After working +1200 hours in oDesk

As a developer living in the US my experience with Odesk is that you cannot make a living doing just Odesk. But you can still achieve good pay rate on certain projects if you choose carefully. I used to charge , for example $600+ for a 3 hour job in the weekend. and if you are lucky you may end up building relationship with your client and get other projects outside of Odsek.<p>If anybody looking to get into Odesk, this is my advice on how to get over the chicken and egg problem(You are trying to build your work history while clients looking for your work history).<p>Find projects that can be partially or even fully prototyped and send the live link in the bidding. If the project is genuine most clients will bite. If they don&#x27;t , write off your effort as marketing expense!<p>Also never bid for a project if you think you cannot get a 5 star rating after the delivery.<p>You can see my odesk profile below , all my ratings are 5 star. No surprise!<p><a href="https://www.odesk.com/users/~014c438dbb17ea9c46" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.odesk.com&#x2F;users&#x2F;~014c438dbb17ea9c46</a>

To me, the most revealing part of this post is how much of a difference the profile picture made: adding a fake beard increased response rate threefold!<p>I am often told that I look very young; I am 27 and people think I&#x27;m 20. I&#x27;ve never really thought much of it, but it might explain how disrespectful some people (especially in academia) have been treating me. Maybe I should grow a beard.

The hours logged in his graph (per my understanding) do not show the work spent on searching and applying for jobs. And also tweaking your CV. There is a lot of overhead in doing this.<p>And then you have to log hours for: accounting, banking, and government papers. And then deduct banking and accountants fees. And then deduct your hardware fees (since you are paying for them yourself). No need for an office since you are can do it from home.<p>So is this really profitable or sustainable on the long term?<p>I live in a poor third-world country and I consider my break-up rate to be around $60&#x2F;hour. There can be only one of these scenarios if you work for a lesser rate:<p>1. You cut on some expenses like an accountant&#x2F;medication that might result in a disaster later.<p>2. You over-work yourself and you work on week-ends&#x2F;no vacation.<p>3. You live with your parents, so you don&#x27;t pay (or share) the bills.

I&#x27;m ashamed to admit this.<p>I worked for someone on RentACoder back in the day. I got paid to develop software that is now used by over 20 million people. My cut for a week of work? $200.<p>Never again... (and years later I&#x27;m still periodically asked by the owner of the company if I&#x27;m interested in new projects for the same pay rate)

Sadly, the linked site is a classic case of &#x27;tab closed, didn&#x27;t read&#x27;:<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/ZsZxfP3.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;ZsZxfP3.png</a><p>I am of course referring to <a href="http://tabcloseddidntread.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tabcloseddidntread.com&#x2F;</a>. <a href="http://crapshaming.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;crapshaming.tumblr.com&#x2F;</a> would fit too.

The fact that his response rate got higher after he photoshopped a beard on his face needs more explanation, was he applying to get those jobs more than pre-beard? If he was applying about the same that&#x27;s really interesting, and makes me sad as a beardless guy.

8 months worth of work for only $20k? This doesn&#x27;t sound like a successful experience - more like you were highly over worked and under paid. It probably would have been more beneficial to have marketed your services for 80 hours and be able to land a $20k project as well as a lasting client.

I have left odesk, because of their ridiculously unjust behaviour in a dispute between a client and me. The &quot;support&quot; people there lack basic ethical principles like &quot;in case of a conflict hear both parties involved&quot; and just suspended my account. It&#x27;s a place, where arbitrariness is an everyday occurrence. I think, it is better to avoid a place, where people with such weak ethics have power over one&#x27;s business.

How do you get people to pay you? The couple of times I&#x27;ve worked through oDesk the person disappeared after I delivered.

odesk is awful and should be put to rest peacefully.<p>at least for people hiring (i know first hand), and i read in this thread that also people being hired get ripped off.<p>the team at odesk are basically sitting behind their desks but more so behind their legal agreements, collecting their clean share without doing any work, without applying common sense or due process.<p>do not use odesk. leave it for good! odesk deserves to die peacefully.

Something like this for the graph? <a href="http://jsfiddle.net/6sdH6/3/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jsfiddle.net&#x2F;6sdH6&#x2F;3&#x2F;</a><p>Highcharts documentation is incomplete. In order to override the tooltip configurations for a given series you need to define the tooltip object inside it.<p>I also added a different axis for the hours, but this results in a Highcharts bug where a time series point does not show a tooltip when there is a series defined after that one with a higher y value.

How can you get a software developer jobs in oDesk with so many people from India in there? Not against them, but they can do so low rates that even if I work 80h&#x2F;week I still can&#x27;t get a decent income. I mean below 8 USD&#x2F;h. Living costs are so low in there?

I think at least twice in this article you wrote &#x27;contractor&#x27; when you meant to say &#x27;client&#x27;. A contractor is the worker (you in this case) and the client is the person hiring you.

What was your income after that much if I may ask? I always wondered how it compared to just getting word of mouth referrals from freelancing.

I wonder if you are searching for something about SEO, if you should just always go with the first result.

Maybe I&#x27;ll try a fake beard myself. A neckbeard even.

I tried oDesk last year. There are so many people that are only willing to pay &lt;$5US&#x2F;hour for a developer (and I even saw listings like &quot;Non-negociable!!&quot;.<p>After getting through all of this, the clients left over that are even willing to pay a decent wage expect way too much. Developer, designer, and product manager for one fee.<p>I can&#x27;t tell you how many potential clients I turned down because of this.<p>I gave this up and found a decent part-time contracting gig on craigslist.<p>Odesk should be renamed to: &quot;unrealistic expectations&quot;