After working +1200 hours in oDesk

http://malditointer.net/after-working-1200-hours-in-odesk/

by miquelcamps • 13 years ago

132 91 13 years ago

TallboyOne• 13 years ago

What was your income after that much if I may ask? I always wondered how it compared to just getting word of mouth referrals from freelancing.

purringmeow• 13 years ago

If we multiply his hourly rate by the amount of hours he put, we get around $23,000.

sanswork2• 13 years ago

His profile shows $17.78/hr so probably around $20-25K. Depending on variations in his rate.

lauriswtf• 13 years ago

If you check his work history, you see that he works for a way lower number. The hourly rate in freelancer profiles are very often just for display.

malditojavi10• 13 years ago

My hourly salary has changed a lot since my first contracts. I started around $ 9.00 USD/hour. I plan to extend the post and explain not how I have increased my rates till my current rate, but also how I dealt with employers not willing to pay more.

malditojavi10• 13 years ago

$ 23358.60 USD approx. I have made public my accounting sheet, check it out: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgFzKOfWdj-jdDJ...

dethstar• 13 years ago

The fact that his response rate got higher after he photoshopped a beard on his face needs more explanation, was he applying to get those jobs more than pre-beard? If he was applying about the same that's really interesting, and makes me sad as a beardless guy.

sanswork2• 13 years ago

It doesn't sound like the beard so much as him appearing too young before and the beard making him appear older.

So as long as you don't look like a teenager you shouldn't have problems.

rubberband• 13 years ago

I have to guess the jump is just coincidental, but who knows... Maybe because all us tech folk are basement dwelling, D&D playing, bearded outcasts, it fit some sort of subconscious stereotype. It'd be interesting to try blue hair or thick geek glasses and whatnot.

ronaldx• 13 years ago

I wouldn't put much stock in that.

If the results were 2/17 vs 7/20 that would not be a statistically significant result; in any case, there could be other major factors such as time-of-day and experience-building which are not discussed.

The job applications limit and 2 week period of this trial suggests that the sample sizes were not any bigger than that.

It's likely just a coincidence.

malditojavi10• 13 years ago

Different job applications. I know for a real and accurate a/b test, those job applications should be the same, but it was not like that.

codeddesign3• 13 years ago

8 months worth of work for only $20k? This doesn't sound like a successful experience - more like you were highly over worked and under paid. It probably would have been more beneficial to have marketed your services for 80 hours and be able to land a $20k project as well as a lasting client.

albedo2• 13 years ago

Agreed, and this is basically what we do for devs who want to do contract work -- help find clients that pay well and don't suck. (http://getlambda.com)

shubhamjain3• 13 years ago

There is a difference between contextual self-promotion and irrelevant spamming. What you are doing is the latter. Please limit the advertising, it only hurts the PR with not much to gain.

dinkumthinkum• 13 years ago

I feel like you've made too many comments advertising this site ... Seems like spam ...

codeddesign3• 13 years ago

Yes. As a daily reader of HN, you guys randomly insert your advertising without adding any true value to the discussion.

Is that your normal business practice? To spam but actually add no real value?

waps3• 13 years ago

Yeah, so income on oDesk for hard workers is brutally disappointing.

euro 20k/8 = 2.5k /month 1200/8 = 150 hours /month ~= 40 hours/week

That's actually not that bad for being a programmer in, say, Eastern Europe, but it's rapidly becoming a rather bad wage even there.

shubhamjain3• 13 years ago

I wonder wht people use it and others at all.

* The clients expect insane amount of work at a very cheap rate.

* People in developing countries are always ready to charge a lesser amount.

* The Signal : Noise ratio is low on both sides.

* The commissions taken by site and payment services also offer a blow to the amount earned.

IMO, its tough to imagine a situation where a sane client who expects quality would be willing to shuffle through 100s of bids submitted on each project.

e12e2• 13 years ago

Actually, 150 hours/month is more like 37.5 hours a week (7.5 hours, mon-fri). IMNHO there's actually quite a difference between that and a full 40 hour week. This all assumes no work outside the 1200 hours, obviously.

coldtea• 13 years ago

8 months worth of work for only $20k? This doesn't sound like a successful experience

On the internet, which is kinda global, not everybody is paid US/Western EU salary rates, you know right?

codeddesign3• 13 years ago

Yes, but that drives me crazy! With the internet you aren't held down by your local economic wage and yet there are people like this guy who works like a dog and undercuts everyone with crazy cheap prices which brings down the global value of developers on sites like odesk. While I am sure he is a great developer, my point was that he could have worked less, raised his prices, gained better clients, and overall built a better business model.

mkartic• 13 years ago

USD20k is a very large sum. It works out to just over 1.2million in INR. Now that's a lot. If all it took to make USD20k a year was 40-50hour work week, I wouldn't feel underpaid at all. And I would be living a life of luxury.

bruceb• 13 years ago

Depends where in India you live. Real estate is not cheap in Mumbai.

infra178• 13 years ago

How do you get people to pay you? The couple of times I've worked through oDesk the person disappeared after I delivered.

goler• 13 years ago

If you're working hourly jobs, payment is guaranteed by oDesk. That said, fixed-price jobs usually pay out, too. Make sure to review the client's work history and feedback which is shown at the bottom of every job post. Equally important, make sure you understand your client's expectations before you do the work - a good practice regardless of where you find clients.

Disclosure - I'm a former oDesk employee.

loucal• 13 years ago

I think at least twice in this article you wrote 'contractor' when you meant to say 'client'. A contractor is the worker (you in this case) and the client is the person hiring you.

emp_• 13 years ago

Don't speak spanish but in portuguese it's kinda tricky because 'contratante' means 'hirer', and 'contratado' means 'contractor'.

malditojavi10• 13 years ago

Probably you are right. I was still drafting the final post when I saw it in HN.

ashamedtoadmit• 13 years ago

I'm ashamed to admit this.

I worked for someone on RentACoder back in the day. I got paid to develop software that is now used by over 20 million people. My cut for a week of work? $200.

Never again... (and years later I'm still periodically asked by the owner of the company if I'm interested in new projects for the same pay rate)

csomar4• 13 years ago

I don't see why this is shameful. If anything, you can use your new credentials to charge higher.

Would you reveal the site/project name?

malditojavi10• 13 years ago

I see no reason to be ashamed. If you think your skills are going to provide them a higher income, increase your rates and explain why you are doing it. I have learnt a lot from Brennan Dunn's blog: http://brennandunn.com/ I'm sure it will provide you some good insights.

ChristianMarks2• 13 years ago

Maybe I'll try a fake beard myself. A neckbeard even.

romanovcode• 13 years ago

Don't forget to add a fedora aswell.

ChristianMarks2• 13 years ago

Good point!

europa• 13 years ago

As a developer living in the US my experience with Odesk is that you cannot make a living doing just Odesk. But you can still achieve good pay rate on certain projects if you choose carefully. I used to charge , for example $600+ for a 3 hour job in the weekend. and if you are lucky you may end up building relationship with your client and get other projects outside of Odsek.

If anybody looking to get into Odesk, this is my advice on how to get over the chicken and egg problem(You are trying to build your work history while clients looking for your work history).

Find projects that can be partially or even fully prototyped and send the live link in the bidding. If the project is genuine most clients will bite. If they don't , write off your effort as marketing expense!

Also never bid for a project if you think you cannot get a 5 star rating after the delivery.

You can see my odesk profile below , all my ratings are 5 star. No surprise!

https://www.odesk.com/users/~014c438dbb17ea9c46

cheapsteak• 13 years ago

$123.00 HOURLY RATE

Wow. What is your usual rate outside of oDesk?

coolsunglasses• 13 years ago

That's a pretty common software contracting rate ($90-120).

jptman• 13 years ago

A couple of years ago, I was away from the U.S. for a few months and thought I'd try to get some contracts online. I hadn't heard of oDesk and only knew of some others like rentacoder. I did the exact same thing you suggested, which is send a link to a prototype in my bid. With my awesome luck, I didn't hear back from either of the 2 projects I sent the prototypes for. I ended up finding a software company that was hiring locally.

csomar4• 13 years ago

The hours logged in his graph (per my understanding) do not show the work spent on searching and applying for jobs. And also tweaking your CV. There is a lot of overhead in doing this.

And then you have to log hours for: accounting, banking, and government papers. And then deduct banking and accountants fees. And then deduct your hardware fees (since you are paying for them yourself). No need for an office since you are can do it from home.

So is this really profitable or sustainable on the long term?

I live in a poor third-world country and I consider my break-up rate to be around $60/hour. There can be only one of these scenarios if you work for a lesser rate:

1. You cut on some expenses like an accountant/medication that might result in a disaster later.

2. You over-work yourself and you work on week-ends/no vacation.

3. You live with your parents, so you don't pay (or share) the bills.

x1024• 13 years ago

Wow, $60/hour. Define "poor".

pessimizer2• 13 years ago

Easy: $60/hour, 5 hours a week.

atox3• 13 years ago

Could you share how you got the $60 number?

I recently relocated to a low income country and guestimated my needed hourly rate to be around $20 when doing a 30 hour work week.

Biggest differences that I could think of is that I bought my house mortgage free and that I have a partner that also makes $20 per hour.

GFischer2• 13 years ago

I live in Uruguay (South America) and I agree with you.

A U$ 20 rate would enable me to live decently, but U$ 60/hr would enable me to live extremely well (living in the best neighbourhood, private school for children, etc..)

I currently make U$ 8 an hour (because I work 240 hours a month as a salaried employee) and I find it tough to make ends meet (even though my girlfriend works as well, she makes more than I do but only works 100 hours a month)

csomar4• 13 years ago

I was talking about one worker (partner doesn't work), so I guess your accumulated income is $40/hour. Still a bit far from my estimate.

1. Do you need a car? It's a must here, otherwise your low income country is more developed than the average third-world one.

2. Do you actually do the accounting, marketing... yourself or are you full-time employed. That skew things by a big margin.

3. How is inflation. It's around 20% here. Not all third-worlds suffer from high inflation, but many (most of them?) do.

malditojavi10• 13 years ago

You are right, Abid. No info shared about how much time takes to complete all the 'certification exams' present also in other workforce-on-demand platforms, that I tell, they took some considerable part of your time.

2012, working +1200 hours, was not my working best year. I sacrified a lot of my (free?)time to apply for new jobs, get new contracts, make internal research on how to improve my opportunities of having more employers interested in me. Working stituation sometimes overexceed my capacity to manage it, and I experienced an anxiety attack mainly produced by having almost no disconnection time.

Future is now and working on remote is possible and a great opportunity. Nonetheless, working on remote should not imply to low insanely your rates just for the fact that you are working from other place (and you are not consuming office supplies, office space). It's just question of learning how to deal with a new situation of selling your services to someone that is just contacting you virtually.

And no, imho, it was not sustainable to work like this. At least, not with those rates.

I'm planning to talk about this widely in the newsletter, feel free to join it.

pedrosorio• 13 years ago

Something like this for the graph? http://jsfiddle.net/6sdH6/3/

Highcharts documentation is incomplete. In order to override the tooltip configurations for a given series you need to define the tooltip object inside it.

I also added a different axis for the hours, but this results in a Highcharts bug where a time series point does not show a tooltip when there is a series defined after that one with a higher y value.

malditojavi10• 13 years ago

Thanks Pedro! Sometimes I see Internet is full of people willing to help. Thanks again.

cpg• 13 years ago

odesk is awful and should be put to rest peacefully.

at least for people hiring (i know first hand), and i read in this thread that also people being hired get ripped off.

the team at odesk are basically sitting behind their desks but more so behind their legal agreements, collecting their clean share without doing any work, without applying common sense or due process.

do not use odesk. leave it for good! odesk deserves to die peacefully.

paulhauggis• 13 years ago

I tried oDesk last year. There are so many people that are only willing to pay <$5US/hour for a developer (and I even saw listings like "Non-negociable!!".

After getting through all of this, the clients left over that are even willing to pay a decent wage expect way too much. Developer, designer, and product manager for one fee.

I can't tell you how many potential clients I turned down because of this.

I gave this up and found a decent part-time contracting gig on craigslist.

Odesk should be renamed to: "unrealistic expectations"

crayonVision• 13 years ago

My experience was a few years back. When I was starting, I realised that getting clients with no records and rating in your profile was hard. I set to build up my profile. After filling the descriptive data, one thing that makes profiles to standout, are skill ratings. One can take online tests, and get achievements. I took various tests, and with effort got some good ratings, only to realise that some folks had managed to game the test, and got 99-100% ratings on all the most important tests. The sadness started. I resigned to never achieving competitive ratings with the cheaters. Time to move on to the next thing.

After skill ratings, the other essential thing to stand out, is to have actual work records with ratings. I deviced a plan: Get a few very short gigs, and excel at them, to quickly fill my profile with some good ratings. After reading hundreds of insane projects, including a kid that wanted a simcity clone, to offer as a free download on his website, I found one that looked good.

The guy wanted to connect an HTML form with a mysql db with a simple php script. He had all the software installed. Even had a base php script. I thought "wow so easy! I can make this in one or two hours as the worst possible scenario!! :)". So I contacted the guy. To my incredible surprise, the guy managed to sink me down in incredible ridiculous minutia discussion of what I was going to do. I spent five days and answered around 80 emails, discussing what I was going to do. I should have know better. But I kept telling me, "well, let's answer this, and the guy will just let me do the task."

Finally we agreed on doing the task. I made it in 3 hours, exactly according to the guy instructions. With the curious o desk spyware constantly taking screenshots of my desktop, and gauging my mouse movements and keypresses. After ieach screenshot, it gives you a few seconds of chance to click a button and delete it, before uploading and sending it to the client. I explained to the client, that I was including basic php security measures, as a bonus. Of which the guy had no clue. And his original form had nothing. After having the form working, I cleaned a bit the ugly graphic design, sent the stuff by mail, and went to sleep thinking "well, after all the pain, I think that the guy will be impressed by the quality of the work, and dedication answering all of his concerns." I was happy.

In the morning , I took a coffee, and went to the computer singing a tune. "Well, let's see what the guy thinks". The agreed payment was 40$. I didn't care about it, all I was thinking was on getting a good rating. To my incredible surprise, the guy answered with an angry rant, trowing all kind of threats and accusations, and claiming that I was trying to diddle him. The guy threatened me of giving a zero rating, and continuing the angry rant on my public profile, destroying my internet career forever. Unless we cancelled the deal, and acted as if nothing ever happened. Even told me that I should thank him, for not demanding an indemnization for his lost time. I was totally dumbfounded.

After some thinking, I realized that all the minutious questioning previous to the work, was a deliberated plan , to set a nest of argument traps, to later act as If he was being robbed. I was like "jesuschrist, I can't believe this. All of this tragedy just to avoid paying the pityful $40". I spent like two days lying around wanting to do nothing. Not even think. Every time that I looked at the PC, I felt like I wanted to vomit.

The cherry on the cake, was that a few months later, the guy contacted me again, offering me "a more challenging and involving project". Jesus! I can't believe the kind of people that there is out there. Finally after some time, I recovered. Went back to o desk and managed some success. After some years of working at other places, I can say that there are much better places to be.

mgkimsal2• 13 years ago

We just had a discussion about this at our freelancer meetup last night. We've got a PM who's going to give a presentation on contracts and scoping work in January, and we were chatting about problems freelancers face. A couple guys in our group have been getting abused in much the same way you describe, although f2f and in the same town, not remote via odesk. And... trying to get people to go through a full 'statement of work' process before getting started is just something that will fall flat with most projects under a certain amount, however informal you try to make the process.

What we all agreed on is that there are some number of abusive people out there, much like you described. No amount of process, formalizing agreements, etc will save you from dealing with them. They have to be avoided, but you have to know how to identify them first, and you have to be willing to walk away from work, sometimes even in the middle of a projects. None of that is easy for some people - especially younger folks.

And yet... by the same token, I get contacted from people who tell me "my last guy just quit - just quit responding to emails - he flaked out - etc". I used to think those people were just irresponsible idiots, and I was going to provide great customer care, etc. I now realize there's 2 sides to the story, and sometimes the original party 'flaked out' because the employer in question quit paying or bounced checks, or is abusive, or a micromanager who's never satisfied and wants an ebay clone for $25 and will call you at 1am because they need help setting up their wife's email on her new iPhone.

malditojavi10• 13 years ago

I feel your pain, Paul. It's true that there are some contractors willing to sell themselves for some bucks, while there are other real professionals that know what are they limit rates and what is the threshold of rates they can play with. imho, first group won't never last a large period in workforce-on-demand platforms cause of: 1.not making enough money to survive 2. getting pissed of junk jobs

malditojavi10• 13 years ago

btw 'Hire meat $4/h' is a killer add https://twitter.com/malditojavi/status/399545792114851842

chmars2• 13 years ago

Sadly, the linked site is a classic case of 'tab closed, didn't read':

http://i.imgur.com/ZsZxfP3.png

I am of course referring to http://tabcloseddidntread.com/. http://crapshaming.tumblr.com/ would fit too.

dangrossman• 13 years ago

Someone should make a tumblr of HN comments about not reading submissions. It's not helpful; people are on this page to discuss the story, not why chmars didn't read it.

chmars2• 13 years ago

I couldn't read it … there was no way for me to remove the pop-up layer without being forward to another URL.

OK, technically, I could have gone all the way to access the original content. But why should I reward a website that does apparently not want to be read?

jakobe2• 13 years ago

Discussions on HN are never strictly on topic. There are always lots of meta comments, and many very good comments I've read were only tangentially related to the submitted article. Instead of complaining what HN should and shouldn't be, try writing good comments, upvote good comments and downvote or ignore bad comments.

Also, if you read the article, you'll see that the author talks a lot about SEO and conversion optimisation, and chmars' comment fittingly points out how annoying it is when people go overboard with conversion optimisation.

kassner• 13 years ago

How can you get a software developer jobs in oDesk with so many people from India in there? Not against them, but they can do so low rates that even if I work 80h/week I still can't get a decent income. I mean below 8 USD/h. Living costs are so low in there?

agilebyte2• 13 years ago

One would hope that the living standard in India and elsewhere would improve fast so that the wage disparity gets smaller and smaller.

jakobe2• 13 years ago

To me, the most revealing part of this post is how much of a difference the profile picture made: adding a fake beard increased response rate threefold!

I am often told that I look very young; I am 27 and people think I'm 20. I've never really thought much of it, but it might explain how disrespectful some people (especially in academia) have been treating me. Maybe I should grow a beard.

mhurron• 13 years ago

You also gain the benefit of not wasting time and money on shaving.

skorgu• 13 years ago

Do it. Growing some modest facial hair has made a big difference in being treated like an adult for me. For comparison I'm 30 and if I shave I get carded at movie theaters.

mildtrepidation• 13 years ago

32 here and carded for beer when I shave (at places that normally don't). I guess I don't look quite Under 17 young any more, though, so congrats to you on that. ;)

Now if only I could grow a decent beard...

alleycat• 13 years ago

I'm the same. I recommend getting a heavy stubble and maintaining it with a beard trimmer. It easy, and you still look clean and professional, plus the ladies prefer it ;)

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3345796/Women-pre...

olaf• 13 years ago

I have left odesk, because of their ridiculously unjust behaviour in a dispute between a client and me. The "support" people there lack basic ethical principles like "in case of a conflict hear both parties involved" and just suspended my account. It's a place, where arbitrariness is an everyday occurrence. I think, it is better to avoid a place, where people with such weak ethics have power over one's business.

Houshalter• 13 years ago

I wonder if you are searching for something about SEO, if you should just always go with the first result.

After working +1200 hours in oDesk

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