7 ms·

As long as oDesk does not change at all, I'm happy. The only reason I hire on oDesk is because it is NOT elance - have had horrible experience with elance both

by lingben 13y ago

As long as oDesk does not change at all, I'm happy. The only reason I hire on oDesk is because it is NOT elance - have had horrible experience with elance both with providers and the company itself and how it conducts business (or what it calls business). Although this is called a merger, it is only that in name. It seems elance's CEO will call the shots. https://www.odesk.com/blog/2013/12/mergerfaq/ https://www.odesk.com/blog/2013/12/mergerfaq/ "Who will lead the new company? oDesk executive chairman Thomas Layton will continue in the same role at the combined company, and Elance CEO Fabio Rosati will serve as chief executive officer." There's a huge wave of consolidation in the industry in the past 5 years. Just last year freelancer bought vworker. It is ripe for disruption as the dominant sites grow bloated and complacent, only seeing acquisitions as the way to grow.

tannerc 13y ago
I couldn't agree more. My experiences with oDesk have been overall phenomenal, while Elance has consistently been a pain. I wonder what's fully fueling the merger, as oDesk seems to be doing pretty well as of late on its own.
- loceng 13y ago
  I imagine oDesk is fine as long as you don't have any problems. They don't see blackmail as breaking their rules though, e.g. a contractor blackmailing you for a good rating. That contractor gets to stay on the platform. I have had this experience.
  - lingben 13y ago
    out of curiosity, how exactly does the blackmailing on oDesk work?
    - alecsmart1 13y ago
      Something as simple as the contractor wont provide you with the full code until you leave a 5 star rating.
      - loceng 13y ago
        Or just the final code or maybe have access to your servers or other assets - and without a full security check / wipe, you can't know if they created a way in - or they threaten to release your code publicly, or sell it, etc..
        bigiain 13y ago
        Wait - what? People actually accept executable, possibly backdoored code and/or assets from random-internet-site-freelancers – then install it on their production sites _without_ security auditing it? (I know - I _shouldn't_ be surprised, I suspect significant double-digit percentages of WordPress sites have themes installed which have some mysterious " <?php echo eval(base_64_decode('foobazbah')) ?> type thing in footer.php…)
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
        andyjdavis 13y ago
        Most people I know who have used odesk/elance simply don't have the ability to perform an audit. They are mostly writers, photographers, non-technical entrepreneurs and so on who have outsourced some development tasks related to their online activities. They personally have no ability to assess the code apart from how it looks in the front end. They could hire a second person to do the audit for them but now they have two people to worry about getting screwed by...
      - fayyazkl 13y ago
        Just to balance the concept, usually people who have maintained good ratings for a long time, don't do this. I have worked for like 5-6 years at odesk part time, done around 40 jobs of varied sizes (hourly as well as fixed prices), never even once held back code or any thing, and barely once received some what negative feedback in which case i believe it was still my fault. So all sorts of people exist and work online. Those who have build reputations over years value it far more than the money, and an employer can easily trash the reputation with feedback. That being said employers from the western world are generally nice or may be it was just my experience :)
    - sampk 13y ago
      Not directly related but shit like this really scares me away from these sites and make me lose some faith in humanity (look at the client's history): https://www.odesk.com/o/jobs/job/Artist-Needed-for-Home-Page_~019bff28f83b38633d/ https://www.odesk.com/o/jobs/job/Artist-Needed-for-Home-Page... He's basically selling ratings. 147 jobs — which would usually cost you at least $200+ each — done for $829 total!
      - corin_ 13y ago
        Surely that guy isn't selling ratings, as he's the client so he's the guy paying the low fees - presumably to get work (just cheap work), otherwise why would he spend $829 just to give contractors ratings. (Unless there's more going on than meets the eye, for example behind the scenes he's selling the chance to get a positive rating for more than he pays on the site.)
        loceng 13y ago
        Or the company via a different means is paying this "person" more money than he is spending, to make it look legitimate -- the only loss then is the fee (%) that Elance / oDesk takes, which further incentivizes Elance / oDesk to allow this behaviour, though that is minor in comparison to having a lot of "high quality" / highly rated contractors on their platform.
      - loceng 13y ago
        Yeah. Elance / oDesk aren't incentivized to prevent this behaviour. They want a site that looks busy, and full of "high-quality" / highly rated contractors. They could easily allow for filters to weed, though instead they allow for details to be hidden.
        carlosrt 13y ago
        Having the ability to see everybody that scored in the top 5% for [specific skill] would be nice. Maybe an email to garyeswart@odesk.com is in order.
- tluyben2 13y ago
  I've had issues with both, but most with oDesk. Companies / people - saying they are from the US or EU but actually being from India, obviously lying about it to appear more credible, - starting a project with (1 or more) seniors to get the project and trust and then switching those for the random people dragged in from the street (the worst juniors you can imagine), - blackmailing withholding parts of deliverables, - working (with different accounts on different sites) on 10+ projects at a time, - disappearing without any recourse (yes this can happen in 'real life', but it's extremely rare; on oDesk it's not) - making up the most insane lies why they are late/more expensive; most common and very morbid; cancer of close family or themselves, but so badly researched that after 3 questions you already know it's not true and other types of scamming. Most of these things are preventable if you are really really paranoid and are on top of the 'workers' 24/7, checking everything they deliver with a fine comb, however, that's not really what I would want to do. And for all cases reported to oDesk they just said they couldn't do anything as the screenshot tool was used and the workers 'worked' according to that. There was an IDE open and code was typed in; random copy/paste code from the web, but that was not the point. I have very good experiences with both as well and a lot of successful projects, but yeah; this stuff delivered a lot of pain and energy and we seem completely unprotected as buyer. What we do these days is actually building a team at the outsourcing location, sitting there in the office, training etc; it takes more upfront effort and cost, but it's much more effective. So much more that I would never use these sites again. And we build value instead of work with and train people who will leave in a blink of an eye for a better paying client.
  - bluekite2000 13y ago
    where are you buiding your remote team? I m in saigon (ho chi minh) vietnam this month for that same reason.
    - tluyben2 13y ago
      i built sucessful teams in the Netherlands, Ukraine, Poland, India, Spain and Portugal. I built a team in Vietnam two years ago together with another company, but i'm sorry to say we were badly scammed there with the most common scam; as soon as you are happy and the machine is well oiled, juniors replace the seniors for the work except in Skype calls where the guys you recruited and know still show up to play the part. We should've stayed on location maybe but I find it very uncomfortable to work with that level of distrust. Hope you fare better! I met great coders there. Almost all played along with the charade; one of them contacted my recently telling he was sorry and explaining that it is common practice because they make more money that way and clients usually don't notice. Had this over the years in all Asians countries we worked with, however except this one it never happened after actually being on location.
aytekin 13y ago
It is like Google merging with AltaVista and AltaVista CEO becoming the new CEO. We depend heavily on oDesk for our support team so this is a very scary news.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- adamzski 13y ago
  I completely agree, it seems like oDesk are throwing their business away.
sixspeed 13y ago
Would you mind elaborating on your experiences with elance? I had a family member who does freelance marketing/writing called me a few years ago and mentioned he was planning to sign up there and asking what I knew about it. I could only tell him about a comment I'd browsed on HN that referred to it as a "ghetto" of poor paying assignments. He went ahead with it and now seems to be doing quite well as one of the top 5 providers of marketing and writing services.
- lingben 13y ago
  My experience is with hiring technical freelancers: design, network, security, development, etc. It is entirely possible that elance is great for non-technical jobs. The issues I ran into were providers who have great ratings but who can't do the job! Later I found out that elance has a loophole where buyers who disputed or cancelled projects are not able to leave feedback. So you're not getting the full story when you look at a provider's history. elance doesn't really care about this. So you have a huge portion of freelancers on elance who cosmetically pump up their ratings to get more jobs and then either farm them out to others or do a shoddy job themselves. when/if the job goes into dispute or is cancelled it disappears from their history. if the client is dumb enough to be happy with the crap work, they get a nice rating in exchange for turning over the final code.
  - maratd 13y ago
    > Later I found out that elance has a loophole where buyers who disputed or cancelled projects are not able to leave feedback. That is not correct. You can dispute a project and as long as the freelancer received a single dollar for any work, you can leave feedback. Why should you be allowed to leave feedback if there hasn't been any payment made? There are just as many clowns on the client side, as there are on the freelancer side. Many projects never get off the ground because the client has no money or is just an idiot. People like that should be allowed to leave feedback? If you're having trouble finding quality help on Elance, try creating a private project and invite only those in your geographic region. So if you're in the US, that means US freelancers. In the end, you get what you pay for. Don't expect miracles from India.
benhebert 13y ago
I too hate elance and have been using oDesk for years. The experience at oDesk was just phenomenally better than elance. You're right about ripe for disruption too. I wonder who will move into the space.
- goostavos 13y ago
  Out of curiosity, are you using oDesk to hire contractors, or are you freelancing on oDesk? I ask because I recently started freelancing on the sight an it feels like fighting for scraps. I mean, half the posts I see have "Contact goes to the lowest bidder" at the top of the listing. Does it get better once you "establish" yourself on the site? Right now it feels pretty futile outside of making some pocket change.
  - wonderyak 13y ago
    I used oDesk exclusively for hiring developers for a number of years, here is my 2 cents: > it feels like fighting for scraps You are fighting for scraps. Generally speaking, until you've been really burnt by a contractor you feel great hiring people in India to work for pennies compared to what you're reselling the service for. IMO, this is the vast majority of people hiring on oDesk. In addition, there are SMB or Agency type businesses that are looking to form relationships; they don't want to have to constantly search for new developers. Often, they will find a group or business with a stable of developers even if the quality of the work is a little bit poorer. Many of the firms I worked with just had a project manager that communicated with the developers on their end (often because they did not speak english) and maintained a single point of contact for us. Those were our best experiences. > Does it get better once you "establish" yourself on the site? It should. By the end of the time I was using oDesk I had several filters set up when searching so if someone had not completed a test or rating they would never appear on my radar.
- mike_herrera 13y ago
  I'd love to drink their milkshake. My friend and I are mid-redesign on a new service marketplace called reBaked. Our innovation is collaboration with many freelancers and paying them proportionally to what they actually deliver. There's also a negotiated minimum payment for freelancers so it's not overly risky for them. ...it's not quite ready for a Show HN, but the gist can be seen at (https://rbkd-staging.heroku.com https://rbkd-staging.heroku.com). I'd love to get your first reaction.
dubcanada 13y ago
As long as it's not Freelancer I'm fine.
weland 13y ago
> There's a huge wave of consolidation in the industry in the past 5 years. Just last year freelancer bought vworker. I really hope oDesk - Elance won't go the same way freelancer - vworker went. I used to have an account of RentACode, a long time ago. It was mostly a good experience, considering the state of freelancing back then. When my significant otter got fired, I dug the account and handed it over to her -- it had a bunch of good reviews and some of them were for tech writing jobs, so I though it would be useful to her (she's not a programmer, she does marketing). RAC had, in the meantime, become freelancer.com. The first thing it did was chew through the money I still had in my account -- two or three hundred dollars the withdrawal of which I had procrastinated for a long time, keeping them there in case I'd suddenly decide to take new jobs on RAC (then vWorker) again. I didn't get anything other than automated answers from their tech support, and eventually settled for that being dead money. Now freelancer.com is a scammer's heaven. It doesn't have escrows by default, the rounding of of fees is done quite liberally, there seems to be no mechanism to stop automatic bidding (with ridiculous sums that do nothing but bring the average bid price down, since it's obvious that whatever is behind those posts is never awarded a project), and their support for disputes is unhelpful at best. My gf is actually still unemployed and still gets projects on Freelancer every once in a while, but after being scammed twice -- with copious help through lack of reaction by Freelancer -- both her and her clients generally eschew its payment system altogether. She usually insists on a 100% milestone on Freelancer.com the first time she works with them, and then it's PayPal all the way. The eschewing of the payment system seems to be quite generalized, because their lack of reaction and real buyer and seller protection basically means people end up paying fees for something that is then little more than a glorified job advertising website, since it otherwise fails to offer anything for the (hefty) fees they take. Freelancer.com is a pretty sore sight nowadays. I browse its range of contract offers every once in a while; there's generally nothing for me (I do systems programming and embedded stuff -- people don't usually hire freelancers to write operating systems or make gadgets, unsurprisingly), but most of the projects and most of the bids depress me. Ads along the lines of "looking for an app expert", looking for reasonably non-trivial applications that work on a gazillion of platforms, awarded to poor people for sums that seem small even to me.
- adamzski 13y ago

by lingben 13y ago

tannerc 13y ago

I couldn't agree more. My experiences with oDesk have been overall phenomenal, while Elance has consistently been a pain. I wonder what's fully fueling the merger, as oDesk seems to be doing pretty well as of late on its own.

loceng 13y ago
I imagine oDesk is fine as long as you don't have any problems. They don't see blackmail as breaking their rules though, e.g. a contractor blackmailing you for a good rating. That contractor gets to stay on the platform. I have had this experience.
- lingben 13y ago
  out of curiosity, how exactly does the blackmailing on oDesk work?
  - alecsmart1 13y ago
    Something as simple as the contractor wont provide you with the full code until you leave a 5 star rating.
    - loceng 13y ago
      Or just the final code or maybe have access to your servers or other assets - and without a full security check / wipe, you can't know if they created a way in - or they threaten to release your code publicly, or sell it, etc..
      - bigiain 13y ago
        Wait - what? People actually accept executable, possibly backdoored code and/or assets from random-internet-site-freelancers – then install it on their production sites _without_ security auditing it? (I know - I _shouldn't_ be surprised, I suspect significant double-digit percentages of WordPress sites have themes installed which have some mysterious " <?php echo eval(base_64_decode('foobazbah')) ?> type thing in footer.php…)
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
        andyjdavis 13y ago
        Most people I know who have used odesk/elance simply don't have the ability to perform an audit. They are mostly writers, photographers, non-technical entrepreneurs and so on who have outsourced some development tasks related to their online activities. They personally have no ability to assess the code apart from how it looks in the front end. They could hire a second person to do the audit for them but now they have two people to worry about getting screwed by...
    - fayyazkl 13y ago
      Just to balance the concept, usually people who have maintained good ratings for a long time, don't do this. I have worked for like 5-6 years at odesk part time, done around 40 jobs of varied sizes (hourly as well as fixed prices), never even once held back code or any thing, and barely once received some what negative feedback in which case i believe it was still my fault. So all sorts of people exist and work online. Those who have build reputations over years value it far more than the money, and an employer can easily trash the reputation with feedback. That being said employers from the western world are generally nice or may be it was just my experience :)
  - sampk 13y ago
    Not directly related but shit like this really scares me away from these sites and make me lose some faith in humanity (look at the client's history): https://www.odesk.com/o/jobs/job/Artist-Needed-for-Home-Page_~019bff28f83b38633d/ https://www.odesk.com/o/jobs/job/Artist-Needed-for-Home-Page... He's basically selling ratings. 147 jobs — which would usually cost you at least $200+ each — done for $829 total!
    - corin_ 13y ago
      Surely that guy isn't selling ratings, as he's the client so he's the guy paying the low fees - presumably to get work (just cheap work), otherwise why would he spend $829 just to give contractors ratings. (Unless there's more going on than meets the eye, for example behind the scenes he's selling the chance to get a positive rating for more than he pays on the site.)
      - loceng 13y ago
        Or the company via a different means is paying this "person" more money than he is spending, to make it look legitimate -- the only loss then is the fee (%) that Elance / oDesk takes, which further incentivizes Elance / oDesk to allow this behaviour, though that is minor in comparison to having a lot of "high quality" / highly rated contractors on their platform.
    - loceng 13y ago
      Yeah. Elance / oDesk aren't incentivized to prevent this behaviour. They want a site that looks busy, and full of "high-quality" / highly rated contractors. They could easily allow for filters to weed, though instead they allow for details to be hidden.
      - carlosrt 13y ago
        Having the ability to see everybody that scored in the top 5% for [specific skill] would be nice. Maybe an email to garyeswart@odesk.com is in order.
tluyben2 13y ago
I've had issues with both, but most with oDesk. Companies / people - saying they are from the US or EU but actually being from India, obviously lying about it to appear more credible, - starting a project with (1 or more) seniors to get the project and trust and then switching those for the random people dragged in from the street (the worst juniors you can imagine), - blackmailing withholding parts of deliverables, - working (with different accounts on different sites) on 10+ projects at a time, - disappearing without any recourse (yes this can happen in 'real life', but it's extremely rare; on oDesk it's not) - making up the most insane lies why they are late/more expensive; most common and very morbid; cancer of close family or themselves, but so badly researched that after 3 questions you already know it's not true and other types of scamming. Most of these things are preventable if you are really really paranoid and are on top of the 'workers' 24/7, checking everything they deliver with a fine comb, however, that's not really what I would want to do. And for all cases reported to oDesk they just said they couldn't do anything as the screenshot tool was used and the workers 'worked' according to that. There was an IDE open and code was typed in; random copy/paste code from the web, but that was not the point. I have very good experiences with both as well and a lot of successful projects, but yeah; this stuff delivered a lot of pain and energy and we seem completely unprotected as buyer. What we do these days is actually building a team at the outsourcing location, sitting there in the office, training etc; it takes more upfront effort and cost, but it's much more effective. So much more that I would never use these sites again. And we build value instead of work with and train people who will leave in a blink of an eye for a better paying client.
- bluekite2000 13y ago
  where are you buiding your remote team? I m in saigon (ho chi minh) vietnam this month for that same reason.
  - tluyben2 13y ago
    i built sucessful teams in the Netherlands, Ukraine, Poland, India, Spain and Portugal. I built a team in Vietnam two years ago together with another company, but i'm sorry to say we were badly scammed there with the most common scam; as soon as you are happy and the machine is well oiled, juniors replace the seniors for the work except in Skype calls where the guys you recruited and know still show up to play the part. We should've stayed on location maybe but I find it very uncomfortable to work with that level of distrust. Hope you fare better! I met great coders there. Almost all played along with the charade; one of them contacted my recently telling he was sorry and explaining that it is common practice because they make more money that way and clients usually don't notice. Had this over the years in all Asians countries we worked with, however except this one it never happened after actually being on location.

aytekin 13y ago

It is like Google merging with AltaVista and AltaVista CEO becoming the new CEO. We depend heavily on oDesk for our support team so this is a very scary news.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
adamzski 13y ago
I completely agree, it seems like oDesk are throwing their business away.

sixspeed 13y ago

Would you mind elaborating on your experiences with elance? I had a family member who does freelance marketing/writing called me a few years ago and mentioned he was planning to sign up there and asking what I knew about it. I could only tell him about a comment I'd browsed on HN that referred to it as a "ghetto" of poor paying assignments. He went ahead with it and now seems to be doing quite well as one of the top 5 providers of marketing and writing services.

lingben 13y ago
My experience is with hiring technical freelancers: design, network, security, development, etc. It is entirely possible that elance is great for non-technical jobs. The issues I ran into were providers who have great ratings but who can't do the job! Later I found out that elance has a loophole where buyers who disputed or cancelled projects are not able to leave feedback. So you're not getting the full story when you look at a provider's history. elance doesn't really care about this. So you have a huge portion of freelancers on elance who cosmetically pump up their ratings to get more jobs and then either farm them out to others or do a shoddy job themselves. when/if the job goes into dispute or is cancelled it disappears from their history. if the client is dumb enough to be happy with the crap work, they get a nice rating in exchange for turning over the final code.
- maratd 13y ago
  > Later I found out that elance has a loophole where buyers who disputed or cancelled projects are not able to leave feedback. That is not correct. You can dispute a project and as long as the freelancer received a single dollar for any work, you can leave feedback. Why should you be allowed to leave feedback if there hasn't been any payment made? There are just as many clowns on the client side, as there are on the freelancer side. Many projects never get off the ground because the client has no money or is just an idiot. People like that should be allowed to leave feedback? If you're having trouble finding quality help on Elance, try creating a private project and invite only those in your geographic region. So if you're in the US, that means US freelancers. In the end, you get what you pay for. Don't expect miracles from India.

benhebert 13y ago

I too hate elance and have been using oDesk for years. The experience at oDesk was just phenomenally better than elance. You're right about ripe for disruption too. I wonder who will move into the space.

goostavos 13y ago
Out of curiosity, are you using oDesk to hire contractors, or are you freelancing on oDesk? I ask because I recently started freelancing on the sight an it feels like fighting for scraps. I mean, half the posts I see have "Contact goes to the lowest bidder" at the top of the listing. Does it get better once you "establish" yourself on the site? Right now it feels pretty futile outside of making some pocket change.
- wonderyak 13y ago
  I used oDesk exclusively for hiring developers for a number of years, here is my 2 cents: > it feels like fighting for scraps You are fighting for scraps. Generally speaking, until you've been really burnt by a contractor you feel great hiring people in India to work for pennies compared to what you're reselling the service for. IMO, this is the vast majority of people hiring on oDesk. In addition, there are SMB or Agency type businesses that are looking to form relationships; they don't want to have to constantly search for new developers. Often, they will find a group or business with a stable of developers even if the quality of the work is a little bit poorer. Many of the firms I worked with just had a project manager that communicated with the developers on their end (often because they did not speak english) and maintained a single point of contact for us. Those were our best experiences. > Does it get better once you "establish" yourself on the site? It should. By the end of the time I was using oDesk I had several filters set up when searching so if someone had not completed a test or rating they would never appear on my radar.
mike_herrera 13y ago
I'd love to drink their milkshake. My friend and I are mid-redesign on a new service marketplace called reBaked. Our innovation is collaboration with many freelancers and paying them proportionally to what they actually deliver. There's also a negotiated minimum payment for freelancers so it's not overly risky for them. ...it's not quite ready for a Show HN, but the gist can be seen at (https://rbkd-staging.heroku.com https://rbkd-staging.heroku.com). I'd love to get your first reaction.

dubcanada 13y ago

As long as it's not Freelancer I'm fine.

weland 13y ago

> There's a huge wave of consolidation in the industry in the past 5 years. Just last year freelancer bought vworker. I really hope oDesk - Elance won't go the same way freelancer - vworker went. I used to have an account of RentACode, a long time ago. It was mostly a good experience, considering the state of freelancing back then. When my significant otter got fired, I dug the account and handed it over to her -- it had a bunch of good reviews and some of them were for tech writing jobs, so I though it would be useful to her (she's not a programmer, she does marketing). RAC had, in the meantime, become freelancer.com. The first thing it did was chew through the money I still had in my account -- two or three hundred dollars the withdrawal of which I had procrastinated for a long time, keeping them there in case I'd suddenly decide to take new jobs on RAC (then vWorker) again. I didn't get anything other than automated answers from their tech support, and eventually settled for that being dead money. Now freelancer.com is a scammer's heaven. It doesn't have escrows by default, the rounding of of fees is done quite liberally, there seems to be no mechanism to stop automatic bidding (with ridiculous sums that do nothing but bring the average bid price down, since it's obvious that whatever is behind those posts is never awarded a project), and their support for disputes is unhelpful at best. My gf is actually still unemployed and still gets projects on Freelancer every once in a while, but after being scammed twice -- with copious help through lack of reaction by Freelancer -- both her and her clients generally eschew its payment system altogether. She usually insists on a 100% milestone on Freelancer.com the first time she works with them, and then it's PayPal all the way. The eschewing of the payment system seems to be quite generalized, because their lack of reaction and real buyer and seller protection basically means people end up paying fees for something that is then little more than a glorified job advertising website, since it otherwise fails to offer anything for the (hefty) fees they take. Freelancer.com is a pretty sore sight nowadays. I browse its range of contract offers every once in a while; there's generally nothing for me (I do systems programming and embedded stuff -- people don't usually hire freelancers to write operating systems or make gadgets, unsurprisingly), but most of the projects and most of the bids depress me. Ads along the lines of "looking for an app expert", looking for reasonably non-trivial applications that work on a gazillion of platforms, awarded to poor people for sums that seem small even to me.

adamzski 13y ago