I couldn't agree more. My experiences with oDesk have been overall phenomenal, while Elance has consistently been a pain.
I wonder what's fully fueling the merger, as oDesk seems to be doing pretty well as of late on its own.
I wonder what's fully fueling the merger, as oDesk seems to be doing pretty well as of late on its own.
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.
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.