Ask HN: Are freelancer sites (e.g. Odesk, Elance) useless?
So I submitted a few gigs to freelance sites like Odesk, freelancer.com, elance etc. I used the handy guide provided by Derek Sivers on how to write up a good "help wanted" ad.
I was looking for a skilled designer to produce a simple UI.
After about 2 minutes, I received around 8 applications on odesk and freelancer.com. By the end of the day, I had around 40 applications in total.
Problem is: almost all of them sucked. Very disappointing indeed.
Has anyone out there actually found a good designer / developer on one of these freelance sites? Care to share tips?
72 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadIf you decide to go the 99design way (easier maybe) read this: http://blog.trisse.com/2011/05/09/how-to-make-the-most-of-yo...
I think you're right with dribbble. I've also been looking into Behance.net and Creattica. Have you had good experiences with directly approaching designers?
You'll probably gather more out of their code than screenshots of what they've been a part of.
I've got encouraging comments from my customers, but dont think I am that good. (Probably/Hopefully Dunning-Kruger effect in play).
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
As an extra note: The Impostor syndrome is not an officially recognized psychological disorder[3]. I've seen the Impostor syndrome mentioned many times but had never taken time to read the complete wikipedia page.
[1]http://people.psych.cornell.edu/~dunning/publications/pdf/un... [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect [3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
also, the quality of most of the job requests is pretty low as well.
Yes and no; I would get a job, and usually lots more work would come as a direct result of that. Out of interest, once or twice a month, I'd take a look back on the site to see if there was anything interesting I'd like to work on, and if so, I would.
Wait a few days. If you've written a good project description (and if you're a bit lucky), you'll start to see a few qualified proposals trickle in.
This is the main problem with freelancing sites. The race to the bottom finished years ago, and the result is that there are simply no good developers or designers left there. It's actually an opportunity waiting for talented newcomers, since a single person showing up and acting professionally would get the job described by this poster (and everybody else who goes there seriously looking to build something).
I took the time to write up my experiences with these freelance sites a few years back:
http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/09/how-to-fail-at...
I'll wait it out a bit longer before calling it quits on these sites.
Additionally have them restate in their own words what they feel that you want from them. It is amazing how much miscommunications happens at that initial stage.
A lot of people expect a work of someone at 100$/hr but only want to pay 10-20$/hr.
- Price is a pretty good differentiating factor.
- Communication is another. If he can speak/communicate well then you can still work with him even if he's not a "rockstar"
- Portfolio of work. is he able to deliver a product by himself?
- Get references of past clients. Infact as a freelancer myself, they're my biggest selling point. I simply hand out references of 3-4 clients i've worked with.
- And to be honest, things like "I am real", actually put me and probably other professionals off from your post. You have to treat us like professionals, and not like cheap throw-away labour!
- Be as descriptive as possible, add mockups, add anything that might help a person to judge the effort/skillset needed for that job. Otherwise it indicates, you didn't do much homework and want us to fill in all the blanks. To outsource anything, you actually have to put in more time initially than the actual dev!
I suspect the poster's goal was to easily identify those responders who didn't even bother to read the posting (or those posters who were machines!). Is there a less offensive way he could have obtained this information?
Posting "I am real" looks more like a test for "i'm smarter than a 5th grader"? But other freelancers might differ on this.
Sorry, but this is stupid. I think a developer should write a dedicated message. That is, you should figure it out from the message you get, you don't need such things. I actually ignore buyers that put such rules.
This implies to me that they will be all the more appreciative when you turn out to actually be real! A client that appreciates you from the get go, well that has to be a good thing, no?
I prefer to ask them to demonstrate their knowledge or skills in some way. Either:
a) researching something very minor that will only take 5-10 minutes
b) including samples of something very specific they did that is relevant to the task you posted
And then if they don't include what you requested, you can delete them because they obviously didn't read it.
I was the only person to post for the job that put some clear and serious thought into it, and I got it. Delivered the plugin with a 18 working examples under different conditions too. Probably ate up two hours of my life, but it's really my first step into the world of freelance so I considered it quite good. Now the downside to all this is the extortionist bastards at freelancer.com double-dipping, so the $150 ended up giving me about $135 (10% fee), and took another 5 from the guy who posted it. Of course, I could pay $35 every month for the privileged of only being charged 3%, which means I'd have to earn more than $5k/year specifically through their website to just break even on that "deal." Which isn't too optimistic when you look at the average pay rate for freelancers on there.
The second job I bid on was given directly to the lowest bidder, regardless of the fact I put some serious thought into my response.
The third job, the guy posting the bid didn't even know what he was asking for. He made a posting for javascript but he had deeper issues where his server-side was sending the page content twice in the same request. He didn't want to accept "no, I don't want to do this for $50, because you asked someone to fix an error in JS" (something that would only take like 15 minutes if you toss the thing through jslint).
So that's really my experience, in summary:
- Be careful of fees and take them into account.
- Just because you are fluent in English and put thought into your answers doesn't mean they understand the value
- Some people don't know what they really need.
Apply a bit of filtering. One trick I use is asking a simple domain-knowledge type question in the posting. Ignore everyone who doesn't read it properly or doesn't bother answering. That will instantly cut a lot of the crud out.
I initially went to the sites listed above, but eh...every job had hundreds of bids offering absurd rates (no, you are not going to build a Facebook clone for $200 dollars in 10 days).
Anyone have any tips on how to find clients who understand the market and are willing to pay for quality work?
* Don't try and compete on price. A lot of freelancers on the site can go lower, and you'll end up broke. Besides, if a client is more interested in saving a few dollars than paying for a decent worker, you're saving yourself a lot of future pain.
* When you apply for something, say what you'll do and give a rough idea of how you'll solve their problem. It only has to be a few paragraphs, but you'll have put more thought in than 99% of other applicants.
* Look for jobs that mention an ongoing relationship. This usually means they have a lot more work and want to try things out.
All of my work now comes from referrals which in some way originate from the first job I did on oDesk. It was discouraging when I was rejected for jobs despite putting in the effort, but the work paid off in the end. Best of luck!
Agreed, it's a game that you're not going to win. I found that even if a client said "No way, that's my limit," they'd often come back a day later asking me to work for the original amount of money I'd quoted.
I recently blogged about how I got started freelancing here:
http://tbbuck.com/winning-your-first-freelance-job-on-vworke...
One thing I would recommend is looking for potential clients that need help with blogs, especially in a non-technical field. If they're at the point where they're paying for help, they probably have a good network of friends they can refer you to if you do a good job.
2. Haven't touched oDesk since my first job there. I might use it again in the future, but to be honest I found searching for work there rather depressing with all the low rates.
We've been using Odesk for about 5 years now for overflow and large projects. From the buyer side of things, communication is key. If you can communicate well and promptly it will go a long way towards instilling confidence in the buyer.
For buyers just going to Odesk for the first time, expect to be bitten in the ass a few times. All of the knowledge in the world isn't going to save you from having a developer half a world away bail on you for no reason.
Look for freelancers that are a part of a group, as a whole they are more responsible than single freelancers.
One option is to invite coders to bid on your project by looking at their past experiences and find some that may relate to the type of project you have.
Other than that, and I know I've said this before, the best coders on free lance sites are those that ask questions relevant to your project description.
While you can safely discard all those that submit generic bids with links to their portfolios without any type of comment about the project they are bidding on, those that ask questions are the ones you want to work with.
Maybe I'll have to give freelancing another thought!
Here are a few of my tips:
1. As jasonkester said, wait at least a week before you start looking at proposals and making your decision. You get a lot of crap in the first few days, and you want to give the "good" people enough time to find and read it.
2. Be really clear and specific with your RFP. Go in into as much detail as possible, and look for responses that indicate that they have read it. Also, make sure you use a descriptive headline. You're competing with quite a few people, so you want your project to stand out.
3. Ask a few specific questions in your description. This is not only a great way to start to grasp their domain knowledge, but you also can filter out people who haven't read it (similar to #2).
4. When you have narrowed down your selection to 3 or 4, send them an even more detailed description of your project and arrange a Skype call. It's easy to be deceptive via email, but if you have someone on the phone you can quickly gauge how competent they are on the fly. Treat it like a real phone interview for a job you've had in the past, except you are the interviewer.
Good luck!
My trick, if it is one, is to put a human face on my postings. I share a little about who I am, a young entrepreneur trying to do something cool.
This usually helps get 1 or 2 posts that are by someone whose a good match and it usually goes well from there.
Now I occasionally outsource some of our work through these websites. Following are the tips that usually work for me:
- Freelance Outsourcing works best for smaller projects with a clear scope. Examples: web design, PSD to XHTML, WordPress / CMS themes etc. It works best in this use case because a lot of people have such requirements. Freelancers are well versed with it, and they have usually worked on at least one similar project.
- Find the designers / developers who have worked on a project similar like yours. There are freelancers who are expert at a particular stack / technology / framework. Example: Wordpress, Django, Code Igniter, iOS experts. They don't apply at every listing unlike most freelancers. Once you shortlist them, invite them to apply for your listing and review their past work.
Agreed. This is exactly the kind of outsourcing my website focuses on.
You have on one end of the spectrum "project outsourcing" (odesk, elance, ...) and on the other end "microtask outsourcing" (fiverr), and in between there is http://taskarmy.com that focuses on skilled tasks.
I am looking for more quality developers on it, especially PHP. Please submit your service if you are interested.
Thanks!
When I had started using various sites of this type, my intention was to take projects at below my normal rate to fill in "dead time" -- I'd decided I could settle for $25 an hour. This number proved virtually impossible to meet except for the rare client who needed something immediately and was willing to pay $50-$75 to have something fixed.
The end result? I think competent programmers are driven away from these sites because the financial rewards are simply not worth it. I found getting projects at $20/hour a challenge, and $15/hour typical. To put that in perspective I was charging my more typical clients $50/hour at the time.
I'm still looking for somewhere for cheap mechanical labor (basic writing gigs, data entry etc). Anyone have any suggestions?
Disclaimer: my baby.
Main points:
1. Get ready to be flooded by a bunch of low-quality, copy/paste proposals on the freelancer. Ignore them, and focus on finding the diamonds in the dust.
2. The more specific your proposal is, the better informed your designer will be and the more likely you’ll attract a quality designer (who, naturally, want quality clients). Gursimran commented that I was one of the best clients she ever worked with, and she is certainly the best designer I’ve ever worked with, which is sincere praise even with a sample size of 1.
3. English is funny sometimes. Examples you can point to sometimes help a lot more than our limited design vocabulary, especially when you’re an engineer and your design vocabulary contains only the words "pretty" and "not pretty".
4. For God’s sake, look at the portfolio before accepting a bid. You might not get designs as stunning as the portfolio, but you certainly aren’t going to get better, and about 50% of portfolios disqualify designers straightaway.
What did you do when you started to get your first clients?
The first jobs I got were not in IT but in translation and copywriting, where demonstrating my skills was much easier. To get the first job in IT, I had to offer references outside oDesk - which were followed up - to make my profile credible.
Once I had my first jobs, my main focus was on delivering very high quality work - even if it was not always very well paid - so as to build up a very positive feedback history. My main focus at this stage was on creating a good profile, not making money.
Once I had enough history and feedback, new job offers started rolling in, and I stopped looking for work.
Of course there are good indians, but more often than not, you would be wasting your time.