Poll: Devs, Have You Used oDesk or eLance?
I'm curious to see how many people have used (or attempted to use) these types of sites to find freelance/contract work.
At least for development work, where each job is only receiving ~10-15 applicants, a well written cover letter that talks intelligently about the employer's problem can cut through the noise of low-quality applicants & lead to a hire.
Freelanceful.com
=)
Seeing the positive response to sites like http://tinyproj.com and http://weekendhacker.net, it seems like highly competent freelancers would benefit from a middle ground between the somewhat impersonal market of eLance/oDesk and the inefficient method of seeking work via personal networks. Something like a "hackers guild" of people who have been vetted for quality work. Projects could be semi-automatically assigned to single or multiple individuals based on the importance of the project as measured by the dollar value attached to it and the skill of the individuals as measured by their historical feedback ratings.
Maybe this is just my naive impression as an undergrad approaching graduation who would prefer freelancing to a 9-5 or even a startup but hasn't come to terms yet with the fact that inefficiency in the matching process and initially low rates are unavoidable. If not and you'd be interested in building or using such a system, I'd like to talk to you. It also relates to emerging things like the "reputation graph" and transitive delegation that can enable these sorts of systems, and are going to be huge (see http://blog.hyperarchy.com, http://liquidfeedback.org, http://rglabsinc.com).
Would love to chat with you. gordon at grouptalent.com
I did a lost of tests and spending 10x$500 for a project I know is worth $20k actually works very well. You just put 10 bidders separately on the same project and 1 or 2 turn out great. While the rest is of horrible 'quality', if they deliver anything at all. Yes you have to 'sit on them' more than you probably would for $20k teams, but it saves $15k. And i'm not kidding here.
This was actually just testing; I have regular people to do projects who I know and trust (and pay more obviously). We were trying to get ideas to open our own freelancer site; we gave up in the end because for employers there is not much upside. You have heard it before and you'll hear it a lot of times; there are complete novices who get nice stuff done on these sites without paying much and not caring about quality, code as long as it works. And that's on freelancer sites, sites like Digitalpoint forums are much much worse; you can get complete designs done for $5-10 and have projects implemented for $100-500 and that's considered a lot usually there.
In short, what makes you solve this I wonder?
We did see the same with admins and even quite high up (in the rankings on freelancer) ones; the same thing applied. We had an admin team which had super rankings, but their prices were insane, but we thought ok, let's try. So 4 admin teams, 8 servers, 2 each. 2 had ratings and 1 high ratings. 3 were actual teams, 1 was 1 guy (spoiler: the 1 guy won). They all were priced about $50-80/month per server for everything (yes... everything, including monitoring, 24/7 calamity resolve, etc).
During intake, the 2 rated teams performed very very well (spoiler: they do have 1 guy in their office who knows stuff who does only intakes all day, that's me presuming, but he), the other two less professional, but okish.
The first hick up was the highest rated company not knowing what an ssh key was. Or GPG (me asking for the public key for gpg to send over the ssh key must've sounded like alien speak to them)... They kept asking me for the cpanel root password. I usually don't run cpanel as I don't like it, nor does it run on debian.
This turned out to be the actual difference between the intake person and 'the rest' of the company (i demanded a total over these teams of 10 different admins) that they ONLY know cpanel. They absolutely did not know anything about linux but the sheer basics... Amazing.
The one person (coincidentally also the only one not from India) did know debian and was actually good, asking very low prices to get good ratings. We gave them and he's still managing 2 servers.
But how will ANY site trump this common trick for programmers OR admins. Yes using Odesk with camera works. But i'm not spending my time watching someone else, well actually a lot of someones, otherwise my scaling is limited to me watching someone, sit and write code. So usually the intake is with some person who is (very) good and when the cam goes off from the intake (or skype) you get some junior incapable of doing anything. How to prevent that and still enjoy the scalability of outsourcing? I mean if i have to check up on every person of my team, all day, I am better of putting someone next to me right?
I might be working soon on an awesome project that seeks to be the missing link for hiring in the 21st century. And, we have a way around the chicken and egg problem that dooms most attempts, im very excited about it.
Follow me at @dylanized and I'll keep you posted!
The state of the industry is terrible. It's a race to the bottom that devalues the whole enterprise in general.
Some good advice in the comments, too.
I especially like the idea of getting multiple developers working on the first milestone, in parallel. Sure, you pay a little more but it gives you a better chance at landing the perfect developer for the 'full enchilada.'
One thing that pisses me off about these sites is that there's so many of them. See, reputation is worth a lot, and it's not transferable between sites :( You work hard to gain a high score on, say, vWorker, but then at Odesk you're a fresh dev with 0 experience, unlikely to get any piece of work that can really bring normal pay.
I haven't tried out eLance or oDesk but I did check them out around the same time I used vWorker and found no real difference. It would'nt be worth the time I spent on the sign up process.
Tinyproj looked promising but by emails stopped sometime the other week. If anyone can do a Stack Overflow to these sites then I'd reconsider, but not until that day.
It could make sense for smaller projects and could even feature something like more experienced "buddys" who watch over the process? Just some ideas :)
For being successful reputation matters a lot. I was the top result for "android" queries on elance for over a year, and that allowed me to bid over the average, and that helps. I ended up eventually with a more permanent contract that pays better than most jobs on elance, but still not as good as a lot of Silicon Valley jobs.
So, that's where elance stands. Perfect if you're in a developing country :)
Aside from finding work, the software that oDesk uses for time tracking can be very annoying. The number of times that it's managed to decide that it can't upload the data to them recently has become a bit of a problem for the team I'm on.
Pros: 1) The hourly mode worked fine in my case. Get paid for the hours you work. 2) You don't need to send an invoice to the client. oDesk do it weekly and transfer funds to your account. 3) Good amount of money if you are living in a country like India. 4) 80% of time the employer will be an agency who outsource their work. If you are good you'll get their future projects.
Cons: 1) Most of the employers need cheap work. 2) Its difficult to find potential longterm clients and big projects. 3) You will face lots of employers who already lost money because of bad providers. 4) A single bad feedback from a bad client can make your profile rating down (the no. of bids you can make depends on the rating)
Now my team is working on 3 good startup projects through oDesk.
If you're cheap, you'll get cheap programmers, that's about as basic as it gets.
I really liked the way elance gets you in touch with the developer and handles payment really well. Also, the communication system worked well. Would do it again.
I haven't tried other freelance sites but I do remember researching a few before settling on oDesk for its payment controls.
If you're willing to work within the bounds of the system, I'd recommend giving oDesk a shot.
This kind of system has been gamed for decades if not centuries in physical workplaces and odesk prides itself on perpetuating it in the virtual world.
For some types of work this is simply wasteful, but for software development it's outright destructive. You get below average programmers because they are benefiting most from the system, and you get unnecessary code that you have to maintain down the road.
I think odesk gives you a false sense of "value-for-money". But I guess it depends on what your alternatives are.
It's no different than a boss checking up on an in-house employee to see why their output is not optimal.
I do agree with your sentiments to a point though. I don't want a contractor that appears busy. I want one that is busy.
I am currently looking to outsource a little programming MVP job and i would like to know the good place to use.
To me, the part that I find perplexing is that if technical workers around the world knew exactly how short they are in supply they would understand their leverage in the market and not be asking for $3/hr. The thing is in some countries their is collusion to keep that realization from happening. I am not suggesting massive corporate conspiracies but rather people not knowing their true worth by gauging themselves and their income to local cultural norms instead of looking at global supply and demand and adjusting their rates accordingly. The reality is a guy in India or China could be charging $15 to $20 to $30 hr depending on specialty and still be competitive in the market.
That awakening happened among western technical workers and I think it will happen among other cultures, the cold hard reality is there is a small percentage of the population that choose technical career paths, and even fewer who are actually good at it. Once one realizes that the balances shifts in their favor.
I guess my point is in our field we only have our selves to blame if we are asking to little for our services. At one point outsourcing was used to leverage the price of technology down, but that has come back to bite the creator, it created new technical markets and constrained the supply of talent even further.
Will never ever do this again.