- 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.
I wonder what's fully fueling the merger, as oDesk seems to be doing pretty well as of late on its own.