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Longtime oDesker here, I've made mid 5 figures total. I recently received a notification from oDesk that I'm part of the top 5% of "successful freelancers" on o

Longtime oDesker here, I've made mid 5 figures total. I recently received a notification from oDesk that I'm part of the top 5% of "successful freelancers" on oDesk which I interpreted to mean top 5% of earners. It honestly astounded me because my account has been basically inactive for the last 8 months and I've only worked on oDesk projects since a few months after I quit my job, roughly late 2011. I started working oDesk mostly to stave off having to dip too deeply into savings. In fact, I read a lot of helpful information on HN related to getting your foot in the door for freelancing online and it ended up working very well for me. If you're looking to get an established profile, the short version is: 1. Build things (i.e. small projects, clones, browse project listings for things that would take a few hours and just implement them) 2. Tell people (learn to write proposals well, show the employers that you know your stuff and can produce) Over time I slowly raised my rate and, surprise surprise, everyone who every wrote anything about raising your rate is right! The more the client is paying, the better they are. I ended up firing the client with the lowest rate because he was so bad and have done repeat work for my highest paying client. As far as the tracking software, it has been buggy at times (I'm on Linux, I imagine they spend more time on other platforms) but I don't really see the big deal about having it take a screenshot. If the client is micromanaging to the point where he's having you remove 10 minutes because facebook showed up in your screenshot, it's not worth the time. I do notice that it tends to take screenshots when switching apps. On oDesk, I get hired hourly, I provide work hourly. Just like any in-person project, online projects require you to have good communication skills - letting the client know when you're working, what you'll be doing, when you expect things to be done, technical tradeoffs, etc. None of this is unique to remote projects. Additionally, just like the real world, there are endless people posting jobs expecting the moon in exchange for peanuts. I used to regularly receive "invitations to interview" from people who posted projects and almost always they were someone with an idea, looking for a coder, willing to pay $1k to get their facebook clone off the ground. While my girlfriend was impressed that my skills were in such high demand, it's can be a bit of a game of roulette trying to find serious projects and employers willing to invest real money. In my experience, setting a high hourly rate on your profile mitigates this situation quite a bit. I also experimented with vworker and elance back in 2011, but neither of them ended up being a good fit. It turns out that when you're building your profile on a freelancing site, sticking to one site is pretty useful because you get feedback and projects to post about at the same time and alongside each other. Glowing feedback next to a completed project with 5 figures invested does good things for your profile. If you're looking to get started with oDesk or have any other questions about how it works, I'm always free for a chat. Email is in my profile.

victorhn 13y ago
If i were a generalist programmer, eager to learn a technology for good pay on Odesk, what would you say are the technologies more well paid and that at the same time adjust better to the remote freelance model on that site?
- latortuga 13y ago
  In general, my advice would be to not approach freelancing as an exchange of expertise in a certain technology for currency. Usually people are looking for their problems to be solved - build me an app, fix my slow site, make me more money - so my advice would be to market yourself as a problem-fixer instead. That said, web development is obviously hot at the moment (Django, Rails, Node, etc) and I have marketed myself as an expert Ruby on Rails developer successfully. Now, I don't do this for in-person gigs but on oDesk I think that it helps with my credibility for those tech-savvy employers with lists of skills they need. There are certainly a plethora of jobs posted for various stacks. I believe oDesk lists their projects in public and if not, you can create a free account and peruse the listings for a better idea. I still would advise you to address other risks in your pitch to employers though, because generally speaking you'll be talking to people who are nervous about hiring and spending money on someone they've never met (and may never meet in person). A business owner or entrepreneur posting on oDesk is disproportionately worried about things like: 1. Is this guy for real/a flake? 2. When is he going to work on my site? 3. Is he just browsing facebook since I can't look over his shoulder? 4. What was he doing for 4 hours yesterday and nothing got deployed to the staging site? Communication is really the thing that is going to set you apart, much moreso than your technical expertise. To give you an idea, I opened my profile on oDesk with about 2.5 years of professional Rails development experience and started out around $25/hour for my first gig (gulp, a bit nervous admitting that I worked as a developer for $25/hour) - I was new to this freelancing thing and if I could go back, I would run screaming from that $25/hour client, feedback be damned. I raised my rate rather quickly however - I have since taken projects at hourly rates of $35, $50, $65, and $75. Please note that this places me in the top 5% of successful freelancers on oDesk, and that I never worked for a client more than 20 hours per week. Yes, you're competing against folks who bid $2/hour and no, I have never spent a moment worrying about them. Nobody, and I mean nobody wants a client who values developer time at $2/hour.

victorhn 13y ago

If i were a generalist programmer, eager to learn a technology for good pay on Odesk, what would you say are the technologies more well paid and that at the same time adjust better to the remote freelance model on that site?

latortuga 13y ago
In general, my advice would be to not approach freelancing as an exchange of expertise in a certain technology for currency. Usually people are looking for their problems to be solved - build me an app, fix my slow site, make me more money - so my advice would be to market yourself as a problem-fixer instead. That said, web development is obviously hot at the moment (Django, Rails, Node, etc) and I have marketed myself as an expert Ruby on Rails developer successfully. Now, I don't do this for in-person gigs but on oDesk I think that it helps with my credibility for those tech-savvy employers with lists of skills they need. There are certainly a plethora of jobs posted for various stacks. I believe oDesk lists their projects in public and if not, you can create a free account and peruse the listings for a better idea. I still would advise you to address other risks in your pitch to employers though, because generally speaking you'll be talking to people who are nervous about hiring and spending money on someone they've never met (and may never meet in person). A business owner or entrepreneur posting on oDesk is disproportionately worried about things like: 1. Is this guy for real/a flake? 2. When is he going to work on my site? 3. Is he just browsing facebook since I can't look over his shoulder? 4. What was he doing for 4 hours yesterday and nothing got deployed to the staging site? Communication is really the thing that is going to set you apart, much moreso than your technical expertise. To give you an idea, I opened my profile on oDesk with about 2.5 years of professional Rails development experience and started out around $25/hour for my first gig (gulp, a bit nervous admitting that I worked as a developer for $25/hour) - I was new to this freelancing thing and if I could go back, I would run screaming from that $25/hour client, feedback be damned. I raised my rate rather quickly however - I have since taken projects at hourly rates of $35, $50, $65, and $75. Please note that this places me in the top 5% of successful freelancers on oDesk, and that I never worked for a client more than 20 hours per week. Yes, you're competing against folks who bid $2/hour and no, I have never spent a moment worrying about them. Nobody, and I mean nobody wants a client who values developer time at $2/hour.