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Freelance dev market

21 points by anovikov ↗ HN
Hi everyone,

I've been working for 5 years on oDesk.com. So far i am doing very well, but looks like i hit the limit: there is extremely little work (coding: Java, Actionscript, JS) priced over $35/h gross there, and while i am easily pitching customers on this kind of rates, i was unable to get anything more than that yet.

But: overwhelming part of the projects i do are total nonsense. Like, i did 4 very different clones of the infamous chatroulette, last 2 years after the original one (while even the original one failed to take off), i did stupid looking Flash games for which there are zillions clones around, etc. Only 'real' work i can remember doing in 5 years was some rather complex scrapers for a guy who is in sports betting business (sure they are making him a ton of money and were fun to implement as well), and some distributed network analysis software for a well-funded Valley startup. The rest was an obvious trash which was sure to get nowhere even before i started.

So i am thinking: if 80% of the customers are so dumb, and they pay $30-$35 per hour, they must be the poorest kind of clients to work for, so there must be a marketplace where i can get at least $50-$60 rates, just because i will be doing something with higher chances to bring profit to my customers, not so obvious trash? If so, how do i approach them, given i'm offshore (EU)? Or smart customers just avoid these sites and look for developers offline (which may sound like a good idea, i've seen the kind of pre-cooked spam 'cover letters' that are posted in dozens for every offer on oDesk and if i was a customer, i'd hate to get through them)?

So the question is, if freelance sites are a bottom of market (both in quality of developers and of customers, and therefore rates), then where is the middle tier and the top?

11 comments

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PythonDeveloper
eLance.com. It's not that it's any better than oDesk or any of the others, but the FEEL of the process, environment and information layout gives employers more confidence in the developers. IMHO, the vast majority of freelance contracts are still given based on relationship and past experience with the developers, and NOT classified ad sites like rentacoder, elance, etc.

Most developers simply return to the site for the next job instead of working the employer for more contracts, probably because they feel that this is sales and introverts hate to do sales.

jamesjguthrie
I tried one of those sites - vWorker - and had a terrible time with my first and only client. Ended up closing my account.

I now just have my website and Gumtree advert and that's bringing me in work.

[dead] vintagius
Could I have your email mate?
nordicnomad82
Have your own website with a blog about what you're working on, and a portfolio of what you've done in the past. And then ask people you've worked for in the past to keep you in mind when people they know ask them for a recommendation. Plus, doing cool stuff on the side even if no one is paying you will always get people's attention.

You can still be doing the freelance classified stuff when you have nothing else, but to get the better jobs and opportunities you have to create a brand out of yourself and make it possible for people to find you. But if you're good and do those things, believe me that they will find you.

The people I know who buy work through O-Desk are Noobs who personally don't know any devs (or all the devs they know told them to go jump in a lake) or are other freelancers who find the contracts themselves at $100-200 an hour and then farm them out to folks who are willing to work for $20-50 an hour.

lsc
first? put your email and a bit about the work you are looking for in your hn profile.

But yeah, as far as I can tell, elance, odesk, etc... are not how most higher-paid gigs are done. The perception is that you are 'paying peanuts and getting monkeys'

The few times I've worked through those sites (this was many years ago) I'd get one gig through the site, then the customer would contact me directly for more work. I mean, if you are just one guy, it doesn't take many ongoing customers to keep you busy.

I'd rate it slightly below craigslist.org/cpg, which isn't a great way to make a living, but you eat.

I have observed a few deals done through such sites where my client hired someone to setup something; it seemed to me that most of those deals, essentially, ended up with the remote worker quickly stamping out, say, an oscommerce install with minimal modifications, then charging a flat fee. That's another way to go at it, I guess. I think the guy I talked to that was doing this for my client was probably making pretty good money.

Rodeoclash
We're building something like this but for local markets.

http://www.dragonflylist.com

At the moment we're only in Australia however. We've found that many businesses have not had a lot of success with using offshore freelancing and are moving back to local freelance markets.

CanadaKaz
I've been using ODesk for about a month to outsource some fairly basic HTML and SQL work. I have found that most (not all) of the developers fall into three categories. 1. There are agencies, usually in Eastern Europe for some reason, that seem to get the work done professionally but are not really much cheaper than just hiring someone into a company. 2. There are the run of the India/Bangladesh contractors, who I swear would be worth every penny if there could be an easy way to overcome the communication challenges (I've had to throw out lots of code and $). 3. The elusive great coders.

I have to admit I have not been able to find the third kind yet, but I read lots of comments on boards from people who swear they exist. I am getting to a point that I am considering hiring someone part time just to manage the second kind of coders. I figure if I can have a part time person who can adequate reduce the batch size then maybe communication challenges won't matter as much.

All of this to say: as a person paying ODesk coders, I think the problem you are pointing to is a two-way street. I would be willing to pay 100% premium over what I am paying if there was something like hiretheworld.com. I could post the wireframe of what I want, put a price on what I'm willing to pay for it. Have people build it and then pay for the code I choose to use. I know this is impractical for lots of reasons, but I don't see why with an adequately small batch it could not be done.

I know this is not helpful, but what I am saying I guess is if you build something like hiretheworld version of ODesk, you have at least one client.

usladha
Hi,

I am on the other side of the ODesk. I am a fairly good coder with 7+ years of experience under my belt. I have worked mostly on enterprise side of coding. So I dont have much to show to the clients.

Hence clients dont give me projects. In my regular day to day job, I communicate with the folks on the other side of the planet.

I am not able to resolve this problem and hence stopped visiting odesk.

lix2333
As others have said, you should put your email in your profile. I have something you might be interested in, but I have no way of contacting you.
nfriedly
Back when I was freelancing, I found a few clients through elance.com paying $50/hr. When I quit freelancing to join a startup, I raised my posted rate to $120/hr - but I still get about one invitation per week to submit a proposal.

The other thing I did was ask clients for a footer back to my personal website, sometimes ofering a small discount in exchange. It's been a couple of years and I'm still on the first page of google for a number of the things I worked on.