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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.
Having the ability to see everybody that scored in the top 5% for [specific skill] would be nice. Maybe an email to garyeswart@odesk.com is in order.
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I too hate elance and have been using oDesk for years. The experience at oDesk was just phenomenally better than elance. You're right about ripe for disruption too. I wonder who will move into the space.
I'd love to drink their milkshake. My friend and I are mid-redesign on a new service marketplace called reBaked. Our innovation is collaboration with many freelancers and paying them proportionally to what they actually deliver. There's also a negotiated minimum payment for freelancers so it's not overly risky for them. ...it's not quite ready for a Show HN, but the gist can be seen at ( https://rbkd-staging.heroku.c…
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out of curiosity, how exactly does the blackmailing on oDesk work?
Something as simple as the contractor wont provide you with the full code until you leave a 5 star rating.
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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,…
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 whic…
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.
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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…
I think that your minimum rate is too high. A lot of developers would like to branch out and get experience with new technology but with a minimum rate of $100/hr you really can only offer your most familiar language/platform. Someone with 10 years of building Java apps, could build pretty good Android or iOS apps, if they could find a customer who would accept that career history at a lower rate. Honestly, I think t…
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Would you mind elaborating on your experiences with elance? I had a family member who does freelance marketing/writing called me a few years ago and mentioned he was planning to sign up there and asking what I knew about it. I could only tell him about a comment I'd browsed on HN that referred to it as a "ghetto" of poor paying assignments. He went ahead with it and now seems to be doing quite well as one of the top…
My experience is with hiring technical freelancers: design, network, security, development, etc. It is entirely possible that elance is great for non-technical jobs. The issues I ran into were providers who have great ratings but who can't do the job! Later I found out that elance has a loophole where buyers who disputed or cancelled projects are not able to leave feedback. So you're not getting the full story when y…
The mistake many clients make is to request "cancellation". You should request a refund instead (and in the common case where a contractor goes silent, you will get back 100%.) Then mark the job as "complete" and leave feedback, which will be visible in their history (though it will not affect their average star rating.)
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.
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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.
Do you guys need any Python or Django people?
Oh, good. Now the experience of begging for slave wages fixing people's wordpress installs can be even more streamlined.
If you really want to destroy someone's day in a low cost country, campaign to stop this type of work getting to them. Then they will be out of a job. To several billion people, working for $20/day in their local lives using a computer would be a dream job. Someone who is employed is making money for their family and probably feels good about themselves.
Otherwise the next step in that poor country is, inevitably, the work moves somewhere cheaper still or gets automated.
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I'd love to drink their milkshake. My friend and I are mid-redesign on a new service marketplace called reBaked. Our innovation is collaboration with many freelancers and paying them proportionally to what they actually deliver. There's also a negotiated minimum payment for freelancers so it's not overly risky for them. ...it's not quite ready for a Show HN, but the gist can be seen at ( https://rbkd-staging.heroku.c…
It's interesting and I'll have to think about it further but I wouldn't think that a listing fee of 10% of project budget, payable in advance, is going to work.
For that fee we guarantee users are promptly paid (net 10 or less, no excuses), absorb all of the usual transaction fees, host and archive the project workspace, and generate/distribute all 1099 and W9's.