Thoughts about freelancing or buying from freelancers/shops

I loved vworker.com. Then they sold out to freelancer.com and now it blows ass. I worked on over 1000 projects on vworker and since the sell-out I haven't been able to land a single bid. I'd love a US ONLY freelancer site.

vworker was the best site around BEFORE they got bought out and destroyed by freelancer. Follow their example and you can't go wrong.
Not paying for bids is a big step in the right direction. Asking questions is another.

Just be aware, that escrow takes some serious cash to get started. First of all, to do escrow you can't just wing it, you need to be a licensed escrow company, at least in the US. There's just a lot of legal hoops to jump through. Something to research if you're serious.

Another vWorker refugee here. Not going to badmouth Freelancer here, but suffice to say that they did their darndest to lose my business, and that was despite assigning me a "personal concierge", since I had outsourced over 200 jobs at vWorker/RentACoder over seven years. Thrilled with oDesk as a replacement.

Yes, this is one big issue for both sides. vWorker tried to address this with their "Sherpa" idea, but that never really took off. I've actually played this intermediary role (unofficially) for a few clients, and it worked out very well. It comes down to being a good educator/communicator/manager to make sure each side knows what the other needs, but of course, that has to come with a cost.

He isn't. I asked.

I always break large tasks into multiple tiny jobs. That's what I am doing with AboutTh.is now. About five out of six providers complete the tasks satisfactorily, and I don't worry about the sixth one. (Went to arbitration, and never lost, on vWorker, and it's even easier now with oDesk, since no money changed hands.)

An even higher cost is the "free" arbitration that has to go hand-in-hand with an escrow system. I fear that this is what ultimately pushed Ian to sell.

I fear that it was mostly the latter. They obviously had zero interest in keeping the ecosystem that they had just purchased, and had somehow felt that they'd be able to "keep" all of the members with their strong-arm tactics.

And I'd be the last one to register as a buyer. I realize that my view is hugely unpopular with my fellow Americans, and this is absolutely nothing personal, IB, but the rate that you earn at an outsourcing site is what your time is worth. Buyers come to the site, typically looking for the lowest rate, (although not always), and by definition, it is a free market which yields the "correct" rate for a given job. If you don't want to work for a dollar an hour, no one is forcing you to sell your services on such a site.

As for the people who ask, "what about keeping American jobs?", my answer has always been that I have taken the money that I saved and then spent or invested it in other things that either built my business or helped my family, and the vast majority of the time, this money did go back into the American economy. The key is that it was spent on other American workers, not the ones who wanted to charge ten times what people in Bangladesh ask. So money saved on a software project went to pay for American-made bicycles for my children, and so on.

Economies have always shifted and changed over time. Smart people have to adapt in order to succeed. I used to write software for a living myself, for two decades. I don't any more, and I actually got out before the Web really took off, around '97. It certainly does not make sense for an American to sell their software design services on an outsourcing site, but it definitely makes sense for one to buy them.

Some interesting points here. I think both the Dollar an hour coder and a 40/hr coder have their places though.

Hire a security consultant for a dollar? Think not. Move some css around? Sure.

I think both can co-exist and work together.

Though I would never go to the lowest bidder. You tend to get what you pay for. I have seen enough bids to clean up sites like that. Worst case, guy paid 5k to have site coded. He then contacted me to consult on the code. It was an abomination. Full of sql injection and xss holes. He couldnt afford to have it all fixed. Site was hacked and taken down within 2 months.

There is real risk in going to lowest bidders