ODesk worked great for me, stick with very straight forward / easy tasks, I was paying $3/hr for someone to do data mining. I ended up with a great excel doc with over 3000 related sites & email addresses, very useful to my startups initial launch
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.