What do you like or dislike about Elance and ODesk?
Let's discuss...
The big problem is education. We speak with a surprising amount of people who've never hired a developer before. They often don't understand the difference between Wordpress dev and someone who's been doing high-performance numerical computing. If they tried to hire a dev on Elance, it would almost certainly be a frustrating experience for both parties, since they're unable to write a reasonable job description.
Our solution has been to take a very unsexy approach: anyone who wants to hire a dev through our service needs to first hop on a phone call and tell me a little about what they're looking for. Sometimes we reject potential clients outright (particularly if they have poor expectations about price) other times we suggest they hire a different type of dev than they initially thought they needed.
Unless Elance is willing to start offering this sort of concierge service, it's unlikely to grow into the sort of place where qualified devs will want to find qualified clients.
Although your 100/hr minimum rate does cause me a bit of concern. I'd find it difficult to justify that rate for most of the work I do, which is PHP and javascript development.
I'm an experienced developer and I find odesk and freelancer a waste of time in the attempt to bid against lowballers.
The marketplace is craving for quality local (north american only) freelance service providers powered by strong job platform service.
Many enterprises are slowly realizing that outsourcing is what-you-pay-is-what-you-get business and it's a prime time to negotiate services with local quality talents.
Positive:
- meritocratic
- satisfactory rates. I get as much work as I want at $50 (sometimes more) doing upper four or lower five figure projects
- flexibility - I can dump a client, change workload, take a year break, anytime - and come back to where I was. A safety net.
- no need to do anything else than talking to clients and building software. No marketing besides the profile, no Linkedin profile, no Twitter, no conferences, no interacting with HR etc useless people
- no phone or IM. As a rule, I only communicate through email, which I check once a day, tops
Negatives:
- huge fees (close to 10% per transaction)
- have to actually work to earn, but that's how it is with freelancing Elance or not
- overall low prestige, though some clients are top-notch
As others pointed, some clients try change the scope. I just send them back quotes for any changes I don't feel like doing for free. Problem solved.
Most projects are boring CRUDs, but I also got to do some interesting pieces of software.
I appreciate the freedom that Elance gives. Still, I treat it as a convenient alternative to flipping burgers, and I would not recommend it for someone who wants to make a career as a developer.
BTW the screen making software is abomination and no one should ever agree to use it.
But, as the other commenters have stated, most of the jobs pay too little, require immediate turnaround and/or have initial scopes which turn out to be poorly though-out.
But, yes, as others have said, it's hard to make a living if you're in a high-cost-of-living country. My rate on there is $100/hr. I get about 1 inquiry a month and maybe a few jobs a year from it. I did have one long-term job on there at $60/hr so I made it to the top %1 of devs though.
The reason I ended up on them is because I have chronic health problems and have not been able to get much in the way of health insurance or when I did I wasn't able to really solve my problems. So I have not been able to show up on time and put in the hours or had the energy to hold a regular full time job. Being able to work from home on my own schedule has been necessary.
At the moment I have a bit of freelance work that is not from those sites and pays OK. But I may end up going back on odesk or something and scrambling for another project out of necessity.
There is a reason those projects are posted on outsourcing sites, which is that the resources available are very limited or at least too limited to pay for US based developers.
This initial underfunding usually doesn't bode well for the overall project management.
Well let me soften that a bit. Usually the project managers are not completely clueless and are doing the best they can in a situation that is not ideal. That's not always the case.
The other developers I have worked with have been very capable contrary to what people say about outsourcing. But more often than not delivering some kind of usable system is required even though there isn't adequate time or developer resources and is never any QA. So you pretty much have to cut corners everywhere or just lose the fee and get a bad report on your record.
The thing is that so many people want custom software and development is so expensive that tools like WordPress with plugins etc are taking the place of custom development. Sometimes taking advantage of those tools can make what would be completely ridiculous underfunded projects a few years ago now realistic.
I think that is great, but we are actually going to have to change our societal structure because there really aren't going to be enough jobs.
Within 10 or 20 years quite a lot of the application/plugin configuration work now being done by programmers and even much of the custom software development will be done by interactive AI programs.
The reason I can say that confidently is that we have such a rich ecosystem of for example open source web applications and plugins that have already been developed. More than half of all software projects are minor improvements in areas where problems have been solved dozens or hundreds of times. With such an ecosystem of existing solutions and most problems already solved the level of language understanding or general intelligence required is low and either already accomplished or will be within our reach shortly. And to be clear I'm not just talking about outsourced programming but software development in general. Certainly there are lots of software projects that require true human level intelligence, but the majority of them do not if we take advantage of existing solutions and employ leading-edge AI.