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> 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
by 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 agolol yes a very similar situation for me but from the other side.. I employed people on rentacoder and it was not too bad just had to be very careful but then freelancer LOL it seems like an army of people who are only in the business of scamming, also the actual freelacer company looks really shady themselves! I only posted a few jobs on freelancer many many years ago but that was enough.. I logged in recently to freelancer and they seem to be ripping off 99designs/fiverr/whatever else they can find to copy.. I remember that now with rentacoder, they had a great escrow system. oDesk are good, they dont allow employers or freelancers to get away with much wrong doing, they re all I use now and I hope they do not change
- mattbarrie 13y agoHi Adam I'm the CEO of Freelancer.com. How did the RAC escrow system differ? We don't have "expert guarantees" or reverse escrow, where the freelancer is required to put an escrow in the opposite direction, if that is what you mean? Other than that we have the same functionality. Regards Matt
- mattbarrie 13y agoHi Weland, I'm the CEO of Freelancer.com. I thought I would reply to your comment, and I'm also happy to get someone to look into your account if you get send me your username. A few comments- we do have escrows by default- called Milestone Payments. We don't however force people to use them if the two parties decide to come to an arrangement where they don't want to use them. The vast majority of projects do. Also you have a chance to not accept the project as a freelancer if Milestone payments have not been created after you've been awarded. So I can't see the issue here. Rounding of fees? I have no idea what you are talking about here. We round project commissions to the cent, like everyone else. Automated bidding- we changed our system some time ago to dramatically stop bid spam. I'm not sure how recently you have used the site. We have removed "public" bids entirely. Now you can only leave one private bid, this has got rid of the problem you talk about. I would have to disagree with you for disputes and support. We have the largest support team in the entire industry with 250 people in our own facility that operate 24x7x365 and speak 10 languages. We have a paralegal team doing disputes that I believe is the most sophisticated in the industry as well in terms of how it resolves issues. Our business is going from strength to strength and we are the only company that is publicly listed, so our financials are transparent. Our revenue is growing at almost double the growth rate of our nearest competitors, so I would have also disagree about your comments about the state of the site. Happy to answer any other questions you may have or you can email me directly at matt@freelancer.com. Also if you shoot me your account username I will have someone take a look at it. Regards Matt