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"
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.
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.
> 3 SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM. This is a subtext of number one. There was in the sixties a man named Fritz Perls who was a gestalt therapist. Gestalt therapy derives from art history, it proposes you must understand the 'whole' before you can understand the details. What you have to look at is the entire culture, the entire family and community and so on. Perls proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn't matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energized or less energized. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.
One problem with these sites is the reputation system which suffers from the same problem all "star rating" systems suffer from. Namely that anything less than 5 stars is seen as a negative and higher paying clients will often look for providers with solid 5 star feedback.
Clients can abuse this by demanding additional work/scope creep in order to award the full 5 stars. In theory it can go both ways as providers are also able to rate clients, but in reality the rating is far more important to sellers since a buyer can go to one of these sites without a reputation, post a project and still receive a ton of bids.
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
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"