oDesk to merge with Elance
odesk.com
odesk.com
Although this is called a merger, it is only that in name. It seems elance's CEO will call the shots.
https://www.odesk.com/blog/2013/12/mergerfaq/
"Who will lead the new company? oDesk executive chairman Thomas Layton will continue in the same role at the combined company, and Elance CEO Fabio Rosati will serve as chief executive officer."
There's a huge wave of consolidation in the industry in the past 5 years. Just last year freelancer bought vworker. It is ripe for disruption as the dominant sites grow bloated and complacent, only seeing acquisitions as the way to grow.
I wonder what's fully fueling the merger, as oDesk seems to be doing pretty well as of late on its own.
People actually accept executable, possibly backdoored code and/or assets from random-internet-site-freelancers – then install it on their production sites _without_ security auditing it?
(I know - I _shouldn't_ be surprised, I suspect significant double-digit percentages of WordPress sites have themes installed which have some mysterious "<!-- Don't remove this! required for mobile menu to work! --> <?php echo eval(base_64_decode('foobazbah')) ?> type thing in footer.php…)
They are mostly writers, photographers, non-technical entrepreneurs and so on who have outsourced some development tasks related to their online activities. They personally have no ability to assess the code apart from how it looks in the front end. They could hire a second person to do the audit for them but now they have two people to worry about getting screwed by...
He's basically selling ratings. 147 jobs — which would usually cost you at least $200+ each — done for $829 total!
They could easily allow for filters to weed, though instead they allow for details to be hidden.
Companies / people
- saying they are from the US or EU but actually being from India, obviously lying about it to appear more credible,
- starting a project with (1 or more) seniors to get the project and trust and then switching those for the random people dragged in from the street (the worst juniors you can imagine),
- blackmailing withholding parts of deliverables,
- working (with different accounts on different sites) on 10+ projects at a time,
- disappearing without any recourse (yes this can happen in 'real life', but it's extremely rare; on oDesk it's not)
- making up the most insane lies why they are late/more expensive; most common and very morbid; cancer of close family or themselves, but so badly researched that after 3 questions you already know it's not true
and other types of scamming.
Most of these things are preventable if you are really really paranoid and are on top of the 'workers' 24/7, checking everything they deliver with a fine comb, however, that's not really what I would want to do. And for all cases reported to oDesk they just said they couldn't do anything as the screenshot tool was used and the workers 'worked' according to that.
There was an IDE open and code was typed in; random copy/paste code from the web, but that was not the point.
I have very good experiences with both as well and a lot of successful projects, but yeah; this stuff delivered a lot of pain and energy and we seem completely unprotected as buyer.
What we do these days is actually building a team at the outsourcing location, sitting there in the office, training etc; it takes more upfront effort and cost, but it's much more effective. So much more that I would never use these sites again. And we build value instead of work with and train people who will leave in a blink of an eye for a better paying client.
I built a team in Vietnam two years ago together with another company, but i'm sorry to say we were badly scammed there with the most common scam; as soon as you are happy and the machine is well oiled, juniors replace the seniors for the work except in Skype calls where the guys you recruited and know still show up to play the part. We should've stayed on location maybe but I find it very uncomfortable to work with that level of distrust.
Hope you fare better! I met great coders there. Almost all played along with the charade; one of them contacted my recently telling he was sorry and explaining that it is common practice because they make more money that way and clients usually don't notice. Had this over the years in all Asians countries we worked with, however except this one it never happened after actually being on location.
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 5 providers of marketing and writing services.
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 you look at a provider's history.
elance doesn't really care about this. So you have a huge portion of freelancers on elance who cosmetically pump up their ratings to get more jobs and then either farm them out to others or do a shoddy job themselves. when/if the job goes into dispute or is cancelled it disappears from their history. if the client is dumb enough to be happy with the crap work, they get a nice rating in exchange for turning over the final code.
That is not correct.
You can dispute a project and as long as the freelancer received a single dollar for any work, you can leave feedback. Why should you be allowed to leave feedback if there hasn't been any payment made?
There are just as many clowns on the client side, as there are on the freelancer side. Many projects never get off the ground because the client has no money or is just an idiot. People like that should be allowed to leave feedback?
If you're having trouble finding quality help on Elance, try creating a private project and invite only those in your geographic region. So if you're in the US, that means US freelancers.
In the end, you get what you pay for. Don't expect miracles from India.
I won't even touch the non sequitur about India.
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.)
You're right about ripe for disruption too. I wonder who will move into the space.
Does it get better once you "establish" yourself on the site? Right now it feels pretty futile outside of making some pocket change.
> it feels like fighting for scraps
You are fighting for scraps. Generally speaking, until you've been really burnt by a contractor you feel great hiring people in India to work for pennies compared to what you're reselling the service for.
IMO, this is the vast majority of people hiring on oDesk.
In addition, there are SMB or Agency type businesses that are looking to form relationships; they don't want to have to constantly search for new developers. Often, they will find a group or business with a stable of developers even if the quality of the work is a little bit poorer. Many of the firms I worked with just had a project manager that communicated with the developers on their end (often because they did not speak english) and maintained a single point of contact for us. Those were our best experiences.
> Does it get better once you "establish" yourself on the site?
It should. By the end of the time I was using oDesk I had several filters set up when searching so if someone had not completed a test or rating they would never appear on my radar.
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.com). I'd love to get your first reaction.
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.
I really hope oDesk - Elance won't go the same way freelancer - vworker went.
I used to have an account of RentACode, a long time ago. It was mostly a good experience, considering the state of freelancing back then. When my significant otter got fired, I dug the account and handed it over to her -- it had a bunch of good reviews and some of them were for tech writing jobs, so I though it would be useful to her (she's not a programmer, she does marketing).
RAC had, in the meantime, become freelancer.com. The first thing it did was chew through the money I still had in my account -- two or three hundred dollars the withdrawal of which I had procrastinated for a long time, keeping them there in case I'd suddenly decide to take new jobs on RAC (then vWorker) again. I didn't get anything other than automated answers from their tech support, and eventually settled for that being dead money.
Now freelancer.com is a scammer's heaven. It doesn't have escrows by default, the rounding of of fees is done quite liberally, there seems to be no mechanism to stop automatic bidding (with ridiculous sums that do nothing but bring the average bid price down, since it's obvious that whatever is behind those posts is never awarded a project), and their support for disputes is unhelpful at best.
My gf is actually still unemployed and still gets projects on Freelancer every once in a while, but after being scammed twice -- with copious help through lack of reaction by Freelancer -- both her and her clients generally eschew its payment system altogether. She usually insists on a 100% milestone on Freelancer.com the first time she works with them, and then it's PayPal all the way.
The eschewing of the payment system seems to be quite generalized, because their lack of reaction and real buyer and seller protection basically means people end up paying fees for something that is then little more than a glorified job advertising website, since it otherwise fails to offer anything for the (hefty) fees they take.
Freelancer.com is a pretty sore sight nowadays. I browse its range of contract offers every once in a while; there's generally nothing for me (I do systems programming and embedded stuff -- people don't usually hire freelancers to write operating systems or make gadgets, unsurprisingly), but most of the projects and most of the bids depress me. Ads along the lines of "looking for an app expert", looking for reasonably non-trivial applications that work on a gazillion of platforms, awarded to poor people for sums that seem small even to me.
I remember that now with rentacoder, they had a great escrow system.
oDesk are good, they dont allow employers or freelancers to get away with much wrong doing, they re all I use now and I hope they do not change
I'm the CEO of Freelancer.com. How did the RAC escrow system differ? We don't have "expert guarantees" or reverse escrow, where the freelancer is required to put an escrow in the opposite direction, if that is what you mean? Other than that we have the same functionality.
Regards Matt
A few comments- we do have escrows by default- called Milestone Payments. We don't however force people to use them if the two parties decide to come to an arrangement where they don't want to use them. The vast majority of projects do. Also you have a chance to not accept the project as a freelancer if Milestone payments have not been created after you've been awarded. So I can't see the issue here.
Rounding of fees? I have no idea what you are talking about here. We round project commissions to the cent, like everyone else.
Automated bidding- we changed our system some time ago to dramatically stop bid spam. I'm not sure how recently you have used the site. We have removed "public" bids entirely. Now you can only leave one private bid, this has got rid of the problem you talk about.
I would have to disagree with you for disputes and support. We have the largest support team in the entire industry with 250 people in our own facility that operate 24x7x365 and speak 10 languages. We have a paralegal team doing disputes that I believe is the most sophisticated in the industry as well in terms of how it resolves issues.
Our business is going from strength to strength and we are the only company that is publicly listed, so our financials are transparent. Our revenue is growing at almost double the growth rate of our nearest competitors, so I would have also disagree about your comments about the state of the site.
Happy to answer any other questions you may have or you can email me directly at matt@freelancer.com. Also if you shoot me your account username I will have someone take a look at it.
Regards Matt
However, as for the other matters:
> we do have escrows by default- called Milestone Payments.
Actually, you don't have them by default :-). By your own admitting:
> We don't however force people to use them if the two parties decide to come to an arrangement where they don't want to use them.
My (admittedly foggy, please correct me if I'm wrong) memory tells me that RAC had escrows by default, i.e. the buyer had to place the money in RAC's escrow before the coder could start work. I distinctly remember that RAC's seller instructions clearly said you should not start coding before the project is awarded to you, because there is no way to be sure the buyer actually has the money to pay you. When the project was awarded, the money was placed in escrow. I actually had a dispute settled over this matter: my client had simply vanished. I waited for two weeks before telling him I'd get the project into arbitration if I don't receive feedback, and waited another three before getting it into arbitration. The RAC arbitrator decided that if he failed to respond within some reasonable period (a couple of weeks, again), I'd get the money, because the deliverable I had submitted was indeed in accordance with what had been agreed.
Freelancer.com doesn't force buyers to do that, giving rise to the following phenomenon: a scammer opens an account -- with zero reviews but a verified payment method -- and posts a job ad. It's well-paid for something otherwise reasonably simple, like some content writing, but the job has to be done quickly and the buyer claims he can't offer a milestone payment that quickly -- he doesn't have the money on hand, bank transfer takes time (he usually lists his country to be something like Zambia or Congo, where it's probably fairly safe to assume that banks don't go too smoothly with all the firing in the street and whatnot). Since the pay is higher than average, a lot of freelancers are happy to do it. Needless to say, they never get their money.
I'm sorry to say, but when this happened, your large support team did absolutely nothing. They simply reminded her that she should ask for a milestone payment, which a lot of buyers actually don't want to do for credible, or at the very least legitimate reasons. If you don't want to force people into escrowing, you should be able to deal with cases like these.
This wasn't an isolated incident because the same type of job ad appeared several times in the following weeks. We actually tried to warn other freelancers about it and we found at least another dozen people got the same treatment, quite possibly from the same guy who was opening different accounts, and from the same support team.
Edit: Oh yes, rounding of fees.
This page: http://www.freelancer.com/feesandcharges/ claims that, for a free membership plan, Freelancer.com gets 10% of what gets paid to a freelancer, or 5 USD, whichever is greater. Fair enough.
But if I try to bid for 100 USD that gets paid to me, the bid now gets to 111.11 USD, which looks an awful lot closer to 11%.
I initially assumed this had something to do with including the 3% amount that the employer is charged for the posting, too, but it doesn't add up. I never really bothered understanding how it goes; as I mentioned in my other post, I haven't done freelance work on what is today Freelancer.com since the days it was still called Rent a Coder. But in the best case, this is poorly documented. I, for one, can't make sense of it, and I'm probably better at doing math than most freelancers who do content "writing" or social media promotion on your website.
Even later edit: just to be clear, I'm not trying to scold your business model, nor your efforts as a company. If your current model works for you, then it's awesome. Matters of finance and corporate politics are beyond either my possibilities and my wish to comprehend. Freelancer.com isn't doing bad financially (though, since I'm not living off its dividends, that's irrelevant to me) so I presume there are people for whom it makes world a better place. For me, it doesn't.
Being an old RAC then vWorker freelancer, I totally share weland's view.
Lately, I restarted on freelancer.com, and the amount of WTF moments that I faced are quite substantial. Let me give you a summary (and why I decided to move to elance):
-- The worker being constantly extorted in every corner of the site:
-Pay $5 in order to take a test.
-Pay more $ to get your bid in the first row/highlighted
-Pay some $ to unlock more BidsPerMonth and Skills
-Pay upfront 10% of every job you are awarded, even if the employer is determined to scam you and never pay
-What about a constant Ad to remind you that you can always choose to pay more. ...
-- Milestone payment is not defaulted, if the employer didnt made a milestone payment, we couldn't care less, we wont give you back the initial 10% fee (even if both agree to cancel), and you'll have a permanent "Work in Progress" job in your profile (until you decide to constantly harass the support team and wait few weeks)
--The website is a hassle:
- Everything is dynamically processed, slow loading, excessively simplified, and most pages cant be bookmarked
- Forced facebook-like communication!! seriously!!
- Using game mechanism to motivate workers is interesting(levels, badges, XP points ...), but most of it is actually useless/funny (Exp: 78000 credit point to have a 20min call with the CEO)
Pay: $10
That said, I got burned on eLance by charging a flat rate for a client that was never satisfied with my work. I made less after several weeks than other contractors make in an hour. I guess that's the main reason I went to oDesk (though I always liked eLance).
Please, somebody, somewhere, come up with a daily rate mechanism that doesn't invade workers' privacy.
That and finding a way to spread workloads across multiple developers (to reduce stress and make for a better product) are the two main challenges I see right now in freelancing.
Of course, you get what you pay for. Most people looking to hire on these sites aren't interested in quality; they want quantity at a discount. It works well for both them and the people doing the work at least in the short term. After all, some money (food) is better than nothing. I consider it a pretty base form of exploitation, though.
Pick a country in the list on that page where the Per Capita Income is less than ~$4160/year. Most likely, in such a country, $2/hour is very likely going to put an individual at or above the median income (farther above, the lower the GDP Per Capita). $5/hr is a nice wage.
For comparison, the UN ranking of the US in this category is ~$51,000, and the median household income in the US is about $55,000 (per year).
If you land a job making $5/hour, full time 40 hour weeks, that's $800 a month. A LOOOOT of people here would kill for that kind of salary.
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 which are in use. I guess the logistics would kill it, but still.
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.
What you make in a couple of days, they make in a year. It's mind boggling. Yes, cost of living is cheaper, but not that cheap.
On the plus side, you feel like you can make a difference in their life. If you're living there, you can pay them a great salary, without breaking the bank. Or if you're visiting, they might not expect tips, but hand someone $5 that went out of their way to give you a free ride on their moped, and you just dropped a few days income in their pocket.
I'm pretty sure there are tons of folks out there just like me living comfortable lives with their oDesk earnings.
I came in a little below that and got several gigs at $30/hr, mostly in esoteric areas like OpenGL programming.
Also I would recommend watching your job invites and you'll start to notice which areas are the least sensitive to hourly rates. For me that's been 3D work in iOS, but YMMV.
I'm trying to move to a daily rate, in that case I would assume only 2-4 hours of coding daily because when you are really in the zone, most of your problem solving work happens off the computer. So I think that's why we see rates of $75 or even $125 or more quoted so often.
The other thing I've learned is that institutional work pays a lot more, so it's better to find gigs for consultancies/studios/education, things like that, as opposed to individuals. They seem to expect a rate of at least $50-75/hr and up. In large cities the rate probably starts at $100/hr.
Anyway, I'm basically taking a pay cut as a freelancer so that I can work on my own projects, which have the potential to pay back exponentially someday, and are at the very least challenging and rewarding and keep my psyche going. I've had jobs where the boss charged $100/hr and paid us $15/hr, and on top of that wanted us to work 9 hours or more a day, and I did the math and realized that I would never be able to achieve my goals if the lion's share of my efforts went to someone else.
I have some people that work with me on oDesk that I've found over the past few years. I don't pay them a lot by US standards, but they're good people. I've sent them various hardware, like Kindles and a new laptop to help them do their work better, and it has worked out well, although I was kind of nervous about it at the time.
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.
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/au/freelancer-more-than-triples-first-d...
I'm the CEO of Freelancer.com (Freelancer Limited ASX:FLN).
Our share price dropped rapidly in the first few days because the issue price was 50 cents and it was the biggest opening on the ASX every (so I was told by the exchange). The share price opened at $2.50.
A month later we are at $1.40, almost three times our issue price. I think that's pretty good. You would expect a bit of a pullback from such a strong opening (5x !).
Regards Matt
Never use a service whose name you could make up thoughtlessly.
I tend to evaluate a service based on what they provide, their reputation and sometimes the care put into their branding, but rarely do I make a blanket judgement on name alone. Anyone on HN should know how challenging it is to pick a name in the competitive domain landscape.
"Never use a service whose name you could make up thoughtlessly."
Not to mention that while you could make up a name thoughtlessly, those behind it might've spent weeks brainstorming, getting feedback, checking their options, etc.
I think these guys know that a startup will struggle to compete, getting the critical mass of devs and employers is the same problem as starting a social network.
I share the view that ODesk quality is an order of magnitude better than elance, I think only those using elance will being thinking anything positive at this moment...
We have a few other competitors targeting the high-end of the freelancer market, but that's still open territory.
For the types of projects we work with, "exceptional developers" might be better described as "competent developers, great entrepreneurs". Of course, that wouldn't be ideal marketing copy :)
In general, raw technical ability isn't a huge factor in commanding higher rates. There's definitely a minimum threshold someone needs to pass, but you'd probably clear that easily if you've been freelancing for 5+ years.
Instead of learning to code faster, you'd be better served by learning to code less. Clients often have big ideas that would take 6+ months to build in their entirety, but which could be shipped in weeks by eliminating unnecessary features. Convincing them to cut those features is a skill in of itself, which is often what separates "freelancers" from "consultants".
Could you please name a few?
I have the same expectations for this merger/acquisition. Elance won't become any better and Odesk will cease to exist very soon after transferring all users to Elance.
Sadly this merger is dictated by nothing else but increasing market share of Freelancer.com.
I'm the CEO of Freelancer.com. Since the vWorker acquisition actually all the quality metrics are up. The vWorker user base was also a very high quality workforce and today dominate highly our freelancer rankings and awarded projects. This is reflected in our financials- we are growing revenue at almost twice the rate of our competitors. We're also publicly listed (ASX: FLN) so our financials are transparent.
If you have any other questions, I'm happy to answer them or shoot me a note at matt@freelancer.com.
Regards Matt
Clearly they need to use their own services for a system admin & someone with aws+scaling experience
For the past couple of years we've been busy building Socialance, sort of like a hybrid if oDesk & LinkedIn. A site where you can hire people recommended by your network.
I know building a marketplace is an extremely challenging task, but we've come this far, we're going to see it through.
It seems plenty of you are heavy users of either site, or have strong opinions about the sector. If you want to help out my email is guillermo@socialance.com (we're bootstrapped, took part in Startup Chile and are based in London).
If it sounds like something might be interested in using, please drop your mail at http://Socialance.com
Then I opened a profile for myself as a contractor. I charge $100/hour. So far I've gotten about 10 hours worth of work from two different US companies. I'd like to increase my rates in 2014. This is purely for interesting work to me, I've already got a day job.
Can u refer me to ur contractor in India?
I am not holding my breath for the merger to improve this dynamic.
Yes, I know there are some freelancers working on these sites who earn a "decent" living. They're anomalies. The vast majority of workers earn really horrible wages. The well paid oDesk or Elance freelancer is as common as a rags-to-riches startup billionaire in the software industry as a whole.
But it really depends on your definition of "horrible" and "well paid".
$5/hr in US is horrible.
$5/hr in a developing country is awesome and well paid - Even for talented freelancers.
And finding clients who are ready to pay you, as a developer from outside US, an standard/decent/well US wage for the job is pretty hard - almost impossible - at least in my experience.
Do you have any tips on finding well paid (generally better paid than oDesk) jobs for freelancers outside US/Western europe?