oDesk to merge with Elance

https://www.odesk.com/blog/2013/12/odeskelancemerge/

by goblin89 • 13 years ago

309 139 13 years ago

flavor8• 13 years ago

Ugh, let's hope Elance's CEO doesn't fuck up ODesk. Elance is kindergarten quality compared to ODesk's site.

lingben5• 13 years ago

As long as oDesk does not change at all, I'm happy. The only reason I hire on oDesk is because it is NOT elance - have had horrible experience with elance both with providers and the company itself and how it conducts business (or what it calls business).

Although this is called a merger, it is only that in name. It seems elance's CEO will call the shots.

https://www.odesk.com/blog/2013/12/mergerfaq/

"Who will lead the new company? oDesk executive chairman Thomas Layton will continue in the same role at the combined company, and Elance CEO Fabio Rosati will serve as chief executive officer."

There's a huge wave of consolidation in the industry in the past 5 years. Just last year freelancer bought vworker. It is ripe for disruption as the dominant sites grow bloated and complacent, only seeing acquisitions as the way to grow.

tannerc• 13 years ago

I couldn't agree more. My experiences with oDesk have been overall phenomenal, while Elance has consistently been a pain.

I wonder what's fully fueling the merger, as oDesk seems to be doing pretty well as of late on its own.

loceng6• 13 years ago

I imagine oDesk is fine as long as you don't have any problems. They don't see blackmail as breaking their rules though, e.g. a contractor blackmailing you for a good rating. That contractor gets to stay on the platform. I have had this experience.

tluyben22• 13 years ago

I've had issues with both, but most with oDesk.

Companies / people

- saying they are from the US or EU but actually being from India, obviously lying about it to appear more credible,

- starting a project with (1 or more) seniors to get the project and trust and then switching those for the random people dragged in from the street (the worst juniors you can imagine),

- blackmailing withholding parts of deliverables,

- working (with different accounts on different sites) on 10+ projects at a time,

- disappearing without any recourse (yes this can happen in 'real life', but it's extremely rare; on oDesk it's not)

- making up the most insane lies why they are late/more expensive; most common and very morbid; cancer of close family or themselves, but so badly researched that after 3 questions you already know it's not true

and other types of scamming.

Most of these things are preventable if you are really really paranoid and are on top of the 'workers' 24/7, checking everything they deliver with a fine comb, however, that's not really what I would want to do. And for all cases reported to oDesk they just said they couldn't do anything as the screenshot tool was used and the workers 'worked' according to that.

There was an IDE open and code was typed in; random copy/paste code from the web, but that was not the point.

I have very good experiences with both as well and a lot of successful projects, but yeah; this stuff delivered a lot of pain and energy and we seem completely unprotected as buyer.

What we do these days is actually building a team at the outsourcing location, sitting there in the office, training etc; it takes more upfront effort and cost, but it's much more effective. So much more that I would never use these sites again. And we build value instead of work with and train people who will leave in a blink of an eye for a better paying client.

aytekin• 13 years ago

It is like Google merging with AltaVista and AltaVista CEO becoming the new CEO. We depend heavily on oDesk for our support team so this is a very scary news.

adamzski2• 13 years ago

I completely agree, it seems like oDesk are throwing their business away.

sixspeed• 13 years ago

Would you mind elaborating on your experiences with elance? I had a family member who does freelance marketing/writing called me a few years ago and mentioned he was planning to sign up there and asking what I knew about it.

I could only tell him about a comment I'd browsed on HN that referred to it as a "ghetto" of poor paying assignments. He went ahead with it and now seems to be doing quite well as one of the top 5 providers of marketing and writing services.

lingben5• 13 years ago

My experience is with hiring technical freelancers: design, network, security, development, etc.

It is entirely possible that elance is great for non-technical jobs.

The issues I ran into were providers who have great ratings but who can't do the job! Later I found out that elance has a loophole where buyers who disputed or cancelled projects are not able to leave feedback. So you're not getting the full story when you look at a provider's history.

elance doesn't really care about this. So you have a huge portion of freelancers on elance who cosmetically pump up their ratings to get more jobs and then either farm them out to others or do a shoddy job themselves. when/if the job goes into dispute or is cancelled it disappears from their history. if the client is dumb enough to be happy with the crap work, they get a nice rating in exchange for turning over the final code.

benhebert• 13 years ago

I too hate elance and have been using oDesk for years. The experience at oDesk was just phenomenally better than elance.

You're right about ripe for disruption too. I wonder who will move into the space.

goostavos• 13 years ago

Out of curiosity, are you using oDesk to hire contractors, or are you freelancing on oDesk? I ask because I recently started freelancing on the sight an it feels like fighting for scraps. I mean, half the posts I see have "Contact goes to the lowest bidder" at the top of the listing.

Does it get better once you "establish" yourself on the site? Right now it feels pretty futile outside of making some pocket change.

mike_herrera3• 13 years ago

I'd love to drink their milkshake.

My friend and I are mid-redesign on a new service marketplace called reBaked. Our innovation is collaboration with many freelancers and paying them proportionally to what they actually deliver. There's also a negotiated minimum payment for freelancers so it's not overly risky for them.

...it's not quite ready for a Show HN, but the gist can be seen at (https://rbkd-staging.heroku.com). I'd love to get your first reaction.

dubcanada• 13 years ago

As long as it's not Freelancer I'm fine.

weland2• 13 years 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.

adamzski2• 13 years ago

lol 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

mattbarrie4• 13 years ago

Hi 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

anthony_barker• 13 years ago

same experience on the hiring side with freelancer - basically an awful waste of time.

negamax• 13 years ago

Really wish oDesk had carried on by itself.

fuddle• 13 years ago

I'm pretty happy with Elance. Currently Elance charge a 8.75% fee and oDesk charge 10%. Hopefully they won't jack up the price now that they own the market.

bluedevil2k• 13 years ago

Umm...I would expect the price to be jacked up big time now that they own the market.

davidjgraph• 13 years ago

With vworker first being absorbed by freelancer and now this, there's a decided lack of competition developing in this market.

I think these guys know that a startup will struggle to compete, getting the critical mass of devs and employers is the same problem as starting a social network.

I share the view that ODesk quality is an order of magnitude better than elance, I think only those using elance will being thinking anything positive at this moment...

leknarf3• 13 years ago

Our startup Lambda (http://getlambda.com) competes with both, but we're not the least bit concerned. I already thought of elance/odesk as being effectively the same, in the sense that they're both known as places to find cheap, off-shore labor. I don't know any devs in NYC who've seriously considered working through either site and don't expect that to change. Likewise, I don't know many hiring companies that have used their sites for anything more than throwaway projects.

We have a few other competitors targeting the high-end of the freelancer market, but that's still open territory.

k-mcgrady2• 13 years ago

I've been working through Freelancer/Elance for about 5 years now. I'm quite an experienced iOS dev and typically only apply to the higher priced jobs which then tend to lead on to repeat work. I just took a look at your site. Although I would consider myself quite experienced I'm not a 'rockstar'. What kind of devs do you accept to join Lambda? What do you consider an 'exceptional developer'?

memracom• 13 years ago

I think that your minimum rate is too high. A lot of developers would like to branch out and get experience with new technology but with a minimum rate of $100/hr you really can only offer your most familiar language/platform. Someone with 10 years of building Java apps, could build pretty good Android or iOS apps, if they could find a customer who would accept that career history at a lower rate. Honestly, I think that a $25/hr minimum would make more sense and is more in line with the real world.

irlib• 13 years ago

We have a few other competitors targeting the high-end of the freelancer market, but that's still open territory.

Could you please name a few?

loceng6• 13 years ago

I've had opposite experience in general. It's all about hiring well. The problem is that hiring well shouldn't be using the "high ratings" that contractors have - it shouldn't be used to determine who you hire.

zackmorris2• 13 years ago

I have mixed emotions about this because I have made a solid income at times with oDesk's time tracker, but I don't want it to become the standard way of doing things. That's because majority of the work I do now is on a subconscious level, so I'm basically thinking about a problem all day and it may only take an hour to code up the solution. I guess a workaround is to double or triple hourly rates, but I don't see that happening, because as more places merge, we may find ourselves in a race to the bottom.

That said, I got burned on eLance by charging a flat rate for a client that was never satisfied with my work. I made less after several weeks than other contractors make in an hour. I guess that's the main reason I went to oDesk (though I always liked eLance).

Please, somebody, somewhere, come up with a daily rate mechanism that doesn't invade workers' privacy.

That and finding a way to spread workloads across multiple developers (to reduce stress and make for a better product) are the two main challenges I see right now in freelancing.

albedo4• 13 years ago

Our company Lambda (http://getlambda.com) helps negotiate contract work for our freelancers. We often set up the following arrangement: the client pays in advance for a week or two of work, and we agree that "a week" contains X hours of developer time. If there are hours unused by the end of the contract, we refund the money. It's an elegant way to avoid most payment issues.

yogo2• 13 years ago

On your site it doesn't say whether or not you get a cut, but given the natural alignment of interests I think it's safe to say you won't have a problem with having to return unused hours, even an honest developer will simply maximize those hours.

macarthy12• 13 years ago

How much work have you managed to get? Do you restrict where dev's are located (e.g. north america?)

mrfusion• 13 years ago

Do you guys need any Python or Django people?

pmorici2• 13 years ago

What do you consider a solid income? It seems like the majority of the jobs posted on oDesk are asking for a lot and only willing to pay very little. I wonder how even someone willing to work for 2 bucks an hour could possibly make reasonable money on there.

Iftheshoefits3• 13 years ago

$2/hr is a lot of money to some people in some places, particularly certain "developing nations".

Of course, you get what you pay for. Most people looking to hire on these sites aren't interested in quality; they want quantity at a discount. It works well for both them and the people doing the work at least in the short term. After all, some money (food) is better than nothing. I consider it a pretty base form of exploitation, though.

karnajani• 13 years ago

I've been living completely off of my oDesk earnings for the last year. My rates are usually between 35-50 dollars/hr

I'm pretty sure there are tons of folks out there just like me living comfortable lives with their oDesk earnings.

zackmorris2• 13 years ago

I'm a day late answering this but just wanted to add that I consider a solid freelancing rate to be anything higher than the overtime rate of the industry standard. So if you normally would have a $50,000 a year programming job at roughly $25/hr, your freelancing rate should be at least 1.5 times that or $37.50/hr. I've also had trouble staying booked, so if you can manage 20 billable hours a week, you're probably ahead of the curve. So that's a $36,000/yr income I guess, but you own your own time and don't have to be in an office all day. That alone is worth $14k to me.

I came in a little below that and got several gigs at $30/hr, mostly in esoteric areas like OpenGL programming.

Also I would recommend watching your job invites and you'll start to notice which areas are the least sensitive to hourly rates. For me that's been 3D work in iOS, but YMMV.

I'm trying to move to a daily rate, in that case I would assume only 2-4 hours of coding daily because when you are really in the zone, most of your problem solving work happens off the computer. So I think that's why we see rates of $75 or even $125 or more quoted so often.

The other thing I've learned is that institutional work pays a lot more, so it's better to find gigs for consultancies/studios/education, things like that, as opposed to individuals. They seem to expect a rate of at least $50-75/hr and up. In large cities the rate probably starts at $100/hr.

Anyway, I'm basically taking a pay cut as a freelancer so that I can work on my own projects, which have the potential to pay back exponentially someday, and are at the very least challenging and rewarding and keep my psyche going. I've had jobs where the boss charged $100/hr and paid us $15/hr, and on top of that wanted us to work 9 hours or more a day, and I did the math and realized that I would never be able to achieve my goals if the lion's share of my efforts went to someone else.

maerF0x0• 13 years ago

The only problem with odesk is the ridiculous fees for a contract to hire scenario . Their rules is something like 10% of their salary for 2yrs iirc. Head hunter industry standard is something like 10% for 6mos ?

leknarf3• 13 years ago

Most traditional recruiters charge around 20-30% of the first year salary. 10% of the first 2 years is actually a bit cheaper.

walden42• 13 years ago

How does that work? The client specifically notifies odesk that they're making a hire, and they charge the freelancer 10%? When does he have to pay?

krapp5• 13 years ago

Oh, good. Now the experience of begging for slave wages fixing people's wordpress installs can be even more streamlined.

yogo2• 13 years ago

For Wordpress installations I get it but it's the School Administration Solution for US$400 that's scary. Otherwise I agree, good luck to all inhabitants as the ghettos merge.

krapp5• 13 years ago

Yeah... that sounds like something I actually might have bid on. Someone else is probably got it for $10.

davidw• 13 years ago

This kind of trite comment adds little to the discussion.

I have some people that work with me on oDesk that I've found over the past few years. I don't pay them a lot by US standards, but they're good people. I've sent them various hardware, like Kindles and a new laptop to help them do their work better, and it has worked out well, although I was kind of nervous about it at the time.

krapp5• 13 years ago

Fair enough, there are exceptions, but I feel my comment accurately reflects my own as well as many others' experiences trying to find competitive pay on sites like this.

greendata• 13 years ago

Yes, this is the thing. If you are living at a US/UK standard or slightly below, DO NOT waste your time on Elance or ODESK. These sites are not designed to employee US workers.

brc2• 13 years ago

If you really want to destroy someone's day in a low cost country, campaign to stop this type of work getting to them. Then they will be out of a job.

To several billion people, working for $20/day in their local lives using a computer would be a dream job. Someone who is employed is making money for their family and probably feels good about themselves.

krapp5• 13 years ago

I don't want to stop work getting to them. I want them to be paid more so my own relatively paltry rates don't seem like an insult to employers expecting to pay pennies per hour for a fully working whatever clone.

Otherwise the next step in that poor country is, inevitably, the work moves somewhere cheaper still or gets automated.

ckdarby• 13 years ago

"Error establishing connection to database"

Clearly they need to use their own services for a system admin & someone with aws+scaling experience

eli• 13 years ago

"Elance buys oDesk" seems like a more accurate headline.

apalmer• 13 years ago

Seems more like, oDesk cant get a price they want selling, and their CEO just wants out...

tejay• 13 years ago

That's surprising. I feel bad for talented freelancers =/.

Iftheshoefits3• 13 years ago

Talented freelancers do themselves a disservice by using either of these "services". The only reason for a talented freelancer to use them is out of a desperate need for even abysmal compensation. This merger will likely make things worse for them (freelancers), not better.

Yes, I know there are some freelancers working on these sites who earn a "decent" living. They're anomalies. The vast majority of workers earn really horrible wages. The well paid oDesk or Elance freelancer is as common as a rags-to-riches startup billionaire in the software industry as a whole.

zavulon• 13 years ago

While I agree with you for US and Western Europe-based freelancers, it's not true for other places. When you live in a third-world country, Odesk/Elance are some of the only ways for you to make money as a freelancer.

tempestn• 13 years ago

So where would you go to find a talented freelancer then? (Assuming you don't have any good word of mouth recommendations.) Not sarcasm - I'm generally interested if you have a better way of finding them that's more reliable that google searches or trolling stackoverflow.

nikolak2• 13 years ago

From a US based dev's perspective, I'd agree with you.

But it really depends on your definition of "horrible" and "well paid".

$5/hr in US is horrible.

$5/hr in a developing country is awesome and well paid - Even for talented freelancers.

And finding clients who are ready to pay you, as a developer from outside US, an standard/decent/well US wage for the job is pretty hard - almost impossible - at least in my experience.

Do you have any tips on finding well paid (generally better paid than oDesk) jobs for freelancers outside US/Western europe?

jboy• 13 years ago

It would seem that the two main incumbents in this market (founded in 2005 and 1998, respectively) are getting nervous about Freelancer.com's (founded in 2009) rapid growth (predicting ~73% in 2013) and recent IPO [1].

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/au/freelancer-more-than-triples-first-d...

dongsheng• 13 years ago

It dropped rapidly in the first few days too http://www.asx.com.au/asx/research/companyInfo.do?by=asxCode...

mattbarrie4• 13 years ago

Hello Dong

I'm the CEO of Freelancer.com (Freelancer Limited ASX:FLN).

Our share price dropped rapidly in the first few days because the issue price was 50 cents and it was the biggest opening on the ASX every (so I was told by the exchange). The share price opened at $2.50.

A month later we are at $1.40, almost three times our issue price. I think that's pretty good. You would expect a bit of a pullback from such a strong opening (5x !).

Regards Matt

undoware3• 13 years ago

We're running out of vowels to prefix startup names. Peak Vowel was definitely 2007; the iGeneration is iSick of oIt.

Never use a service whose name you could make up thoughtlessly.

prawn2• 13 years ago

Says uNdoware...

I tend to evaluate a service based on what they provide, their reputation and sometimes the care put into their branding, but rarely do I make a blanket judgement on name alone. Anyone on HN should know how challenging it is to pick a name in the competitive domain landscape.

undoware3• 13 years ago

I wasn't making a blanket judgement -- you are making a straw man. I was simply criticizing their branding, which is just as reasonable as any technical consideration. And if you don't believe that, Richard Stallman has a beard for you.

sergiotapia3• 13 years ago

I sincerely hope this doesn't affect the thousands of families making a living working off of oDesk. This change will have real effects on REAL people, let's hope they are all positive. :)

loceng6• 13 years ago

Are there certain people who aren't allowed to work on Elance who work on oDesk?

goblin89• 13 years ago

It could be argued that oDesk is more fair. I tried elance once and AFAIR they encourage you to pay in order to appear higher in listings. This was a turnoff. oDesk's approach to contractor/job listings seems to be centered around smart algorithms and analytics instead.

uladzislau• 13 years ago

Just recently when Freelancer.com acquired vWorker I expected the overall quality improvement at Freelancer. However despite any logic it became worse.

I have the same expectations for this merger/acquisition. Elance won't become any better and Odesk will cease to exist very soon after transferring all users to Elance.

Sadly this merger is dictated by nothing else but increasing market share of Freelancer.com.

mattbarrie4• 13 years ago

Hi Ulad

I'm the CEO of Freelancer.com. Since the vWorker acquisition actually all the quality metrics are up. The vWorker user base was also a very high quality workforce and today dominate highly our freelancer rankings and awarded projects. This is reflected in our financials- we are growing revenue at almost twice the rate of our competitors. We're also publicly listed (ASX: FLN) so our financials are transparent.

If you have any other questions, I'm happy to answer them or shoot me a note at matt@freelancer.com.

Regards Matt

kirk21• 13 years ago

Both are great to find freelancers but the UI of both of them needs work. You have to search to find the most important stuff (eg. paying, hiring etc.).

geolisto• 13 years ago

I'm on the fence about this. I hope that oDesk doesn't go downhill as a result of this.

SimpleXYZ• 13 years ago

It would be nice if there was a US only odesk clone that popped up and became popular. I'd give it a shot...

kamakazizuru• 13 years ago

so ... oLance then?

dj-wonk2• 13 years ago

I'd suggest "LanceIT" -- e.g. freelancing for IT. Plus, not a bad way to get rid of boils.

dj-wonk2• 13 years ago

I like to warn people about my experience with Elance and their flawed approach to contractor accountability: http://djwonk.tumblr.com/post/50365605390/elance-reviews-don...

I am not holding my breath for the merger to improve this dynamic.

d0m• 13 years ago

So, it seems like most people had a bad experience with Elance. I have to admit that I had pros and cons too.. but now that I've learned how to use it smartly it's so damn useful. I think you can find very smart people and if you build a respectful relationship with them, it becomes very handy if you're dealing with multiple projects like I do. I know how I can trust them to do a great work and they trust me back to have quality projects / quality specifications and well paid.

kokey• 13 years ago

Yup, I believe what these sites provide is a platform for introductions and initial agreements, but both parties still need to do the relationship building themselves.

guillermovs• 13 years ago

While this is huge news there's a lot to be done in this space, and it has only recently started to gain momentum.

For the past couple of years we've been busy building Socialance, sort of like a hybrid if oDesk & LinkedIn. A site where you can hire people recommended by your network.

I know building a marketplace is an extremely challenging task, but we've come this far, we're going to see it through.

It seems plenty of you are heavy users of either site, or have strong opinions about the sector. If you want to help out my email is guillermo@socialance.com (we're bootstrapped, took part in Startup Chile and are based in London).

If it sounds like something might be interested in using, please drop your mail at http://Socialance.com

kimonos• 13 years ago

It's fine with me as long as oDesk remains the same..

tedcoombs• 13 years ago

This merger is likely a response to competitor, Freelancer.com going public in Australia this year. It also positions the much larger, Elance/oDesk for an IPO next year. Smaller, niche freelancing marketplaces like Guru.com, 99Designs, WorkersOnCall.com and others will now be looking for acquisition exits from the new giant. The freelancing marketplace industry has been growing 100% year over year for the last 7 years and is expected to continue for the next five years. Once tied to the economy, the freelancing industry trends have now disconnected from the economy in general and are on a steady trend no matter how employment levels rise and fall. All in all, the merger is good news for the industry which saw its first exit this year.

yeukhon• 13 years ago

oDesk has a lot of rock solid freelancers but Elance, the frontend looks like spam site to me and you get tens of applications and half just charge you $2. I am not saying $2 means cheap labor but after deal with a couple on Elance I find the quality is so low. there was one or two on oDesk doing horrible jobs but the rest are just terrific job. oDesk is also more modern and more active and friendly reaching out to the oDesk community - they do a lot facebook advertising.

Silverreven2• 13 years ago

I run a curated freelancing platform for creatives called Coworks. Being part of the industry it's really interesting to read your thoughts on the merger. Even though I've followed them very closed for two years as a competitor I was really surprised by the move. My take on it is: 1. They can lower their acquisition costs by not competing with PPC and in their content marketing. 2. Their real competitors, who are still sleeping behind the wheel, are Manpower, Randstad etc. With the merger they get the muscles to battle them for the online staffing market. 3. Last but not least- they'll ditch one of the platforms (elance?) and save half the money on Tech.

Silverreven2• 13 years ago

Also, I don´t think they will jack up the prices. Everything is moving towards 0% on all global transactions. Rather the opposite: They will offer enterprise solution with 0% commission pretty soon.

mailm• 13 years ago

Two dying competitors merging together to get the hold of a wonderful market that both of these and their likes, scammed and destroyed ... lets see how long you can survive together and lets see how many more will be phished with this corporate scam.

dmourati• 13 years ago

I opened an oDesk account to get some remote help on some software dev that was beyond my skills at the time. The contractor I hired was from India, I think I paid him $15/hour.

Then I opened a profile for myself as a contractor. I charge $100/hour. So far I've gotten about 10 hours worth of work from two different US companies. I'd like to increase my rates in 2014. This is purely for interesting work to me, I've already got a day job.

seferphier• 13 years ago

The hard part is to find a great contractor that is not only technically skilled but responsible. Very difficult

Can u refer me to ur contractor in India?

mnazim• 13 years ago

<shameless self promotion> We are one. Give us a shot. Email in my profile. </shameless self promotion>

alanstorm• 13 years ago

We're looking for a lawyer to help finish up our merger. The previous guy did 90% of the work and then stopped responding to our emails!!! This shouldn't take an experienced lawyer more than a few hours.

Pay: $10

fayyazkl2• 13 years ago

As long as there was competition, they were forced to maintain standards as well as individuality to retain separate policies. From a contractor's perspective only on one site, it would be positive in the sense that you can use the same credibility to bid for projects from other side ONCE they unite.

hendi311• 13 years ago

Henrik, founder of Coworks here. From a shareholder's perspective the merger probably makes perfect sense. They should be able to consolidate investments, overhead, PPC etc. From a contractor view I can't see how it changes much really. From a client perspective it is usually bad news with mergers like this. I think it has been great to have a fight for the lead in the outsourcing industry. The sad thing is that the industry as a whole needs better client processes, more high quality talent, better UX, better vetting systems etc. and that is not likely to come from the market leader at this stage. They will most likely be occupied with merger milestones for a while. Even talented management teams like these have limited bandwidth. It does leave opportunities open for all others looking at building the next generation remote work platform.

Kimberleytin• 13 years ago

Outsourcing is very much in vogue. People hire through trusted freelancer sites like Elance and oDesk. Unfortunately what I feel, many of the Freelance sites on the web can’t simply help you when you need a complex, abstract project done in those domains. However, they are good in tangible services like web development, logo development etc. In my humble opinion, Statlance can be a good option for projects needing abstract thinking.

oDesk to merge with Elance

Related Stories