After working +1200 hours in oDesk
malditointer.net
malditointer.net
If anybody looking to get into Odesk, this is my advice on how to get over the chicken and egg problem(You are trying to build your work history while clients looking for your work history).
Find projects that can be partially or even fully prototyped and send the live link in the bidding. If the project is genuine most clients will bite. If they don't , write off your effort as marketing expense!
Also never bid for a project if you think you cannot get a 5 star rating after the delivery.
You can see my odesk profile below , all my ratings are 5 star. No surprise!
Wow. What is your usual rate outside of oDesk?
I am often told that I look very young; I am 27 and people think I'm 20. I've never really thought much of it, but it might explain how disrespectful some people (especially in academia) have been treating me. Maybe I should grow a beard.
Now if only I could grow a decent beard...
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3345796/Women-pre...
And then you have to log hours for: accounting, banking, and government papers. And then deduct banking and accountants fees. And then deduct your hardware fees (since you are paying for them yourself). No need for an office since you are can do it from home.
So is this really profitable or sustainable on the long term?
I live in a poor third-world country and I consider my break-up rate to be around $60/hour. There can be only one of these scenarios if you work for a lesser rate:
1. You cut on some expenses like an accountant/medication that might result in a disaster later.
2. You over-work yourself and you work on week-ends/no vacation.
3. You live with your parents, so you don't pay (or share) the bills.
I recently relocated to a low income country and guestimated my needed hourly rate to be around $20 when doing a 30 hour work week.
Biggest differences that I could think of is that I bought my house mortgage free and that I have a partner that also makes $20 per hour.
A U$ 20 rate would enable me to live decently, but U$ 60/hr would enable me to live extremely well (living in the best neighbourhood, private school for children, etc..)
I currently make U$ 8 an hour (because I work 240 hours a month as a salaried employee) and I find it tough to make ends meet (even though my girlfriend works as well, she makes more than I do but only works 100 hours a month)
If you ever visit Uruguay, message me and I'll be glad to meet you :)
1. Do you need a car? It's a must here, otherwise your low income country is more developed than the average third-world one.
2. Do you actually do the accounting, marketing... yourself or are you full-time employed. That skew things by a big margin.
3. How is inflation. It's around 20% here. Not all third-worlds suffer from high inflation, but many (most of them?) do.
1) I don't really need a car since public transport here is ok. However I do own one. I cut my car costs to a minimum by changing from a sports car to a 10 year old Ford Focus.
2) I have an accountant that costs about 300 euros per month right now, is one of the bigger costs that I have right now. Am gonna try do take on most marketing tasks myself.
3) I never accounted for inflation so far. This might be something that I have to look into a bit more.
1- Public transport is really huge. A car is a very expensive thing (especially a new one).
2- Car prices are two times higher than in developed countries. This is due to importing restrictions. Old cars are crazy expensive. My car appreciate just one week after I bought it by 8%.
3- This one is huge. In an unstable economy, it's not abnormal to see a sudden raise of 300% in some consumption good.
I do also assume/think that Hungary has an acceptable health care, too. Public health care here is another NO.NO. here. (ps the country is Tunisia).
otherwise, what are rents there like? It'd cost around $1,000/month to rent something respectable here.
I see how all of those things would drastically alter your needed income, especially the cost of a car and inflation.
I'm certainly not well informed on the cost of rent here, but I guess that 300-400€ per month should get you a more than decent place to live and work.
I checked the blog on your profile and seems like you're working on some cool things and doing well for yourself, congrats on overcoming the odds like that.
2012, working +1200 hours, was not my working best year. I sacrified a lot of my (free?)time to apply for new jobs, get new contracts, make internal research on how to improve my opportunities of having more employers interested in me. Working stituation sometimes overexceed my capacity to manage it, and I experienced an anxiety attack mainly produced by having almost no disconnection time.
Future is now and working on remote is possible and a great opportunity. Nonetheless, working on remote should not imply to low insanely your rates just for the fact that you are working from other place (and you are not consuming office supplies, office space). It's just question of learning how to deal with a new situation of selling your services to someone that is just contacting you virtually.
And no, imho, it was not sustainable to work like this. At least, not with those rates.
I'm planning to talk about this widely in the newsletter, feel free to join it.
I worked for someone on RentACoder back in the day. I got paid to develop software that is now used by over 20 million people. My cut for a week of work? $200.
Never again... (and years later I'm still periodically asked by the owner of the company if I'm interested in new projects for the same pay rate)
Would you reveal the site/project name?
http://i.imgur.com/ZsZxfP3.png
I am of course referring to http://tabcloseddidntread.com/. http://crapshaming.tumblr.com/ would fit too.
OK, technically, I could have gone all the way to access the original content. But why should I reward a website that does apparently not want to be read?
Also, if you read the article, you'll see that the author talks a lot about SEO and conversion optimisation, and chmars' comment fittingly points out how annoying it is when people go overboard with conversion optimisation.
So as long as you don't look like a teenager you shouldn't have problems.
If the results were 2/17 vs 7/20 that would not be a statistically significant result; in any case, there could be other major factors such as time-of-day and experience-building which are not discussed.
The job applications limit and 2 week period of this trial suggests that the sample sizes were not any bigger than that.
It's likely just a coincidence.
Is that your normal business practice? To spam but actually add no real value?
euro 20k/8 = 2.5k /month 1200/8 = 150 hours /month ~= 40 hours/week
That's actually not that bad for being a programmer in, say, Eastern Europe, but it's rapidly becoming a rather bad wage even there.
* The clients expect insane amount of work at a very cheap rate.
* People in developing countries are always ready to charge a lesser amount.
* The Signal : Noise ratio is low on both sides.
* The commissions taken by site and payment services also offer a blow to the amount earned.
IMO, its tough to imagine a situation where a sane client who expects quality would be willing to shuffle through 100s of bids submitted on each project.
YMMV etc.
On the internet, which is kinda global, not everybody is paid US/Western EU salary rates, you know right?
If he raises prices: is he actually going to get "better" clients? He'll have to compete with other high end'ers. What if there competition is too fierce at that price point? What if his skill/quality doesn't match up to that price point?
Disclosure - I'm a former oDesk employee.
at least for people hiring (i know first hand), and i read in this thread that also people being hired get ripped off.
the team at odesk are basically sitting behind their desks but more so behind their legal agreements, collecting their clean share without doing any work, without applying common sense or due process.
do not use odesk. leave it for good! odesk deserves to die peacefully.
Highcharts documentation is incomplete. In order to override the tooltip configurations for a given series you need to define the tooltip object inside it.
I also added a different axis for the hours, but this results in a Highcharts bug where a time series point does not show a tooltip when there is a series defined after that one with a higher y value.
After getting through all of this, the clients left over that are even willing to pay a decent wage expect way too much. Developer, designer, and product manager for one fee.
I can't tell you how many potential clients I turned down because of this.
I gave this up and found a decent part-time contracting gig on craigslist.
Odesk should be renamed to: "unrealistic expectations"
After skill ratings, the other essential thing to stand out, is to have actual work records with ratings. I deviced a plan: Get a few very short gigs, and excel at them, to quickly fill my profile with some good ratings. After reading hundreds of insane projects, including a kid that wanted a simcity clone, to offer as a free download on his website, I found one that looked good.
The guy wanted to connect an HTML form with a mysql db with a simple php script. He had all the software installed. Even had a base php script. I thought "wow so easy! I can make this in one or two hours as the worst possible scenario!! :)". So I contacted the guy. To my incredible surprise, the guy managed to sink me down in incredible ridiculous minutia discussion of what I was going to do. I spent five days and answered around 80 emails, discussing what I was going to do. I should have know better. But I kept telling me, "well, let's answer this, and the guy will just let me do the task."
Finally we agreed on doing the task. I made it in 3 hours, exactly according to the guy instructions. With the curious o desk spyware constantly taking screenshots of my desktop, and gauging my mouse movements and keypresses. After ieach screenshot, it gives you a few seconds of chance to click a button and delete it, before uploading and sending it to the client. I explained to the client, that I was including basic php security measures, as a bonus. Of which the guy had no clue. And his original form had nothing. After having the form working, I cleaned a bit the ugly graphic design, sent the stuff by mail, and went to sleep thinking "well, after all the pain, I think that the guy will be impressed by the quality of the work, and dedication answering all of his concerns." I was happy.
In the morning , I took a coffee, and went to the computer singing a tune. "Well, let's see what the guy thinks". The agreed payment was 40$. I didn't care about it, all I was thinking was on getting a good rating. To my incredible surprise, the guy answered with an angry rant, trowing all kind of threats and accusations, and claiming that I was trying to diddle him. The guy threatened me of giving a zero rating, and continuing the angry rant on my public profile, destroying my internet career forever. Unless we cancelled the deal, and acted as if nothing ever happened. Even told me that I should thank him, for not demanding an indemnization for his lost time. I was totally dumbfounded.
After some thinking, I realized that all the minutious questioning previous to the work, was a deliberated plan , to set a nest of argument traps, to later act as If he was being robbed. I was like "jesuschrist, I can't believe this. All of this tragedy just to avoid paying the pityful $40". I spent like two days lying around wanting to do nothing. Not even think. Every time that I looked at the PC, I felt like I wanted to vomit.
The cherry on the cake, was that a few months later, the guy contacted me again, offering me "a more challenging and involving project". Jesus! I can't believe the kind of people that there is out there. Finally after some time, I recovered. Went back to o desk and managed some success. After some years of working at other places, I can say that there are much better places to be.
What we all agreed on is that there are some number of abusive people out there, much like you described. No amount of process, formalizing agreements, etc will save you from dealing with them. They have to be avoided, but you have to know how to identify them first, and you have to be willing to walk away from work, sometimes even in the middle of a projects. None of that is easy for some people - especially younger folks.
And yet... by the same token, I get contacted from people who tell me "my last guy just quit - just quit responding to emails - he flaked out - etc". I used to think those people were just irresponsible idiots, and I was going to provide great customer care, etc. I now realize there's 2 sides to the story, and sometimes the original party 'flaked out' because the employer in question quit paying or bounced checks, or is abusive, or a micromanager who's never satisfied and wants an ebay clone for $25 and will call you at 1am because they need help setting up their wife's email on her new iPhone.
Clients can abuse this by demanding additional work/scope creep in order to award the full 5 stars. In theory it can go both ways as providers are also able to rate clients, but in reality the rating is far more important to sellers since a buyer can go to one of these sites without a reputation, post a project and still receive a ton of bids.
> 3 SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM. This is a subtext of number one. There was in the sixties a man named Fritz Perls who was a gestalt therapist. Gestalt therapy derives from art history, it proposes you must understand the 'whole' before you can understand the details. What you have to look at is the entire culture, the entire family and community and so on. Perls proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn't matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energized or less energized. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.