If this is fixed, it will become attractive workplace for lot of qualified engineers, including those on HN.
This will be a radical move, but it will also eliminate "bad" clients.
Our big thing is to fail fast. If you're new to us and giving us the heeby jeebies in the first week we'll cut our losses and find someone else.
If you're awarding a project purely to the lowest bidder then I feel you kind of get what you deserve.
Why would you undercut their pricing power in the market just because Sillicon Valley has insane costs of living (but also insane job availability)?
I'm myself from less developed eastern European country, and the last time I checked, groceries - eggs, meat, milk, etc.. had comparable prices to that of Californian cities, such as San Diego...
And if we're talking about getting high quality education, healthcare, etc... in developing countries you have to go premium, and it costs even more than in western countries.
In an efficient competitive market, the expected behavior is that each seller will set the price they are willing to sell the next unit of what they are selling at the cost to them of providing that next unit (including the opportunity cost of what they give up to provide it.)
> and when they don't understand it, their price demping hurts whole market.
I think they do understand it. Its just that the people who have higher costs don't like that it prices those sellers out of the market. But welcome to a robust competitive market.
2) No, employers are not so naïve :) Everybody understand who you can hire for $5/hour and what to expect. I'm not interested in such employers and they are not interested in me, so it's just not my part of market and I don't care. As employer (sometimes I'm employer) I have to filter out people with low bids without even reading their profiles. I know what to expect from low price.
If market clearing price is set only by what buyers are willing to pay and not by costs, you have a monopolistic market in which rents are being extracted, not an efficient competitive market.
If market clearing price is set only by sellers costs and not what buyers are willing to pay, you have the reverse case, where you have a monopoly buyer.
In an ideal competitive market, the price a buyer is willing to pay to buy the next unit is set by the expected benefit buying another unit brings them, and the price a seller is willing to sell the next unit for is equal to the seller's cost (including opportunity cost) of providing the next unit, and the market clearing price is the price at which the number of buyers willing to pay that price or more is equal the number of sellers willing to sell at that price or less, and buyers only willing to pay less and sellers only willing to sell for more are priced out of the market.
Now I'm back to consulting, where I get more than the double of that per day. odesk and similar crapy sites suck.
As a developer, this doesn't need to affect you at all. You're not racing to the bottom. The people in that race are not capable of competing with you on quality (or they wouldn't be fighting for $4/hr work). You can (and should) continue to charge several hundred dollars per hour for your services to clients who can tell the difference between you and those oDesk guys, and who are willing to pay for those services.
You're right though. It would be nice if there were a way to create a market that included neither those clients wanting to build a Facebook clone for $350 nor the developers willing to try. But nobody yet has come up with a way to do so.
The whole thing about work status: "I am available to work and will respond to invites right away" is nothing but a surrender of negotiating leverage by contractors to employers.
To attract better clients and engineers. oDesk gets 10% cut, so I guess they will be happy to get 10% of some 3-figure/hr engineer rather than $10/hr one.
- Entry Level: I am looking for freelancers with the lowest rates
- Intermediate Level: I am looking for a mix of experience and value
- Expert Level: I am willing to pay higher rates for the most experienced freelancers
You can simple target jobs which require Expert Level. You'll most likely find clients who are willing to pay you $30-$50/hr.
A new guy can compete on price, get work, get good reviews and then increase his rates.
First evaluate the competition. As an example on oDesk, there are almost unlimited PHP developers, a large percentage who are novices. The reverse is true to some degree when it comes to Python. Identify skills which have less competition and higher rates.
Next is focus on finding someone who hires for long term projects. If you are working for three people at once your quality will suffer and your output is going to be slower. If you are doing 3 hour projects a large percentage of your time is going to be spent trying to find work rather than being paid for work. You could look for how much the hirer has spent on total projects, for example. This is a guess, but you probably want someone with $10k+ spent.
When it comes to oDesk & Freelancer one of your biggest advantages will be English comprehension fluency. Something to consider for non-native speakers.
When I hire, I disregard the developer's profile history. I look at other things such as their English fluency. The first job is short and provides a fairly accurate indicator if they will work out.
oDesk is mined for skilled developer talent. There are companies just posting test projects to find these developers and hire/contract them out full time. In that regards the pool of skilled developers is artificially lower than it otherwise would be. In my experience the guys billing higher amounts are either on par or worse developers than the ones charging lower amounts. In that respect, the skill shifts from developing to sales. If a non-tech person is doing hiring they are at high risk of being strung along.
I would echo what others have commented in the thread -- it is much better to find a full time or part time dev position than chasing after mini projects. (And better yet, be paid in partially equity especially if your work is contributing to significant revenue growth for the employer.)
What is the preferred platform for freelances looking for remote work at decent rates, today ?
Also, I was after more or less niche remote jobs (C++). In case of web or mobile dev - there are literally tons of jobs out there.
Disclaimer - I work for Toptal
It used to be pretty popular in the UK. I don't work freelance anymore but I still check the site out once in a while, it's fairly high quality and I've had several high-paying clients from there.
A few points on issues raise in this thread:
(1) I can assure you---and I really should do some blog posts on this---but client/employers are not nearly as price sensitive as people believe. When you try to model employers choosing who to hire from their pool of applicants, you need to work really hard in specifying the model to get demand curves to slope downward. In other words, "price" often gets the wrong sign, meaning it looks like the higher the bid, the more likely an applicant is to get hired. What's going on is that clients can and will pay more for better, more experienced developers and these developers bid accordingly. However as a freelancer, finding those kinds of employers can be a challenge.
To help deal with this search problem, we asked employers up front to state their relative preferences over price and quality. For example, employers could state they were looking for high quality at a high price, or less experienced workers at a lower price. During the experimentation phase, we randomized whether these employer/client preferences were revealed to applying freelancers. We found that we could induce substantial sorting by freelancers to job/employers of the "right" type, raising wages and project sizes at the high end. This feature is now universal and helps freelancers get in front of clients that are a good fit for them.
(2) After very extensive experimentation, oDesk did in fact impose a minimum wage. It was set at price point that improved the quality of people getting hired, but was not so high that jobs weren't being filled. Obviously, this level of minimum wage doesn't touch the high-end of the market, but picking minimum wages is a real balancing act and setting it too high can definitely price some work out of the market. It also "pulls up the ladder" and prevents new workers from getting started in the market, which oDesk understandably wants to avoid.
(3) There is a problem with too many low quality applications. The problem is similar to what's going on in college admissions---because it's cheap to apply, people apply to almost every school, whether or not it's a good fit. oDesk recently started using the Elance "Connects" system that imposes a meaningful quota on applications, which in turn seems to be improving application quality. It is hard problem though, because if you set the quota to high, you get the bad spam equilibrium, and if you set it too low, you choke off liquidity.
(4) There is a problem with inflated reputations---it's a general problem in online marketplaces, particularly those with bilateral reputation systems. However, oDesk has done something quite clever which seems to be working well, which is collecting private feedback from both workers and clients after a contract and then eventually disclosing non-identifiable aggregates of those ratings to future employers/workers. These ratings are far more truthful on a host of measures, are harder to subvert by begging for good feedback and so far, aren't getting inflated.
The people looking for 10 usd/hr payment would simply go elsewhere. They aren't going to pay 50 usd/hr and you aren't going to accept 10 usd/hr.
A much better solution would be to have a better search functionality.