Welcome to oDesk, the online staffing marketplace connecting businesses (Buyers) to remote workers (Providers).
https://www.odesk.comSeems to me they provide a marketplace for connecting businesses to remote workers. This isn’t exactly a new concept, there are other sites out there not unlike oDesk (guru.com, gofreelance.com, ifreelance.com) and the list goes on and on.
All these sites are more or less the same deal, companies post projects and look for workers to make a match. Outsourcing I like to call it, though I hardly coined the term, you may have heard of it before. Nothing wrong with the sites themselves, including oDesk. Some sites provide better deals than others of course, and some have more quality project postings than others. Let’s do a comparison for giggles.
In my first search on Guru.com, I looked for Adobe Flex jobs and found about 6 posted, with a low budget of $250 and a high of over $25,000. A good number of projects I see listed on Guru.com seem fair enough, there are of course some that seem a pinch pathetic. Not Guru.com’s fault of course, but some companies, it seems, would like a whole heaping wad of work done and would prefer to pay next to nothing to have it done, and have it done quickly I might add.
I know this may come as a surprise to some of you, but I’ve found far more of these types of projects listed on oDesk.com. In one quick search for current project listings, I came across such winners as “Cropping images in Photoshop” where the Beijing company seeking work to be done states:
We are offering a rate of $5 for a batch of 500 images split into 2. There is potential for further batches upon completion of this batch.
Although that would not only give you tons of experience in image cropping, as well as a great spotlight for your resume, by the time you get done with 1000 images you would have earned yourself a cool $100 bill! Now I don’t know about you, but the people who pump electricity into my office, the cable company, the food store, the gas station, they seem to randomly raise their rates due to the “cost of living” and $100 doesn’t go very far these days. If I had any fingers left after the cropping of 1000 images, I might not be able to grasp my $100, let alone toss it over to the aforementioned companies.
Let’s look at another project posted on oDesk.com. Here’s another, oh wait, is this a project? For a budget of $5 (literally) The listing says:
I am programming in ASP and using MYSQL database I just need the code for the following:
1. Say there is a tab on the navigation bar that says Buy. When a user points on buy a drop down appears with Land, Apartment, etc. If the user clicks on Land then I want all the land listings to display. So I need a query that would allow me to get all the land listings from my database and display on more …
Hold on hold on wait wait wait……I’ll need my $5 now if I’m going to read the rest of that post, I’m getting a headache. Again, not oDesk’s fault, it’s the people posting projects on these sites that give me indigestion. So to clear things up, follow me here, if I know anything about oDesk.com at all, its a guru.com-like, project outsourcing website where global buyers match up with global workers and either both parties end up with a handsome deal, or one party makes away with the goods while the other takes a good 5 across the eyes.
Does this sound like a reasonable assessment? Again, nothing against Mr. and Mrs. oDesk and family, but maybe they should weed out these types of silly projects. Or maybe they don’t mind those types at all? One of the testimonials on oDesks’s site says about a customer:
He has been using oDesk’s online service to find development help and said he works most closely with a programmer in Russia who is paid $15 per hour. A U.S.-based programmer doing similar work would expect hourly rates of $60 to $120
Firstly, to that I say, nay, not always so. Some of us American programmers would be willing (and have) worked for a Digg click, or maybe a trackback. In the near future, I may not be above doing a quick banner for a sandwich barter type arrangement. Secondly, being an American programmer as I am, this means one more job overseas for money I couldn’t compete with. Why? Because my cable company, the people pumping electricity into my office, the food store etc won’t be happy when I offer them a ham on rye as payment (barter deal once again) because I’m too poor to afford to pay them the frog skin.
The same company, however, would expect me to pay full price for my sneakers, aspirin, big screen tv that will be obsolete inside a year, and so on even though I may collect payments via an order to Subway.
Another company testimonial on oDesk.com states:
Drive your labor costs with oDesk, which makes it easy to find talented programmers on the cheap.
To add “mwahahahahhahaha” at the end of that sentence would most likely get even more buyers in the future. Here’s another company who wrote:
oDesk continues its efforts to improve tools that track jobs and knit together virtual workers from India to Russia ever more closely with the home office.
Very global of them. Here’s two lists of providers testimonials and buyer’s testimonials for your consideration if my post has you anxious to jump on in and sign up right away. You can find such buyer testimonials as the one who speaks almost lovingly of his Russian programmer he found on oDesk:
He is as talented as the best I have ever hired and he is easier to manage than many other programmers two offices down the hall.
Used in this context however, I’m not sure that I’d add that testimonial to my website if I were the Russian programmer. This being said, think of me what you will, vote for my post or shart upon it, I care not. This is a matter that strikes home for me, outsourcing and watching companies manipulate workers whether they be American, Russian, Indian, or even from a country that sounds like mangina. If we keep up at this rate, we’ll find ourselves working for such circus sideshow acts as.
Regards,
Akash Shrivastava [B.Tech (C.S.E)]
Software Engineer cum SEO Project Manager
AEROSOFT CORP.
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