oDesk Not Reliable

Recently I work 25 hours for a hosting company promoting there products on Yahoo Answers and the hosting company owner filed dispute with oDesk after 2 Week and know what oDesk ruled dispute in favor of the Employer saying that the Work diary showed me answering Yahoo Questions and the contract was about sales and marketing....

oDesk they even understand what the sales and marketing is? I was promoting the hosting products of the company on Yahoo Answers. Thoughts on this issue are welcomed.

 

My experience with odesk is also no different. Most employers are looking to hire 'online slaves' from there. That's why you will notice very few skilled persons there. Elance is much better platform if you have good skills, even DP is better than sites like odesk, freelancer.

 

You have to evaluate the employers as much as they evaluate you. Make sure they're legit. There's a lot that don't like to pay and will do anything to get free work from people.

 

I am an employer on Odesk and things have gone smoothly so far. I am also looking for cheap workers, but I'm not looking to hire 'slaves' .It mainly depends on the work you do there. If you do quality work, you'll get paid more. If you do data entry like everybody else does, there will be a high competition,so the hourly rates will go crazily cheap.

 

then hire me on odesk for seo.... odesk is to hire slaves as far i have seen and there support is most lazy and unreliable.

 

Odesk is probably the leader in the "work-from-home" industry but I think they need to sort out some things that most people don't like with their system.

 

you didn't give them your chat logs and stuff, discussions you had with the employer before you took up the work?

 

Not much different than any other freelancer portal. Rules and terms of service are very lose. In addition to lame to none support.

 

To tell you the truth from an employer's perspective I haven't found much success either. I order something and get delivered something else, and I end up losing the dispute in most cases.

 

If I have to to outsource I use E-Lance. I have found O-Desk unreliable and the work skills are generally lesser.
(no offense to anyone that uses O-Desk to work, I found it a waste of time for me)

 

No offence but... What makes you think answering questions on Yahoo! qualifies as "sales and marketing"?

 

Working on hourly basis comes with its pros and cons. You need to understand the product, its price and your schedule well before bidding for anything on Odesk else you would be no more than a slave for money.

 

This is all that matters. If the employer didn't ask you to do the task you did - or didn't approve it as legitimate work - then it doesn't count. If they agreed that answering Yahoo questions was what they wanted, show the logs/conversation to oDesk.

This has nothing to do with oDesk being reliable or not: it's about a lack of communication, a misunderstanding and an employer being handed a favourable decision because you didn't prove otherwise.

Totally agree. I picked up one of my best (and highest-paying) clients from oDesk. People seem to think they can just wing it, provide crappy service and get paid lots.

Doesn't work like that. Anywhere.

 

i have a strange experience as a developer i only accepted the Tasks i was sure i can do
i build a perfect Profile worked 6 thousand hours and more than 200 fixed price jobs with 4.71 overhaul rating
one day i got hired for a 10 hours job which i completed before week ends and delivered to client
within half an hour he ended the contract gave negative feedback with false and abusive personal attack comment, file a dispute without talking any issue with me
i was not able to understand the situation however i won the dispute.
Later client started abusing me i posted the situation here https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/how-to-get-rid-off-my-abnormal-client-odesk.2695499/

odesk suspended my account for undisclosed reason
the most panic thing was i got informed by my client about suspension

i had some funds in my account and i will get them back on any price even with a scam on oDesk time will decide

 

Elance is getting more and more an attractive option than ODesk.

In fact, fiverr and SEOclerks are getting to be much better options.

One thing you could do is to hold contests for the job. And only get the one who will do the best job there is.

That's what I do when I hire people for making banners.

 

Even Freelancer is a way better option than Odesk, now that they purchase the warrior forum. The only problem with elance is when client has to fund your milestone/escrow, they cannot work around wit the cash on escrow already and the customer service is way worst. Fiverr is just a cheap option and they have no other payment alternatives for paying gigs, just the usual PayPoop. Odesk blows and you are better of going to elance than Odesk.

 

oDesk and Freelancer are partners. They're effectively the same company these days: though they still maintain separate indentities, I believe they're run by the same rules and everything.

 

how much should you have been paid for that much work?

I am not familiar with odesk, however, with things such as freelancer (and or other systems) I have found it better to work in milestones. You might say that for a new client that 4 hours (or whatever realistic minimum that can work for you and the client) is the maximum you might work, before requesting payout. This helps ensure that everyone is happy with the work, and overall progress, and reduces the risk on your end.

Competitions are great, in that you get to see if someone can do a decent job, without locking you into paying them, not to mention in that alot of ideas are brought to the table (100% for free) and we get to make skilled designers dance like sluts in the chance for a few dollars. For people that have no ideas what they want, seeing alot of ideas submitted for free, then helps them take ideas from that that they like and use that as a starting point in their design process.
But to be honest, while I can see the advantages of it, I do disklike crowd sourcing and believe that it actually harms the industry, and works to devalue and undermine the skilled workers. If 10 people enter the competition, all 10 have to work for free, in the hopes that they *might* get a payout, which is often lower then what their work is actually worth. Not to mention, there are times where people have simply taken the ideas submitted, and not paid a winner.

I am, and always will be a fan of the idea, that if people work hard, they should be paid for it. Crowd sourcing goes against this idea.

 

I used to work as employee on oDesk, making my living off of it, and now the past couple years I've been employer and I must say the general population of workers simply sucks there. No, I won't be paying you $10/hr to do the task I could do in half an hour. No, I won't pay you for doing very half-assed job in couple minutes with Google Translate. And even the simples things like "Post me on this forum 4-5 sentences" gets fucked up. Unless you pay more than people in prosperous European countries get by sitting their ass all day long, drinking beer and getting welfare are paid. Makes no damn sense.

 

That's only one form of crowdsourcing, and I agree completely. It's frighteningly close to the "oldest scam in the book" for getting free web content: ask for an original "test" sample, then tell everyone they weren't hired and keep all the free content. That the freelance sites actively encourage turning their providers around, bending them over a table and giving them an unpleasant surprise from behind is, well, unsurprising - but still depressing.

The only time I've ever hired a logo designer, I had two really good candidates so I asked if they'd mind submitting a prelim sketch for a smaller amount, then the better one would get the full job. That worked out well and nobody got screwed.

The other form of crowdsourcing - where a job is subdivided into little bits and farmed out to multiple providers, each contributing part of the whole - works well, though. It's less applicable to most freelance jobs, but there are situations where it makes sense, such as QA for site designs and stuff.