If you're a decent developer in a relatively prosperous country I think you shouldn't waste much time on these types of sites. You're going to be competing against developers in very poor countries who can afford to work for much less than you. You're not going to be competing for great clients but for people that are very price sensitive and demanding. There's exceptions to every generality, but odds are you're better off developing your local client base.
Elance, Odesk and alikes are infested with middlemen posing as an actual developers who are re-hiring poor developers from inidia, pakistan and alike countries in a hit-n-run fashion for pennies.<p>The marketplace is craving for quality local (north american only) freelance service providers powered by strong job platform service.<p>Many enterprises are slowly realizing that outsourcing is what-you-pay-is-what-you-get business and it's a prime time to negotiate services with local quality talents.
I have used Elance for a few years as my primary source of income.<p>Positive:<p>- meritocratic<p>- satisfactory rates. I get as much work as I want at $50 (sometimes more) doing upper four or lower five figure projects<p>- flexibility - I can dump a client, change workload, take a year break, anytime - and come back to where I was. A safety net.<p>- no need to do anything else than talking to clients and building software. No marketing besides the profile, no Linkedin profile, no Twitter, no conferences, no interacting with HR etc useless people<p>- no phone or IM. As a rule, I only communicate through email, which I check once a day, tops<p>Negatives:<p>- huge fees (close to 10% per transaction)<p>- have to actually work to earn, but that's how it is with freelancing Elance or not<p>- overall low prestige, though some clients are top-notch<p>As others pointed, some clients try change the scope. I just send them back quotes for any changes I don't feel like doing for free. Problem solved.<p>Most projects are boring CRUDs, but I also got to do some interesting pieces of software.<p>I appreciate the freedom that Elance gives. Still, I treat it as a convenient alternative to flipping burgers, and I would not recommend it for someone who wants to make a career as a developer.<p>BTW the screen making software is abomination and no one should ever agree to use it.
I've had a couple of engagements that went well. And I've been invited to bid on some team engagements that appeared to be well defined, well managed, and well structured. But the customer "required" 40 hr/week and paid "okay", but not well enough to suck up 40 hours of my week. I would have considered it if it had been deliverable-based rather than time-based.<p>But, as the other commenters have stated, most of the jobs pay too little, require immediate turnaround and/or have initial scopes which turn out to be poorly though-out.
The oDesk software is great. But I don't like that they force taking screen-shots for you to be paid. For one client (in finance industry) we had to disable screen-shots due to NDA and it caused all sorts of problems.<p>But, yes, as others have said, it's hard to make a living if you're in a high-cost-of-living country. My rate on there is $100/hr. I get about 1 inquiry a month and maybe a few jobs a year from it. I did have one long-term job on there at $60/hr so I made it to the top %1 of devs though.
I have worked over 2000 hours on odesk and a smaller number of hours on rentacoder. For me those sites have been a lifesaver and a curse.<p>The reason I ended up on them is because I have chronic health problems and have not been able to get much in the way of health insurance or when I did I wasn't able to really solve my problems. So I have not been able to show up on time and put in the hours or had the energy to hold a regular full time job. Being able to work from home on my own schedule has been necessary.<p>At the moment I have a bit of freelance work that is not from those sites and pays OK. But I may end up going back on odesk or something and scrambling for another project out of necessity.<p>There is a reason those projects are posted on outsourcing sites, which is that the resources available are very limited or at least too limited to pay for US based developers.<p>This initial underfunding usually doesn't bode well for the overall project management.<p>Well let me soften that a bit. Usually the project managers are not completely clueless and are doing the best they can in a situation that is not ideal. That's not always the case.<p>The other developers I have worked with have been very capable contrary to what people say about outsourcing. But more often than not delivering some kind of usable system is required even though there isn't adequate time or developer resources and is never any QA. So you pretty much have to cut corners everywhere or just lose the fee and get a bad report on your record.<p>The thing is that so many people want custom software and development is so expensive that tools like WordPress with plugins etc are taking the place of custom development. Sometimes taking advantage of those tools can make what would be completely ridiculous underfunded projects a few years ago now realistic.<p>I think that is great, but we are actually going to have to change our societal structure because there really aren't going to be enough jobs.<p>Within 10 or 20 years quite a lot of the application/plugin configuration work now being done by programmers and even much of the custom software development will be done by interactive AI programs.<p>The reason I can say that confidently is that we have such a rich ecosystem of for example open source web applications and plugins that have already been developed. More than half of all software projects are minor improvements in areas where problems have been solved dozens or hundreds of times. With such an ecosystem of existing solutions and most problems already solved the level of language understanding or general intelligence required is low and either already accomplished or will be within our reach shortly. And to be clear I'm not just talking about outsourced programming but software development in general. Certainly there are lots of software projects that require true human level intelligence, but the majority of them do not if we take advantage of existing solutions and employ leading-edge AI.
I really can't work for a few dollars an hour or meet the unrealistic high expectation from someone who cannot afford to pay the full price of a project.