Elance-oDesk Rebrands As Upwork, Debuts Slack-Like Chat Platform | Hacker News Reader

Elance-oDesk Rebrands As Upwork, Debuts Slack-Like Chat Platform

techcrunch.com

90 pointsvdfs69 comments

The main issue Elance/oDesk needs to fix - is to eliminate `the race to the bottom` moment. Maybe set some minimum acceptable rates? (e.g. $50/hr)

If this is fixed, it will become attractive workplace for lot of qualified engineers, including those on HN.

This will be a radical move, but it will also eliminate "bad" clients.

How would a new guy differentiate himself?

A new guy can compete on price, get work, get good reviews and then increase his rates.

The logic works the same way, but starting from e.g. 50 instead of 0. oDesk will benefit if rates will be 50 - 3-figures+.

Well, if you put it that way then I agree but then cost of living is cheap in developing countries so an equally good developer there would be happy to do it at a lower rate compared to an American dev for the same work. How do you take care of such issues.

Odesk won't benefit in that case if the higher minimum rate result in enough fewer deals to reduce their share of the total.

Just being competent and knowing what you are talking about is a pretty good differentiator. I'm generally positive to odesk and have had mostly good experiences, but the truth is that I only end up hiring for about half the jobs I post there. For the other half I simply don't get applicants I feel comfortable with at any price.

I'm new to freelancing and a friend recently referred me to https://boonle.com. It seems like a new service and the available projects look to be limited right now. However, I did complete two projects. It is different tho as you work for tips instead of setting an up front bid. I was nervous at first, but I received payment both times. I guess they are trying to target newbies? Not sure, but maybe worth a shot.

Work for tips? What are you, a stripper?

From an employers standpoint,

First evaluate the competition. As an example on oDesk, there are almost unlimited PHP developers, a large percentage who are novices. The reverse is true to some degree when it comes to Python. Identify skills which have less competition and higher rates.

Next is focus on finding someone who hires for long term projects. If you are working for three people at once your quality will suffer and your output is going to be slower. If you are doing 3 hour projects a large percentage of your time is going to be spent trying to find work rather than being paid for work. You could look for how much the hirer has spent on total projects, for example. This is a guess, but you probably want someone with $10k+ spent.

When it comes to oDesk & Freelancer one of your biggest advantages will be English comprehension fluency. Something to consider for non-native speakers.

When I hire, I disregard the developer's profile history. I look at other things such as their English fluency. The first job is short and provides a fairly accurate indicator if they will work out.

oDesk is mined for skilled developer talent. There are companies just posting test projects to find these developers and hire/contract them out full time. In that regards the pool of skilled developers is artificially lower than it otherwise would be. In my experience the guys billing higher amounts are either on par or worse developers than the ones charging lower amounts. In that respect, the skill shifts from developing to sales. If a non-tech person is doing hiring they are at high risk of being strung along.

I would echo what others have commented in the thread -- it is much better to find a full time or part time dev position than chasing after mini projects. (And better yet, be paid in partially equity especially if your work is contributing to significant revenue growth for the employer.)

I don't know if that's their positioning, they've kind of just been a "come one, come all" type of system, letting the contractors and clients filter themselves out, for better or for worse. Newer entrants like Codeable, Awesome Web, and Envato Studio are focusing on the higher end. For WordPress work at around $50/hr, Codeable is great.

Are there valid alternatives ?

What is the preferred platform for freelances looking for remote work at decent rates, today ?

I was in oDesk trap many years ago and got out of it just by applying directly to prospective clients. Since then, I always recommend to look for remote jobs/clients directly, rather than through these kinds of mediums. It works. HN remote jobs, and many other sites.

I am in that same trap, any advice for someone to break the shackles? especially for someone located in Pakistan?

Just as I said above - find gigs on HN who is hiring thread, weworkremotely.com, stackoverflow remote jobs, wfh.io etc... just talk to clients directly. Oh, and needless to say - double/triple your rate, seriously - all it takes is to just ask.

Also, I was after more or less niche remote jobs (C++). In case of web or mobile dev - there are literally tons of jobs out there.

Pick Crew is the only one I know of: https://pickcrew.com/

Gun.io is another.

To be honest I have not had great experiences with them (slow response time, lower number and quality of devs). I compared them side by side with Crew + Toptal, and would recommend either, but ended up going with the latter.

I don't know about Crew but Toptal seems just like remote body shopping. Seems the freelancer gets locked in working for toptal. Not a real freelancing scheme like odesk and such.

Not really, you have full control over your availability. You can dial it up or down however you like. A lot of people start with hourly jobs on Toptal while keeping another gig or a day job and then switch to full time on Toptal when they're ready.

Disclaimer - I work for Toptal

I'd recommend PPH: http://www.peopleperhour.com/

It used to be pretty popular in the UK. I don't work freelance anymore but I still check the site out once in a while, it's fairly high quality and I've had several high-paying clients from there.

Just so people know they also send an ungodly amount of spam so don't sign up with your main email address.

Do you mean they sell their customers' emails or are you just talking about their own marketing emails? Because they do send a lot of crap but I opted out of those and haven't had issues since.

Their own marketing emails, I opted out but they still send a fair amount to me.

I've been decently happy with Toptal.com, which really works hard to carve out only the high end of the market (devs and clients both). Email's in my profile if anyone has questions or would like an intro.

Toptal? No race to the bottom, highly skilled developers, awesome clients.

What if the job can be done by an engineer with a cost of living where $15/hr is viable and profitable? All this will do is drive clients to another marketplace where there is no "minimum wage." There are a ton of reasons to hire a local developer and tons of reasons to hire a foreign developer, and an American developer probably doesn't want the clients that can only afford $15/hr anyway.

It's a global market. Many quality devs earn less than that in less developed countries. Why would they not want to work for less money if it allows them to be competitive but is still a good amount of money for them?

Why would you undercut their pricing power in the market just because Sillicon Valley has insane costs of living (but also insane job availability)?

While SV is an extreme, the sad true is that the cost of living is not as low as it seems from outside - but the people are used to low income. They just buy less goods, live frugally, etc...

I'm myself from less developed eastern European country, and the last time I checked, groceries - eggs, meat, milk, etc.. had comparable prices to that of Californian cities, such as San Diego...

And if we're talking about getting high quality education, healthcare, etc... in developing countries you have to go premium, and it costs even more than in western countries.

This is quite a surprising perspective. Thanks for sharing it!!

Because it's a market and prices of their time should be as high as their skills can be priced, not as low as possible to survive. upd.: and when they don't understand it, their price demping hurts whole market.

> Because it's a market and prices of their time should be as high as their skills can be priced, not as low as possible to survive.

In an efficient competitive market, the expected behavior is that each seller will set the price they are willing to sell the next unit of what they are selling at the cost to them of providing that next unit (including the opportunity cost of what they give up to provide it.)

> and when they don't understand it, their price demping hurts whole market.

I think they do understand it. Its just that the people who have higher costs don't like that it prices those sellers out of the market. But welcome to a robust competitive market.

1) No, price in any market is as high as buyers of this market can afford.

2) No, employers are not so naïve :) Everybody understand who you can hire for $5/hour and what to expect. I'm not interested in such employers and they are not interested in me, so it's just not my part of market and I don't care. As employer (sometimes I'm employer) I have to filter out people with low bids without even reading their profiles. I know what to expect from low price.

> No, price in any market is as high as buyers of this market can afford.

If market clearing price is set only by what buyers are willing to pay and not by costs, you have a monopolistic market in which rents are being extracted, not an efficient competitive market.

If market clearing price is set only by sellers costs and not what buyers are willing to pay, you have the reverse case, where you have a monopoly buyer.

In an ideal competitive market, the price a buyer is willing to pay to buy the next unit is set by the expected benefit buying another unit brings them, and the price a seller is willing to sell the next unit for is equal to the seller's cost (including opportunity cost) of providing the next unit, and the market clearing price is the price at which the number of buyers willing to pay that price or more is equal the number of sellers willing to sell at that price or less, and buyers only willing to pay less and sellers only willing to sell for more are priced out of the market.

Even SV clients get as cheap as they can. I had one -- from SF bay, not exactly SV -- which agreed to pay me 75$ to create a function to write text into images at two different possible positions (bottom and centered). Ok, cheap, but it was a 1h or 2h work. Done. Then he started asking more positions, gradient backgrounds, a command line interface, then a REST interface... when I asked him JUST 250$ for the whole deal, he went nuts.

Now I'm back to consulting, where I get more than the double of that per day. odesk and similar crapy sites suck.

One USD buys 3 BRL (Brazilian Reals), so the exchange rate can make 3rd world products (including developers) look cheaper on the international market.

Why would they want to eliminate the race to the bottom? That is the main service they provide to employers.

The whole thing about work status: "I am available to work and will respond to invites right away" is nothing but a surrender of negotiating leverage by contractors to employers.

>Why would they want to eliminate the race to the bottom?

To attract better clients and engineers. oDesk gets 10% cut, so I guess they will be happy to get 10% of some 3-figure/hr engineer rather than $10/hr one.

Yeah, but they'd rather get a 10% cut of fifty $10/hr engineers than a 10% cut of one $300/hr engineer.

That's well said. Upwork would rather get 10% of $100 than 10% of $10. And hourly rates are actually going up. US average hourly rate was up 18% (comparing Q1 2014 to Q1 2015).

As someone who has used eLance (and is currently) I've found that the price is only a small factor in the quality you'll receive and -surprise surprise- you can weed out most candidates with up front communications before awarding the project. Once we've awarded a project to a developer (or a shop) we aggressively review code and their communication style. We've had good luck with devs at as little as $20/hr and failures with devs and shops (mostly shops) at as high as $75. The real failure is that non-technical people haven't a clue as to how to evaluate the work their receiving and think that they can go from having no relationship to a finished project in a couple of weeks. If I was completely non-technical and didn't have someone in my corner to evaluate my options for me, I would be scared to death- but then again I probably wouldn't know the pitfalls before me either so...

Our big thing is to fail fast. If you're new to us and giving us the heeby jeebies in the first week we'll cut our losses and find someone else.

If you're awarding a project purely to the lowest bidder then I feel you kind of get what you deserve.

Seems like a productized service opportunity - post, manage, & review technical projects on elance/odesk for non-technical folks.

It would probably be useful, but I don't see how you can make that a product. Wouldn't it have to be very individualized?

I was thinking about that while responding but then you run into the same issue: how do you know the reviewer is any good? It's kind of like on the home improvement shows when the new home buyers buy a house and realize it's a money pit and they all say, "but we paid for an inspection!" At some point there needs to be a trusted party and I personally don't trust any vendor until they've proven their worth to me- then I go back to them without hesitation. eLance/ODesk try and address this with reputation and customer feedback, which is probably as useful and valuable as some third party of unknown reputation.

There's no stopping people from racing to the bottom. There will always be developers and designers willing to give away their work for nearly free.

As a developer, this doesn't need to affect you at all. You're not racing to the bottom. The people in that race are not capable of competing with you on quality (or they wouldn't be fighting for $4/hr work). You can (and should) continue to charge several hundred dollars per hour for your services to clients who can tell the difference between you and those oDesk guys, and who are willing to pay for those services.

You're right though. It would be nice if there were a way to create a market that included neither those clients wanting to build a Facebook clone for $350 nor the developers willing to try. But nobody yet has come up with a way to do so.

Perhaps that's a new service. I think Upwork is the Reddit and you might build a very successful HN like version if you brand and focus on quality and price.

What you are proposing is analogous to the minimum wage argument. While the intentions may be good to help the lower paid workers make more money, what actually will happen is that anyone who isn't worth being paid $50/hr won't be able to get hired. It ends up hurting the very people you are trying to help.

What would be the point of doing that?

The people looking for 10 usd/hr payment would simply go elsewhere. They aren't going to pay 50 usd/hr and you aren't going to accept 10 usd/hr.

A much better solution would be to have a better search functionality.

Full disclosure: I worked at oDesk for 2 years as their staff economist and still consult with the company (I'm now a professor at NYU Stern).

A few points on issues raise in this thread:

(1) I can assure you---and I really should do some blog posts on this---but client/employers are not nearly as price sensitive as people believe. When you try to model employers choosing who to hire from their pool of applicants, you need to work really hard in specifying the model to get demand curves to slope downward. In other words, "price" often gets the wrong sign, meaning it looks like the higher the bid, the more likely an applicant is to get hired. What's going on is that clients can and will pay more for better, more experienced developers and these developers bid accordingly. However as a freelancer, finding those kinds of employers can be a challenge.

To help deal with this search problem, we asked employers up front to state their relative preferences over price and quality. For example, employers could state they were looking for high quality at a high price, or less experienced workers at a lower price. During the experimentation phase, we randomized whether these employer/client preferences were revealed to applying freelancers. We found that we could induce substantial sorting by freelancers to job/employers of the "right" type, raising wages and project sizes at the high end. This feature is now universal and helps freelancers get in front of clients that are a good fit for them.

(2) After very extensive experimentation, oDesk did in fact impose a minimum wage. It was set at price point that improved the quality of people getting hired, but was not so high that jobs weren't being filled. Obviously, this level of minimum wage doesn't touch the high-end of the market, but picking minimum wages is a real balancing act and setting it too high can definitely price some work out of the market. It also "pulls up the ladder" and prevents new workers from getting started in the market, which oDesk understandably wants to avoid.

(3) There is a problem with too many low quality applications. The problem is similar to what's going on in college admissions---because it's cheap to apply, people apply to almost every school, whether or not it's a good fit. oDesk recently started using the Elance "Connects" system that imposes a meaningful quota on applications, which in turn seems to be improving application quality. It is hard problem though, because if you set the quota to high, you get the bad spam equilibrium, and if you set it too low, you choke off liquidity.

(4) There is a problem with inflated reputations---it's a general problem in online marketplaces, particularly those with bilateral reputation systems. However, oDesk has done something quite clever which seems to be working well, which is collecting private feedback from both workers and clients after a contract and then eventually disclosing non-identifiable aggregates of those ratings to future employers/workers. These ratings are far more truthful on a host of measures, are harder to subvert by begging for good feedback and so far, aren't getting inflated.

I think oDesk already have a solution for this issue. When posting a job you can choose how much you are willing to pay:

- Entry Level: I am looking for freelancers with the lowest rates

- Intermediate Level: I am looking for a mix of experience and value

- Expert Level: I am willing to pay higher rates for the most experienced freelancers

You can simple target jobs which require Expert Level. You'll most likely find clients who are willing to pay you $30-$50/hr.

I wish they'd focus on improving the market by weeding out poor contractors and employers. The rating system doesn't work. If you're an employer you post a job and have to wade through dozens of messages from outsourcing companies who usually do a poor job. And if you're a contractor trying to get seen through that pile is a nightmare - the only way to succeed to is to watch for new job posts and immediately bid. If there are already a few bids you don't have a chance.

I've spent a bit of money (over $10k) on oDesk for my mobile app. I used a lot of translators and some artists (Illustrator), and did the programming myself.

Everyone wants you to review them with 5 stars because anything less is bad for business. The quality does greatly vary and so does the pricing. You can get good deals and you can get burned. I once had someone using a keep-active program so they could log more hours. Thankfully I looked close enough at the screenshots to notice.

If anyone can recommend a great mobile designer on oDesk, I'd like to redesign my iOS app: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish-lite/id388918463?...

My account on oDesk is h4labs, not sure how to link to it.

Hey melling -- if you post your job on upwork and send me the job post, we can try to source some good designers for you. you can email me at mbueno at elance-odesk.com

You can invite me to the design project https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~015159f894bb70a226...

the only way to succeed to is to watch for new job posts and immediately bid. If there are already a few bids you don't have a chance.

Speaking as someone who occasionally hires people off of odesk, I've learnt to basically ignore any bids that come in the first few hours and give it at least 3-4 days before starting even to seriously evaluate candidates. I don't see how being the first bid vs the seventh bid should affect your chances of getting the job.

Interesting. I find that a lot of employers look through bids and stop as soon as they think they've found something good. In my experience if you are higher than 5th you won't ever get a message regardless of the quality of those who bid before you.

I've noticed the same thing as a contractor. I only seem to get hired if I am one of the first few bidders. Otherwise there is a slim chance I will get noticed.

There are definite ways to succeed as a contractor without being the first to bid. A while back (when Elance was just Elance) I decided to do some digging to see how the buyer side looked and ended up with some key learnings that landed me most jobs I went for. Nothing too fancy or "hacky", but the majority of bidders - at the time, at least - were lazy and had messaging very similar to everyone else.

I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/@disruptivedave/how-im-gaming-elance-guru...

They didn't even send email about this change, and now I see their "oDesk Team" tool doesn't track time so I can't work. Good news everyone!

fixed now.

They could just have rebranded themselves as "cheap" or "bottom" because that's what those platforms promote. I appreciate the efforts they've tried to improve the platform(s) but they're dealing with something no one was able to fix yet: solve the lack of scalability of work-people matching.

I loved the new interface. There is already a cool review on UpWork here http://www.websiteplanet.com/review/upwork/

I agree with most parts, not about price (nver liked odesk payment way)

Elance-oDesk aka UpWork vs Freelancer.com and the race to the bottom and dismal customer service but I think that when it comes to poor customer service Freelancer.com shines through as the heavyweight champion in this regard across the board.

The "slack-killer" feature is nice, but I don't think this move does anything to Slack's business. In other words, its just clickbait / PR nonsense.

Why do journalists feel the need to artificially position articles like this?

Strangely the title just mentions a slack like feature whereas the article says the CEO desired is as a 'slack killer'. Although that part has no context whatsoever, they just took those words from some longer quote.

Took a quick look at Slack, what does upwork and Slack have in common, it looks to me that they are operating in different markets.

I was wondering when they were going to get rid of the separation of sites. Curious to see if the chat platform really makes any bit of difference.

The live chat feature is a game-changer. We need things fast, tired of sending an inquiry and getting an answer a day later when I usually already settled my issue or found someone local ready to do it.

I mean... really? You don't just say "this is my Skype, what's yours?" when you start a contract?

I do, but it usually takes hours to get a reply back. With the chat feature, when you see someone online, you can get their skype immediately.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com