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ODesk vs Elance vs Freelancer vs Guru

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Re: ODesk vs Elance vs Freelancer vs Guru

#31

Post by leknarf »

braum wrote: post #28
leknarf wrote: post #26

I thought this was a great comparison of the popular talent marketplaces, but it skipped over the most important trait: the typical hourly or project rate. All of the services have good workers, but they've also all been participating in a race to the bottom. As a developer, it's hard to ask for more than $100/hr on a site where you're listed alongside those asking for $10/hr. Even if you are 10 times more productive…

We are currently looking for a front-end developer. Do you offer only programmers or would we be able to find a quality front-end developer?

We do have quite a few front-end developers. In fact, I've been surprised at how many designer/developers (that is, designers who can implement their own designs) have signed up. That combination of skills was always in short supply when I've tried to hire for in-house teams. I guess they tend to prefer freelancing :)

Please send me an email at andrew [at] getlambda.com and we'll see what we can do!

Re: ODesk vs Elance vs Freelancer vs Guru

#32

Post by gesman »

I used and loved rentacoder back then. The rule is to avoid Indians and Pakistanis as they were usually middlemen between really poor developers. I hired north american or european workers and it worked well and predictable.

Re: ODesk vs Elance vs Freelancer vs Guru

#33

Post by RougeFemme »

weavorateam wrote: post #5
throwmeaway2525 wrote: post #2

Is there any service that doesn't require installing spyware on your system? AFAIK they all force developers to install monitoring software, and then boast about this on their marketing pages targeting employers.

Unless I am mistaken, it is not obligatory (at least on oDesk) to track time using their "spy" software. Instead you can report offline hours if you have previously agreed with the client.

It's not required on Elance, either, thankfully.

Re: ODesk vs Elance vs Freelancer vs Guru

#34

Post by omarchowdhury »

re1ser wrote: post #15

Bad side is that there are alot of scams and poor programmers, looking to snipe the job and squeeze money from employer in any way possible. From my personal opinion, atleast 80% of bidders do this (I'm working over Freelancer). Good side is that with little hassle, employers can find really great freelancers that know to do their job. Personally, as a programmer from 3rd world country, these sites provide alternativ…

Where are you from?

Re: ODesk vs Elance vs Freelancer vs Guru

#35

Post by RougeFemme »

Swizec wrote: post #16
auctiontheory wrote: post #10

Speaking as an employer: All of these sites have good workers, and all of them have workers who will turn in shoddy work, hoping you won't notice. I've hired for more than a dozen projects and in no case did the contractor do the job right the first time - because they didn't care enough, not because they were incompetent. I've hired workers in the US, in India, in the UK, and elsewhere. Same sorts of issues crop up.…

As a remote freelancer: Communication and cost are the main problems. Usually clients have a hard time explaining exactly what they want and our visions might differ. When I turn in results, they are often different than what the client first imagined they'd be, but through iteration and conversation I can help the client clarify what they want or realise something else 90% of the time. Time is another big problem. W…

I've worked as a remote (U.S. based) independent freelancer through Elance and Odesk. I've had positive and negative experiences on both. They both do a decent job of minimizing the risk of non-payment on fixed-price projects, but, as you point out, one of the biggest challenges is nailing down the requirements. I understand that requirements can and will change but there have been times when I've spent an inordinate amount of time going back and forth with my point of contact (who often doesn't really know what the primary customer wants). There have been times when I've pulled the plug and just told the client we weren't a good fit.

I've also learned when to recognize that the clients are looking for speed/volume vs. quality. I know there are often tradeoffs but some clients just really don't seem to care about quality; they are middlemen who just want to throw something over the fence to the client.

Re: ODesk vs Elance vs Freelancer vs Guru

#36

Post by bdcravens »

bdcravens wrote: post #13

I've done some work on these in the past, dating back to 2000. They've always been challenging if you're not in a market where you can lowball, so I presume most "senior" developers in premium markets avoid these sites. I'd love to hear thoughts about using these marketplaces to build up experience in languages you're not yet using in production.

To be clear, this wouldn't be my primary income earner. I have a lot of experience with languages like ColdFusion, PHP, etc, but really want to get some Rails work in. Of course, my "low" rate might be too high (I was thinking in the $15-30 range, where I'd normally bill $50-75 for work I have experience in)

Re: ODesk vs Elance vs Freelancer vs Guru

#37

Post by why-el »

auctiontheory wrote: post #10

Speaking as an employer: All of these sites have good workers, and all of them have workers who will turn in shoddy work, hoping you won't notice. I've hired for more than a dozen projects and in no case did the contractor do the job right the first time - because they didn't care enough, not because they were incompetent. I've hired workers in the US, in India, in the UK, and elsewhere. Same sorts of issues crop up.…

I am about to join oDesk as a freelancer. Coming out of college, I have basically limited experience behind me (internships, personal projects). Any advice you have for me about how to grow in the platform?

Re: ODesk vs Elance vs Freelancer vs Guru

#38

Post by jnbiche »

khalidmbajwa wrote: post #22
Iftheshoefits wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't worth the time or effort to do so. I tried it out (elance) a couple of years ago as a worker. My impression of it is that basically it's a place for two kinds of employer: 1) the "I have this idea, code it up for me for equity in my 'company'" employers who either don't actually have an idea of what they want (and will needle you to flesh out their idea more fully) or have a generic "let's build the next X"…

Umm, no not really. I charge around 60$/hr on oDesk.Have closed to 5000 hours and can easily pull in upwards of 5K USD a month, which is an extra ordinary sum for someone sitting in a country in Pakistan where the conversion rate i 104 PKR to a USD.You can easily get well paying clients if you spend a little time building up your history, and are really good at what you do.

An exchange rate will tell you absolutely zero about one currencies relative worth to another. By your logic, someone in Japan, whose currency trades about 100 to 1 USD, would have about the same buying power as you per USD, when in fact, assuming you're both earning the same in USD, you would almost certainly have much, much more purchasing power.

To accurately compare purchasing power among currencies, you need to use a metric like Purchase Power Parity (PPP): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

Re: ODesk vs Elance vs Freelancer vs Guru

#39

Post by maerF0x0 »

Something being missed by this discussion (and many offshoring discussions) is that many consulting firms design maintenance costs into their business model. They undercut everyone with low prices for a poorly engineered product, knowing they can churn additional hours/sales in "upgrades", "maintenance" etc.

When you pay me $60 an hour (or more) to design you a component of your system, it will be SOLID OO designs, quite reusable, DRY, tested (unit tested) and better in many other ways. Where as most of the code I've seen come from bad agencies basically do "class Main { function doItAll() { /* Here is the entire program */ } };"

Which is why it will cost more in the long run. If you want something added or made similar, they'll copy and paste instead of inheriting or using traits or other language constructs to keep it DRY. If you want to know if the system has regression, they'll shrug, because they either do not test, or they just write the tests to pass the way the code currently works, not testing the component in general. If you're planning on closing business in 12 months, then maybe its not worth it to invest in a scalable, changeable infrastructure. If you're planning on being in business for a long time, then invest the capital to develop your business :D .

ok

Re: ODesk vs Elance vs Freelancer vs Guru

#40

Post by wildmXranat »

auctiontheory wrote: post #10

Speaking as an employer: All of these sites have good workers, and all of them have workers who will turn in shoddy work, hoping you won't notice. I've hired for more than a dozen projects and in no case did the contractor do the job right the first time - because they didn't care enough, not because they were incompetent. I've hired workers in the US, in India, in the UK, and elsewhere. Same sorts of issues crop up.…

As a long time freelancer with a few purchased gigs as well:

Quality of the workers or the turned in work is directly linked to the budget of a project. I've had many conversations on both sides of the table, where there was a miss-match and an eventual agreement to either bump up the budget or to lower the expectation. There's still risk in eventually receiving lame work, but I don't think that is the status quo.

There is a larger than obvious amount of bot or automatic submitters tainting and lowering the overall quality of the pool. It is very easy to sort them out, but it is noise nevertheless. Quality filters and machine taught spam detection would deal a great boost to overall usability of all of these sites.

Now, communication and missed deadlines will deviate wildly because most of the developers are not able to sustain a living doing just elance, odesk or whichever. Honesty and setting expectations at the beginning usually solves this problem. Now, there has been a steady build up of downward pressure from contract owners to expect full availability or a similar version there of. Most of them don't have the budget to back it up. Shit happens.

I found and worked with talented folks through 3 of the 4 mentioned sites and I would have to say that it is not an issue. The issue is actually finding them in short time, and that's where buck stops in my point of view.

I think there is a large opportunity to impress the market by shaving off the amount of time to find quality devs and firms. I think other sites have began doing something along those lines by curating the offers and doing away with the meat-market environment.

Overall, I think the budgets are low, developers pick up multiple gigs, some projects get delayed or rushed and compromise is the name of the game.

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