Ask HN: How would you improve the online Freelancing marketplaces? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How would you improve the online Freelancing marketplaces?

7 pointsjibly9 comments

Professional freelancers, that refuse to work for $5, seem to be losing the battle against an army of low-rate workers on sites like Elance, Odesk etc. I'm interested to hear from you folks how you think this can be solved/improved. I recently launched http://www.cnnected.com as a possible first iteration of the problem, but all ideas are welcome to help solve this serious issue.

View on HN

This was only a slight problem a few years ago. Now the landscape is quickly changing. You'll find a lot of employers specifically seeking "onshore" workers. They usually state it's because of timezone differences, but their off the record comments clearly point at them associating offshore with low quality work from past experiences. The trick to spot them is look for employers that have had many job postings already and whose posts show they care about the technology. If it looks like the product owner themself posting, or they are talking specific modern technologies, or asking for github accounts for reference, then there is a good chance they respect quality. I have had amazing success using this strategy. The first two jobs I took both employers almost forced me into taking a higher pay they were so happy to finally find somebody who can deliver quality and communicate effectively. The market corrects itself, I watched myself as my former employer fired and hired 4-6 cheap workers in a row until he finally became fed-up and reposted the job for triple the starting rate.

So yeah, spot the guys who have done their fair share of hiring, the ones who have been burned already, and hit them with your best quality focused pitch. I take this controlled approach, bid high, and do my research.

I think if these sites need improving at all, it's putting the spotlight more on the employer. These lowballers will become more visible to the seasoned developer who will avoid them, thereby only attracting the lower quality workers who don't even bother to read past the title of the job post. Half the battle is these employers just don't always know better yet, let em loose a few thousand and they'll come around quickly.

> Professional freelancers, that refuse to work for $5, seem to be losing the battle against an army of low-rate workers on sites like Elance, Odesk etc.

I disagree, but you made the statement. Can you back this up?

I don't think there is a problem with these "freelance markets." As with any market, it's a crazy, chaotic, noisy place with prices all over the board. The so called $5 workers occupy a niche just as their higher paid counterparts do.

Perhaps the missing ingredient is education for the customer. Again, each of these types of workers are potentially helpful for different cases. The difficulty for the customer is to figure out the landscape. I have heard many stories of people having a hard time doing this in the beginning but after blowing through X funds and trying out X developers they eventually figure it out. If money isn't an issue in this case, then the time may be an issue.

For the developer, the fix is to break out of these markets and attract potential clients with your own brand as opposed to piggy-backing off someone else's platform.

There are resources all over for finding out this info. Patio11 is quite active on HN and posts a lot of great info. Here is an example article from Brennan Dunn

http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/high-value-clients/

And a quote from that article.

> This is going to have you seek out clients who have problems to solve, rather than clients with projects to do.

As a consultant, you're end game is to become a partner to the client. These markets are about being a drop-in developer.

If drop-in developer is what you are looking to become, then I think you still need to be able to generate client work based on your own visibility rather than being matched through a platform. You need to learn how to sell. If you can't do that without the platform, then you die when the platform dies.

Bottom line, you are an entrepreneur running a business. There is no special formula for being a business success (just like being successful with any other business.) If there is a formula, then you probably should be working to break that formula so that you can stand out and unlock further value. Otherwise, how do we justify our continued presence in the gene pool? Keep things moving forward or get out of the way.

This is based on my own experience and I've been reading this here on HN a dozens of times. High-end freelancers have smaller chances (not zero, just less) to get projects through sites like Elance and Odesk. It usually seems to be race to the lowest, where quality becomes secondary in most cases (not all)

tnx for the valuable info! Reading through it right now. Very much appreciated!

Fundamentally, the problem is that the buyer doesn't have enough information. If I see

person X, javascript, country A, $5 person Y, javascript, country B, $15

all I see is that person X is $10 cheaper. I want to know if person X does better work than person Y, and I can't tell that from this.

People will tend to use country as a proxy for quality, or perhaps assess purchasing power or something. Can you imagine a situation where people have to say "Russian programmers are better/worse than chinese programmers?" Its absurd as a criterion but it is driven by fact that that is one of the main pieces of information we get.

There needs to be more of a personal touch and a better selling of expertise. The work you want done shouod not be task oriented but idea oriented which requires expertise of individuals. This means weeding out entry level type candidates from the pool of workers and weeding out small tasks from the jobs.

Also, you need to have companies that are open to getting work done on weekends or evenings.

What if the client would set the budget, and that's it. And the freelancers that propose to do the job, don't bid with lower (or higher) prices, but simply show their work. This way the client would choose between the most appealing portfolio, rather than the lowest (or highest) price.

Why did you choose a minimum budget of 100 USD in the project form?

Because there is a bidding system involved in this process, if you would bid $25 for example, than a project of $10 doesn't make sense. So I thought I'd be nice to have a minimum. But up for ideas.

I assume you mean programming?

I do freelance work online as a writer. Most sites out there seem to let the writer sell themselves, bid for projects, state what they will do for X amount of money, etc. The most successful writing market I am familiar with makes the person hiring decide what they want done and sets a preset price and lets workers read the specs and select what they are willing to do. Workers get rated on the quality of their work and their rating determines the kind of work available to them.

The lower skilled pools of work are very competitive (in terms of assignments rapidly disappearing) because there are a lot of people at those lower skill levels. The service provides feedback and a bit of training in terms of letting you know what kinds of things they are looking for at the higher quality levels and what you need to do to achieve that. If you are willing to work to improve yourself, you can get yourself up to a higher rating. Once you are at that higher rating, you also qualify for select teams.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com