The oDesk Experience
qr.io
qr.io
While it is a way to get around the issue of less effective developers, it runs contrary to well known wisdom in the industry, which is hiring a competent developer AKA a 10Xer will result in more efficiency and a faster time to market and the reality is most 10xers are not on oDesk. Which means even if your project completes you still need to oversee the quality of the code. Doing so is easier by hiring a known professional with a known reputation for delivering in the industry. I think this article paints a rosy picture of sites like oDesk when there are a lot of pitfalls. If price is an issue, there are Indian firms with known reputations. While oDesk does provide a medium for communicating reputation, they can be and have been manipulated.
As well on the subject of the test, I do not feel that they provide any insight into the quality of a developer. Code is but a small part of the total job that a developer does, solution's, automation and writing apps with low total cost of ownership, build automation are far more important. A developer that tries to write themselves out of the picture is what companies should strive to find, because they will try to automate every facet of the system.
Finally moving on to the time tracking tool, 90% of a developers job is mental modeling the correct design 10% is actually writing the code. The tool cannot account for the time designing the correct solution and therefore is of little use to a developer that realizes this and require payment for their mentally modeling the optimal solution. It is these lack of understanding of how the development process works on the part of these sites, that keep many of the good developers from adopting systems such as oDesk. They have favored the employer over the developer (naturally it is where the money is) and built the workflow to favor the employer, good developers who are in no need of such services see this and refrain from participating. Until they correct those issue they will be seen as a race to the bottom by good developers.
When we hire developers, we stress that 'mental modeling' is a necessary part of the process that we have no problem paying for. Other employers may not share the same view of how important that part of the process is. We block-out a reasonable amount of time for the developer to sit and think about the big picture and the details of how they'll execute.
In the several hundreds of hours we've tasked, we've had an overall good experience with the developers, designers and copywriters we've hired on oDesk. That's not to say that we've not run into a few bad apples but, overall, we've been pleased.
We're certainly open to the use of other platforms for contract work (we're not in a place to hire permanent employees) and hopefully some HN readers will pitch in their 2 cents.