"Error establishing connection to database"
Clearly they need to use their own services for a system admin & someone with aws+scaling experience
oDesk to merge with Elance
11–20 of 144 posts
Re: oDesk to merge with Elance
#12"Elance buys oDesk" seems like a more accurate headline.
Re: oDesk to merge with Elance
#13As 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. https://www.odesk.com/blog/2013/12/mergerfaq/ "Who will lead t…
I couldn't agree more. My experiences with oDesk have been overall phenomenal, while Elance has consistently been a pain. I wonder what's fully fueling the merger, as oDesk seems to be doing pretty well as of late on its own.
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.
Re: oDesk to merge with Elance
#14That's surprising. I feel bad for talented freelancers =/.
Re: oDesk to merge with Elance
#15I'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.
Umm...I would expect the price to be jacked up big time now that they own the market.
Re: oDesk to merge with Elance
#16It 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].
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/au/freelancer-more-than-triples-first-d...
Re: oDesk to merge with Elance
#17I 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 t…
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.
Re: oDesk to merge with Elance
#18As 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. https://www.odesk.com/blog/2013/12/mergerfaq/ "Who will lead t…
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.
Re: oDesk to merge with Elance
#19With 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 thinki…
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.
Re: oDesk to merge with Elance
#20We're running out of vowels to prefix startup names. Peak Vowel was definitely 2007; the iGeneration is iSick of oIt.
Never use a service whose name you could make up thoughtlessly.