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.
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.