First of all, thanks for the thoughtful reply. This is an interesting take on these sites and I agree that they are definitely employer-leaning in their offerin

First of all, thanks for the thoughtful reply. This is an interesting take on these sites and I agree that they are definitely employer-leaning in their offerings. When we hire developers, we stress that 'mental modeling' is a necessary part of the process that we have no problem paying for. Other employers may not share the same view of how important that part of the process is. We block-out a reasonable amount of time for the developer to sit and think about the big picture and the details of how they'll execute. In the several hundreds of hours we've tasked, we've had an overall good experience with the developers, designers and copywriters we've hired on oDesk. That's not to say that we've not run into a few bad apples but, overall, we've been pleased. We're certainly open to the use of other platforms for contract work (we're not in a place to hire permanent employees) and hopefully some HN readers will pitch in their 2 cents.