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Comment by scottydelta | Hacker News Reader

I am a freelancer and I would say Odesk is the best place for freelancing. I have worked on both Elance and Odesk. My first job as a freelancer was on Elance and also the last one on Elance. Odesk seems to have more good projects on the field I work on and that is tasks automation on servers.

As far as getting the first job is concerned, I got mine by quoting a price of $7/hour(lower than the minimum wage) and suggesting the client that he should choose python over bash for the script he wanted despite his unknown attachment with bash. And my suggestion worked out pretty well. I made an account on Odesk on 10th Dec, 2013 and I have already completed 2 projects and 3 are on progress on Odesk.

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Could you elaborate on the differences between the two, and why you decided to write off all of Elance after one bad experience?

I dint mean to say Elance is bad or something, I just prefer Odesk over Elance and thats my personal opinion. As I mentioned I find more projects on Odesk that interests me, that is just evident that I was giving my personal opinion.

And if you want differences between the two, I would say the option of using 4 extra credits on Elance to get your application on top is very stupid and Odesk has a very simple UX.

"I got mine by quoting a price of $7/hour(lower than the minimum wage) and..."

Depressing stuff like this is why I've never used the odesk acct I made a few months ago. I pretty much only visit the site when I receive email invitations to "apply" for a job, which is 90% recruiter spam and 10% unbelievably underpaid. Most recent example: "creating the official Diffbot Javascript client library"; fixed project price: $75. wat

There's no need to join the race to the bottom. Every now and then there comes a reasonable request, and you can just ignore the rest.

Sometimes it makes sense to try to educate the client about this, for example pointing out that getting an oficial library for $75 can't possibly turn out well for them. Instead of wasting a little money and a lot of time and their users' goodwill, they can find someone that actually cares about the quality and charges accordingly.

Sometimes it works, sometimes not. But hey, that's sales.

Yes, you cant be more right about 90% interview invitations being spam. Sometimes I wish there were a way to send a message to the client when they fix a budget to $5 for a script and $75 for a SDK. but the thing is once you have done few projects on Odesk, its easy to get more. for eg, the Diffbot client invited me to write python sdk even though I dint apply for the project and I think that was because of review left by my previous clients. and take a suggestion, dont take small projects like fixing js code, fixing server bug which yield 20-30$, have patience and try for something worthy of your time.

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