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Ask HN: Elance or Odesk?

12 points by kiraken ↗ HN
I'm a freelance web developer, and i have a decent profile in freelancer, but the website is infested with bot bids and cheap employers, plus indians have completely taken over the website. So i'm thinking of changing to oDesk or Elance. Which is better?

11 comments

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kumkum
oDesk/Elance is no different than freelancer. oDesk was bit better before its merger with Elance. Now it seems like because of over dependence on algorithms to weed out the bad, the ecosystem is getting worse.
icpmacdo
An additional question I have, related to these services is, on average how long does it take for clients your doing work for to pay you?
altern8
How about peopleperhour.com? I've been using it and it's not bad.

There's a screening process to start selling on the site, and there are a more people from England rather than India.

justfalcon
I've been having nightmares using oDesk as of late. Almost every job I post is 95% bots and when I try to bid on jobs it's difficult to cut through the noise when developers are working for $5-10/hr.

My biggest issue with oDesk though is the language barriers (on both client/freelancer sides). I really wish there would be more accountability for this...

davismwfl
Neither honestly. All of these sites are a race to the bottom from what I have seen.

There have been a lot of questions like this on HN, a semi-recent one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9030790

There was good advice given in that thread as to the ways to get work without using these sites too.

yetanotheracc
Based on my experience, the quality of workers on Elance is so bad that it is easy to be the top or the only worthwhile applicant for most jobs. Which makes it easy to win the good clients when they come to Elance and they do come occasionally.
brandonlipman
They both are equally difficult to get work on with many of the same issues as you stated on Freelancer. Strictly looking at interface I really like oDesk. There's a thread on Hacker News where you can post out what you can do/see what others are looking for. I would suggest that.
phazmatis
oDesk has mainly repeat clients who don't get frustrated by the 20+ bots/agencies/morons for every 1 real applicant.
gyre007
Both of these are total jooke from my experience. I've yet to see a proper freelance site for professionals.
JoeAltmaier
I was going to answer, then the explicit racism in the question choked me.