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oDesk to merge with Elance

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Re: oDesk to merge with Elance

#91

Post by macarthy12 »

albedo wrote: post #17
zackmorris wrote: post #8

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 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.

How much work have you managed to get? Do you restrict where dev's are located (e.g. north america?)

Re: oDesk to merge with Elance

#92

Post by albedo »

macarthy12 wrote: post #91
albedo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How much work have you managed to get? Do you restrict where dev's are located (e.g. north america?)

We get about 15 qualified leads a month (on average, each project is worth about $25k). We're focused on the US and Canada only for the moment.

Re: oDesk to merge with Elance

#93

Post by mailm »

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.

Re: oDesk to merge with Elance

#94

Post by dmourati »

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.

Re: oDesk to merge with Elance

#95

Post by thekingshorses »

jfoster wrote: post #89
sergiotapia wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

OK, I stand corrected. Where is that? (just curious)

Bolivia

Re: oDesk to merge with Elance

#96

Post by majani »

sergiotapia wrote: post #68
jfoster wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Your name looks South American. I can verify that a similar situation exists in Africa, right down to the numbers you stated.

Re: oDesk to merge with Elance

#97

Post by alanstorm »

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.

Pay: $10

Re: oDesk to merge with Elance

#98

Post by kokey »

d0m wrote: post #67

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…

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.

Re: oDesk to merge with Elance

#99

Post by weland »

lingben wrote: post #3

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. https://www.odesk.com/blog/2013/12/mergerfaq/ "Who will lead t…

> 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.

Re: oDesk to merge with Elance

#100

Post by undoware »

prawn wrote: post #78
undoware wrote: post #20

We'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.

Says uNdoware... 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.
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