (hefty) fees they take.
Freelancer.com is a pretty sore sight nowadays. I browse its range of contract offers every once in a while; there's generally nothing for me (I do systems programming and embedded stuff -- people don't usually hire freelancers to write operating systems or make gadgets, unsurprisingly), but most of the projects and most of the bids depress me. Ads along the lines of "looking for an app expert", looking for reasonably non-trivial applications that work on a gazillion of platforms, awarded to poor people for sums that seem small even to me.
Hi Weland, I'm the CEO of Freelancer.com. I thought I would reply to your comment, and I'm also happy to get someone to look into your account if you get send me your username.
A few comments- we do have escrows by default- called Milestone Payments. We don't however force people to use them if the two parties decide to come to an arrangement where they don't want to use them. The vast majority of projects do. Also you have a chance to not accept the project as a freelancer if Milestone payments have not been created after you've been awarded. So I can't see the issue here.
Rounding of fees? I have no idea what you are talking about here. We round project commissions to the cent, like everyone else.
Automated bidding- we changed our system some time ago to dramatically stop bid spam. I'm not sure how recently you have used the site. We have removed "public" bids entirely. Now you can only leave one private bid, this has got rid of the problem you talk about.
I would have to disagree with you for disputes and support. We have the largest support team in the entire industry with 250 people in our own facility that operate 24x7x365 and speak 10 languages. We have a paralegal team doing disputes that I believe is the most sophisticated in the industry as well in terms of how it resolves issues.
Our business is going from strength to strength and we are the only company that is publicly listed, so our financials are transparent. Our revenue is growing at almost double the growth rate of our nearest competitors, so I would have also disagree about your comments about the state of the site.
Happy to answer any other questions you may have or you can email me directly at matt@freelancer.com. Also if you shoot me your account username I will have someone take a look at it.
Being an old RAC then vWorker freelancer, I totally share weland's view.
Lately, I restarted on freelancer.com, and the amount of WTF moments that I faced are quite substantial. Let me give you a summary (and why I decided to move to elance):
-- The worker being constantly extorted in every corner of the site:
-Pay $5 in order to take a test.
-Pay more $ to get your bid in the first row/highlighted
-Pay some $ to unlock more BidsPerMonth and Skills
-Pay upfront 10% of every job you are awarded, even if the employer is determined to scam you and never pay
-What about a constant Ad to remind you that you can always choose to pay more.
...
-- Milestone payment is not defaulted, if the employer didnt made a milestone payment, we couldn't care less, we wont give you back the initial 10% fee (even if both agree to cancel), and you'll have a permanent "Work in Progress" job in your profile (until you decide to constantly harass the support team and wait few weeks)
--The website is a hassle:
- Everything is dynamically processed, slow loading, excessively simplified, and most pages cant be bookmarked
- Using game mechanism to motivate workers is interesting(levels, badges, XP points ...), but most of it is actually useless/funny (Exp: 78000 credit point to have a 20min call with the CEO)
Frankly, I don't have too much to offer with regard to the support issues. I only helped my GF with it, and it was a while ago. If it improved in the meantime and my comments are no longer representative, I'm really sorry. I should have made that clearer.
However, as for the other matters:
> we do have escrows by default- called Milestone Payments.
Actually, you don't have them by default :-). By your own admitting:
> We don't however force people to use them if the two parties decide to come to an arrangement where they don't want to use them.
My (admittedly foggy, please correct me if I'm wrong) memory tells me that RAC had escrows by default, i.e. the buyer had to place the money in RAC's escrow before the coder could start work. I distinctly remember that RAC's seller instructions clearly said you should not start coding before the project is awarded to you, because there is no way to be sure the buyer actually has the money to pay you. When the project was awarded, the money was placed in escrow. I actually had a dispute settled over this matter: my client had simply vanished. I waited for two weeks before telling him I'd get the project into arbitration if I don't receive feedback, and waited another three before getting it into arbitration. The RAC arbitrator decided that if he failed to respond within some reasonable period (a couple of weeks, again), I'd get the money, because the deliverable I had submitted was indeed in accordance with what had been agreed.
Freelancer.com doesn't force buyers to do that, giving rise to the following phenomenon: a scammer opens an account -- with zero reviews but a verified payment method -- and posts a job ad. It's well-paid for something otherwise reasonably simple, like some content writing, but the job has to be done quickly and the buyer claims he can't offer a milestone payment that quickly -- he doesn't have the money on hand, bank transfer takes time (he usually lists his country to be something like Zambia or Congo, where it's probably fairly safe to assume that banks don't go too smoothly with all the firing in the street and whatnot). Since the pay is higher than average, a lot of freelancers are happy to do it. Needless to say, they never get their money.
I'm sorry to say, but when this happened, your large support team did absolutely nothing. They simply reminded her that she should ask for a milestone payment, which a lot of buyers actually don't want to do for credible, or at the very least legitimate reasons. If you don't want to force people into escrowing, you should be able to deal with cases like these.
This wasn't an isolated incident because the same type of job ad appeared several times in the following weeks. We actually tried to warn other freelancers about it and we found at least another dozen people got the same treatment, quite possibly from the same guy who was opening different accounts, and from the same support team.
Edit: Oh yes, rounding of fees.
This page: http://www.freelancer.com/feesandcharges/ claims that, for a free membership plan, Freelancer.com gets 10% of what gets paid to a freelancer, or 5 USD, whichever is greater. Fair enough.
But if I try to bid for 100 USD that gets paid to me, the bid now gets to 111.11 USD, which looks an awful lot closer to 11%.
I initially assumed this had something to do with including the 3% amount that the employer is charged for the posting, too, but it doesn't add up. I never really bothered understanding how it goes; as I mentioned in my other post, I haven't done freelance work on what is today Freelancer.com since the days it was still called Rent a Coder. But in the best case, this is poorly documented. I, for one, can't make sense of it, and I'm probably better at doing math than most freelancers who do content "writing" or social media promotion on your website.
Even later edit: just to be clear, I'm not trying to scold your business model, nor your efforts as a company. If your current model works for you, then it's awesome. Matters of finance and corporate politics are beyond either my possibilities and my wish to comprehend. Freelancer.com isn't doing bad financially (though, since I'm not living off its dividends, that's irrelevant to me) so I presume there are people for whom it makes world a better place. For me, it doesn't.
lol yes a very similar situation for me but from the other side.. I employed people on rentacoder and it was not too bad just had to be very careful but then freelancer LOL it seems like an army of people who are only in the business of scamming, also the actual freelacer company looks really shady themselves! I only posted a few jobs on freelancer many many years ago but that was enough.. I logged in recently to freelancer and they seem to be ripping off 99designs/fiverr/whatever else they can find to copy..
I remember that now with rentacoder, they had a great escrow system.
oDesk are good, they dont allow employers or freelancers to get away with much wrong doing, they re all I use now and I hope they do not change
I'm the CEO of Freelancer.com. How did the RAC escrow system differ? We don't have "expert guarantees" or reverse escrow, where the freelancer is required to put an escrow in the opposite direction, if that is what you mean? Other than that we have the same functionality.
Out of curiosity, are you using oDesk to hire contractors, or are you freelancing on oDesk? I ask because I recently started freelancing on the sight an it feels like fighting for scraps. I mean, half the posts I see have "Contact goes to the lowest bidder" at the top of the listing.
Does it get better once you "establish" yourself on the site? Right now it feels pretty futile outside of making some pocket change.
I used oDesk exclusively for hiring developers for a number of years, here is my 2 cents:
> it feels like fighting for scraps
You are fighting for scraps. Generally speaking, until you've been really burnt by a contractor you feel great hiring people in India to work for pennies compared to what you're reselling the service for.
IMO, this is the vast majority of people hiring on oDesk.
In addition, there are SMB or Agency type businesses that are looking to form relationships; they don't want to have to constantly search for new developers. Often, they will find a group or business with a stable of developers even if the quality of the work is a little bit poorer. Many of the firms I worked with just had a project manager that communicated with the developers on their end (often because they did not speak english) and maintained a single point of contact for us. Those were our best experiences.
> Does it get better once you "establish" yourself on the site?
It should. By the end of the time I was using oDesk I had several filters set up when searching so if someone had not completed a test or rating they would never appear on my radar.
My friend and I are mid-redesign on a new service marketplace called reBaked. Our innovation is collaboration with many freelancers and paying them proportionally to what they actually deliver. There's also a negotiated minimum payment for freelancers so it's not overly risky for them.
...it's not quite ready for a Show HN, but the gist can be seen at (https://rbkd-staging.heroku.com). I'd love to get your first reaction.
It's interesting and I'll have to think about it further but I wouldn't think that a listing fee of 10% of project budget, payable in advance, is going to work.
Thanks for looking! I can't argue that 10% is the correct fee - it's more of a starting point.
For that fee we guarantee users are promptly paid (net 10 or less, no excuses), absorb all of the usual transaction fees, host and archive the project workspace, and generate/distribute all 1099 and W9's.
Maybe. I'm actually on the other side of this as a freelancer, so might not have the best info. But one thing I've noticed is that one of main the ways I get gigs is by assuring people that the whole thing is going to work. In other words, there's a lot of inherent and perceived risk in outsourcing and if I can start a conversation, I can allay some of their fears. So it seems to me that with an upfront fee, you're tacking on this perceived extra risk or hurdle before they get to talk to anyone.
I don't know what the psychology of money-back guarantees is. They don't have much affect on me, for some reason.
We're looking for a lawyer to help finish up our merger. The previous guy did 90% of the work and then stopped responding to our emails!!! This shouldn't take an experienced lawyer more than a few hours.
I have mixed emotions about this because I have made a solid income at times with oDesk's time tracker, but I don't want it to become the standard way of doing things. That's because majority of the work I do now is on a subconscious level, so I'm basically thinking about a problem all day and it may only take an hour to code up the solution. I guess a workaround is to double or triple hourly rates, but I don't see that happening, because as more places merge, we may find ourselves in a race to the bottom.
That said, I got burned on eLance by charging a flat rate for a client that was never satisfied with my work. I made less after several weeks than other contractors make in an hour. I guess that's the main reason I went to oDesk (though I always liked eLance).
Please, somebody, somewhere, come up with a daily rate mechanism that doesn't invade workers' privacy.
That and finding a way to spread workloads across multiple developers (to reduce stress and make for a better product) are the two main challenges I see right now in freelancing.
Our company Lambda (http://getlambda.com) helps negotiate contract work for our freelancers. We often set up the following arrangement: the client pays in advance for a week or two of work, and we agree that "a week" contains X hours of developer time. If there are hours unused by the end of the contract, we refund the money. It's an elegant way to avoid most payment issues.
On your site it doesn't say whether or not you get a cut, but given the natural alignment of interests I think it's safe to say you won't have a problem with having to return unused hours, even an honest developer will simply maximize those hours.
What do you consider a solid income? It seems like the majority of the jobs posted on oDesk are asking for a lot and only willing to pay very little. I wonder how even someone willing to work for 2 bucks an hour could possibly make reasonable money on there.
Right, so I've seen this assertion repeated a few times but how do you find these 35-50 an hour jobs on oDesk because I've not really seen them except for very rare occasions.
$2/hr is a lot of money to some people in some places, particularly certain "developing nations".
Of course, you get what you pay for. Most people looking to hire on these sites aren't interested in quality; they want quantity at a discount. It works well for both them and the people doing the work at least in the short term. After all, some money (food) is better than nothing. I consider it a pretty base form of exploitation, though.
Can you give an example of a place where $2 peer hour is a lot? I often hear this type of assertion being made. I can believe that $2 per hour is enough to live off in some places, but I don't know of anywhere it would be considered "a lot."
Where I live, a software engineer makes about $500/month. That's $3/hour and some change, I know software developers who make even less. Freelancing for me is basically a no-brainer as I will not work for those wages if I can help it. I have the incredible fortune of being able to speak and write at a native level, that gives me and a few others an edge but most people suffer a lot.
If you land a job making $5/hour, full time 40 hour weeks, that's $800 a month. A LOOOOT of people here would kill for that kind of salary.
I'm curious. At that sort of rate, buying hardware to work on sounds very expensive compared to your income. What sort of machine do you use, and how much did you pay? I'm guessing you don't have a $3k MacBook.
Seems like there would be an opportunity for developers to donate laptops/hardware to people in developing countries who could use them to make money. I have at least 5 sitting around my office, only 2 of which are in use. I guess the logistics would kill it, but still.
My consulting rate is not $5 because I'm not doing "Wordpress installs". I make similar wages to a software developer working in the US.so I do own an iMac 27'' and a $1200 built Windows PC for .NET work.
It would be very hard to donate laptops here in Bolivia because of how this ass-backwards government handles importing goods and taxes when importing something.
Not OP. But someone who's also in a country where an average salary would be around 3 USD per hour. If you work and charge local rates you're pretty much restricted to either saving longer time for new average, not high end, laptop or shorter time for used one. Ordering used hardware online is much cheaper because prices are much lower, but there's about 50% chance that it will be "caught" by customs and then you have to pay ~27% (tax+customs) of the purchase price, additionally. Prices of new stuff locally is pretty much the same as in other countries in my experience. For reference I'm in Bosnia right now and prices are same or very similar to those in Italy,Germany and Austria.
I spent some time in Indonesia, where the helper for your guest house is making $50/mo. They're cleaning the rooms, running errands around the city, making breakfast, gardening, etc.
What you make in a couple of days, they make in a year. It's mind boggling. Yes, cost of living is cheaper, but not that cheap.
On the plus side, you feel like you can make a difference in their life. If you're living there, you can pay them a great salary, without breaking the bank. Or if you're visiting, they might not expect tips, but hand someone $5 that went out of their way to give you a free ride on their moped, and you just dropped a few days income in their pocket.
Yes. I'm in Cambodia currently. We pay the maid $170 a month + food/beverages and I let her borrow the kindle and surface when she wants. It's a pretty kooshy gig for her, helps her support the family, doesnt break the bank for us and makes my life a lot easier.
Pick a country in the list on that page where the Per Capita Income is less than ~$4160/year. Most likely, in such a country, $2/hour is very likely going to put an individual at or above the median income (farther above, the lower the GDP Per Capita). $5/hr is a nice wage.
For comparison, the UN ranking of the US in this category is ~$51,000, and the median household income in the US is about $55,000 (per year).
I'm a day late answering this but just wanted to add that I consider a solid freelancing rate to be anything higher than the overtime rate of the industry standard. So if you normally would have a $50,000 a year programming job at roughly $25/hr, your freelancing rate should be at least 1.5 times that or $37.50/hr. I've also had trouble staying booked, so if you can manage 20 billable hours a week, you're probably ahead of the curve. So that's a $36,000/yr income I guess, but you own your own time and don't have to be in an office all day. That alone is worth $14k to me.
I came in a little below that and got several gigs at $30/hr, mostly in esoteric areas like OpenGL programming.
Also I would recommend watching your job invites and you'll start to notice which areas are the least sensitive to hourly rates. For me that's been 3D work in iOS, but YMMV.
I'm trying to move to a daily rate, in that case I would assume only 2-4 hours of coding daily because when you are really in the zone, most of your problem solving work happens off the computer. So I think that's why we see rates of $75 or even $125 or more quoted so often.
The other thing I've learned is that institutional work pays a lot more, so it's better to find gigs for consultancies/studios/education, things like that, as opposed to individuals. They seem to expect a rate of at least $50-75/hr and up. In large cities the rate probably starts at $100/hr.
Anyway, I'm basically taking a pay cut as a freelancer so that I can work on my own projects, which have the potential to pay back exponentially someday, and are at the very least challenging and rewarding and keep my psyche going. I've had jobs where the boss charged $100/hr and paid us $15/hr, and on top of that wanted us to work 9 hours or more a day, and I did the math and realized that I would never be able to achieve my goals if the lion's share of my efforts went to someone else.
This kind of trite comment adds little to the discussion.
I have some people that work with me on oDesk that I've found over the past few years. I don't pay them a lot by US standards, but they're good people. I've sent them various hardware, like Kindles and a new laptop to help them do their work better, and it has worked out well, although I was kind of nervous about it at the time.
Yes, this is the thing. If you are living at a US/UK standard or slightly below, DO NOT waste your time on Elance or ODESK. These sites are not designed to employee US workers.
Fair enough, there are exceptions, but I feel my comment accurately reflects my own as well as many others' experiences trying to find competitive pay on sites like this.
For Wordpress installations I get it but it's the School Administration Solution for US$400 that's scary. Otherwise I agree, good luck to all inhabitants as the ghettos merge.
If you really want to destroy someone's day in a low cost country, campaign to stop this type of work getting to them. Then they will be out of a job.
To several billion people, working for $20/day in their local lives using a computer would be a dream job. Someone who is employed is making money for their family and probably feels good about themselves.
I don't want to stop work getting to them. I want them to be paid more so my own relatively paltry rates don't seem like an insult to employers expecting to pay pennies per hour for a fully working whatever clone.
Otherwise the next step in that poor country is, inevitably, the work moves somewhere cheaper still or gets automated.
I sincerely hope this doesn't affect the thousands of families making a living working off of oDesk. This change will have real effects on REAL people, let's hope they are all positive. :)
It could be argued that oDesk is more fair. I tried elance once and AFAIR they encourage you to pay in order to appear higher in listings. This was a turnoff. oDesk's approach to contractor/job listings seems to be centered around smart algorithms and analytics instead.
It would seem that the two main incumbents in this market (founded in 2005 and 1998, respectively) are getting nervous about Freelancer.com's (founded in 2009) rapid growth (predicting ~73% in 2013) and recent IPO [1].
I'm the CEO of Freelancer.com (Freelancer Limited ASX:FLN).
Our share price dropped rapidly in the first few days because the issue price was 50 cents and it was the biggest opening on the ASX every (so I was told by the exchange). The share price opened at $2.50.
A month later we are at $1.40, almost three times our issue price. I think that's pretty good. You would expect a bit of a pullback from such a strong opening (5x !).
I tend to evaluate a service based on what they provide, their reputation and sometimes the care put into their branding, but rarely do I make a blanket judgement on name alone. Anyone on HN should know how challenging it is to pick a name in the competitive domain landscape.
I wasn't making a blanket judgement -- you are making a straw man. I was simply criticizing their branding, which is just as reasonable as any technical consideration. And if you don't believe that, Richard Stallman has a beard for you.
This sounds like a blanket judgement to me. Not "reconsider using" but "never use"...
"Never use a service whose name you could make up thoughtlessly."
Not to mention that while you could make up a name thoughtlessly, those behind it might've spent weeks brainstorming, getting feedback, checking their options, etc.
Again, not a blanket judgment; a blanket judgment is quite specifically when you say, "for all Xes such that Y, then Z." You could argue that there was an implied blanket judgment motivating the assertion that no one should ever use a service such that that service has a boring name; but in fact, given a choice between two equally worthy services, I choose the one with the more intelligent marketing, simply as a way of selecting for things that don't irritate me, and in some small way making the world a slightly less blearily straightforward place. And by encouraging others to also follow this maxim, I was hoping to amplify its world-shaping power further. :)
This merger is likely a response to competitor, Freelancer.com going public in Australia this year. It also positions the much larger, Elance/oDesk for an IPO next year. Smaller, niche freelancing marketplaces like Guru.com, 99Designs, WorkersOnCall.com and others will now be looking for acquisition exits from the new giant. The freelancing marketplace industry has been growing 100% year over year for the last 7 years and is expected to continue for the next five years. Once tied to the economy, the freelancing industry trends have now disconnected from the economy in general and are on a steady trend no matter how employment levels rise and fall. All in all, the merger is good news for the industry which saw its first exit this year.
With vworker first being absorbed by freelancer and now this, there's a decided lack of competition developing in this market.
I think these guys know that a startup will struggle to compete, getting the critical mass of devs and employers is the same problem as starting a social network.
I share the view that ODesk quality is an order of magnitude better than elance, I think only those using elance will being thinking anything positive at this moment...
Our startup Lambda (http://getlambda.com) competes with both, but we're not the least bit concerned. I already thought of elance/odesk as being effectively the same, in the sense that they're both known as places to find cheap, off-shore labor. I don't know any devs in NYC who've seriously considered working through either site and don't expect that to change. Likewise, I don't know many hiring companies that have used their sites for anything more than throwaway projects.
We have a few other competitors targeting the high-end of the freelancer market, but that's still open territory.
I've been working through Freelancer/Elance for about 5 years now. I'm quite an experienced iOS dev and typically only apply to the higher priced jobs which then tend to lead on to repeat work. I just took a look at your site. Although I would consider myself quite experienced I'm not a 'rockstar'. What kind of devs do you accept to join Lambda? What do you consider an 'exceptional developer'?
That's interesting. I love to talk with you sometime about your experience with those higher priced jobs. I'm particularly curious about what kinds of clients are mosting higher price jobs on elance, since our experience has been that it's mostly a race to the bottom. Could you send me an email: andrew at getlambda dotcom
For the types of projects we work with, "exceptional developers" might be better described as "competent developers, great entrepreneurs". Of course, that wouldn't be ideal marketing copy :)
In general, raw technical ability isn't a huge factor in commanding higher rates. There's definitely a minimum threshold someone needs to pass, but you'd probably clear that easily if you've been freelancing for 5+ years.
Instead of learning to code faster, you'd be better served by learning to code less. Clients often have big ideas that would take 6+ months to build in their entirety, but which could be shipped in weeks by eliminating unnecessary features. Convincing them to cut those features is a skill in of itself, which is often what separates "freelancers" from "consultants".
I think that your minimum rate is too high. A lot of developers would like to branch out and get experience with new technology but with a minimum rate of $100/hr you really can only offer your most familiar language/platform. Someone with 10 years of building Java apps, could build pretty good Android or iOS apps, if they could find a customer who would accept that career history at a lower rate. Honestly, I think that a $25/hr minimum would make more sense and is more in line with the real world.
I've had opposite experience in general. It's all about hiring well. The problem is that hiring well shouldn't be using the "high ratings" that contractors have - it shouldn't be used to determine who you hire.
Just recently when Freelancer.com acquired vWorker I expected the overall quality improvement at Freelancer. However despite any logic it became worse.
I have the same expectations for this merger/acquisition. Elance won't become any better and Odesk will cease to exist very soon after transferring all users to Elance.
Sadly this merger is dictated by nothing else but increasing market share of Freelancer.com.
I'm the CEO of Freelancer.com. Since the vWorker acquisition actually all the quality metrics are up. The vWorker user base was also a very high quality workforce and today dominate highly our freelancer rankings and awarded projects. This is reflected in our financials- we are growing revenue at almost twice the rate of our competitors. We're also publicly listed (ASX: FLN) so our financials are transparent.
If you have any other questions, I'm happy to answer them or shoot me a note at matt@freelancer.com.
Henrik, founder of Coworks here. From a shareholder's perspective the merger probably makes perfect sense. They should be able to consolidate investments, overhead, PPC etc. From a contractor view I can't see how it changes much really. From a client perspective it is usually bad news with mergers like this. I think it has been great to have a fight for the lead in the outsourcing industry. The sad thing is that the industry as a whole needs better client processes, more high quality talent, better UX, better vetting systems etc. and that is not likely to come from the market leader at this stage. They will most likely be occupied with merger milestones for a while. Even talented management teams like these have limited bandwidth. It does leave opportunities open for all others looking at building the next generation remote work platform.
While this is huge news there's a lot to be done in this space, and it has only recently started to gain momentum.
For the past couple of years we've been busy building Socialance, sort of like a hybrid if oDesk & LinkedIn. A site where you can hire people recommended by your network.
I know building a marketplace is an extremely challenging task, but we've come this far, we're going to see it through.
It seems plenty of you are heavy users of either site, or have strong opinions about the sector. If you want to help out my email is guillermo@socialance.com (we're bootstrapped, took part in Startup Chile and are based in London).
If it sounds like something might be interested in using, please drop your mail at http://Socialance.com
I run a curated freelancing platform for creatives called Coworks. Being part of the industry it's really interesting to read your thoughts on the merger. Even though I've followed them very closed for two years as a competitor I was really surprised by the move. My take on it is: 1. They can lower their acquisition costs by not competing with PPC and in their content marketing. 2. Their real competitors, who are still sleeping behind the wheel, are Manpower, Randstad etc. With the merger they get the muscles to battle them for the online staffing market. 3. Last but not least- they'll ditch one of the platforms (elance?) and save half the money on Tech.
So, it seems like most people had a bad experience with Elance. I have to admit that I had pros and cons too.. but now that I've learned how to use it smartly it's so damn useful. I think you can find very smart people and if you build a respectful relationship with them, it becomes very handy if you're dealing with multiple projects like I do. I know how I can trust them to do a great work and they trust me back to have quality projects / quality specifications and well paid.
Yup, I believe what these sites provide is a platform for introductions and initial agreements, but both parties still need to do the relationship building themselves.
I opened an oDesk account to get some remote help on some software dev that was beyond my skills at the time. The contractor I hired was from India, I think I paid him $15/hour.
Then I opened a profile for myself as a contractor. I charge $100/hour. So far I've gotten about 10 hours worth of work from two different US companies. I'd like to increase my rates in 2014. This is purely for interesting work to me, I've already got a day job.
I'm pretty happy with Elance. Currently Elance charge a 8.75% fee and oDesk charge 10%. Hopefully they won't jack up the price now that they own the market.
Outsourcing is very much in vogue. People hire through trusted freelancer sites like Elance and oDesk. Unfortunately what I feel, many of the Freelance sites on the web can’t simply help you when you need a complex, abstract project done in those domains. However, they
are good in tangible services like web development, logo development etc.
In my humble opinion, Statlance can be a good option for projects needing abstract thinking.
As long as there was competition, they were forced to maintain standards as well as individuality to retain separate policies. From a contractor's perspective only on one site, it would be positive in the sense that you can use the same credibility to bid for projects from other side ONCE they unite.
Two dying competitors merging together to get the hold of a wonderful market that both of these and their likes, scammed and destroyed ... lets see how long you can survive together and lets see how many more will be phished with this corporate scam.
The only problem with odesk is the ridiculous fees for a contract to hire scenario . Their rules is something like 10% of their salary for 2yrs iirc. Head hunter industry standard is something like 10% for 6mos ?
Also, I don´t think they will jack up the prices. Everything is moving towards 0% on all global transactions. Rather the opposite: They will offer enterprise solution with 0% commission pretty soon.
Talented freelancers do themselves a disservice by using either of these "services". The only reason for a talented freelancer to use them is out of a desperate need for even abysmal compensation. This merger will likely make things worse for them (freelancers), not better.
Yes, I know there are some freelancers working on these sites who earn a "decent" living. They're anomalies. The vast majority of workers earn really horrible wages. The well paid oDesk or Elance freelancer is as common as a rags-to-riches startup billionaire in the software industry as a whole.
From a US based dev's perspective, I'd agree with you.
But it really depends on your definition of "horrible" and "well paid".
$5/hr in US is horrible.
$5/hr in a developing country is awesome and well paid - Even for talented freelancers.
And finding clients who are ready to pay you, as a developer from outside US, an standard/decent/well US wage for the job is pretty hard - almost impossible - at least in my experience.
Do you have any tips on finding well paid (generally better paid than oDesk) jobs for freelancers outside US/Western europe?
While I agree with you for US and Western Europe-based freelancers, it's not true for other places. When you live in a third-world country, Odesk/Elance are some of the only ways for you to make money as a freelancer.
So where would you go to find a talented freelancer then? (Assuming you don't have any good word of mouth recommendations.) Not sarcasm - I'm generally interested if you have a better way of finding them that's more reliable that google searches or trolling stackoverflow.
There are a number of second-generation sites/agencies out there now that focus on ensuring a quality of both freelancer and client (e.g. toptal.com for devs), or that simply provide matchmaking services (e.g. folyo.me for designers).
Do you have a network on Twitter? I see people looking (and responding to) freelance inquiries all the time. All based on word-of-mouth and friend-of-friend networks.
oDesk has a lot of rock solid freelancers but Elance, the frontend looks like spam site to me and you get tens of applications and half just charge you $2. I am not saying $2 means cheap labor but after deal with a couple on Elance I find the quality is so low. there was one or two on oDesk doing horrible jobs but the rest are just terrific job. oDesk is also more modern and more active and friendly reaching out to the oDesk community - they do a lot facebook advertising.
Both are great to find freelancers but the UI of both of them needs work. You have to search to find the most important stuff (eg. paying, hiring etc.).
Although this is called a merger, it is only that in name. It seems elance's CEO will call the shots.
https://www.odesk.com/blog/2013/12/mergerfaq/
"Who will lead the new company? oDesk executive chairman Thomas Layton will continue in the same role at the combined company, and Elance CEO Fabio Rosati will serve as chief executive officer."
There's a huge wave of consolidation in the industry in the past 5 years. Just last year freelancer bought vworker. It is ripe for disruption as the dominant sites grow bloated and complacent, only seeing acquisitions as the way to grow.