Anyone using Odesk for there programming needs? I need advice.

i'd always go fixed rate.

what you pay depends on the complexity of the work. Trey Smith just had an excellent blog post about hiring a programmer for mobile apps...it's just as applicable to FB apps, plugins...whatever.

How to find good programmers | Trey Smith App Blog

Read this article...great tips on interviewing and how to determine the BS'ers from the good programmers. This may answer a bunch of your questions and give you a starting point.

Hope this helps...I'm a bit into Mobile Apps...PM me is your still lost.

I use Odesk all the time and it's absolutely awesome.

Here are a few of my main pieces of advice:

Hiring
- select staff with high ratings and heaps of hours worked.
- especially with coders, cheap per hour does not mean cheap (for example I once hired a candidate who was really enthusiastic to do a task, and was only $3/ hr but estimated it would take 20hrs to build a simple app.
I was also offered 1hr at $50 flatrate from someone with several hundreds of hours at 5 stars.
I figured the $3 guy should get it done quicker than quoted and I wanted to give him a chance - it cost me $80 / and have a buggy app, I should have hired the guy at $50

Instructions
- always be very clear
- I usually request to work for say 1hour and the submit their work through for you to review. This can pull up any errors of understanding
- indicate how long to spend and how much care needs to be taken (for any code, I could spend up to 10x more time if it must display perfectly in all browsers, must be totally secure, must have perfect error processes and capture for example)
- If someone isn't working out, dont be afraid to pick someone else
- don't be racist - there is a clear price divide between some countries (eg india, phillipines and some of the former USSR states) understand culture but I have some of my best work done at a fraction if I only hired US or UK candidates.
- when you find someone awesome, aim to hire them always. Give them as much of a pay rise as you can.

Hourly rate projects
- always insist on running the app which tracks the usage and do review the work done
- also maintain an hourly rate cap
- be clear on

Fixed price projects
- certainly cleanest and least fuss
- you will however typically spend quite a bit more per tasks.
In exchange you are not having to worry about it working, how many hours they put in etc. About 20-40% more.

Odesk maybe not ideal for programming needs I use scriptlance.

Thanks everyone for the honest tips. I will post my project now and see how it goes. But one thing worries me is that when I want update and bug fixes and they no longer available how would I get this done? Do I hire another person and give them the code or start from fresh?

JayBest has good advice. However, I would recommend against using the overall rating as a guide to hiring someone. The overall ratings are fairly standard across workers and miss several things, such as zombie projects (abandoned projects) and cancelled projects.

Better predictors are:

- lots of projects
- good questions asked on their bid
- comments from previous employers
- tests (not self-ratings)

Be very specific when creating the project summary. Something that helps is detailing how you will test the project. This helps frame the project.

If you make changes to the project, make sure that both parties understand and agree to the changes.

Good luck.