The global economic downturn took effect a year ago, and millions of people around the world right now are jobless, because big companies forced themselves to lay off their employees or even close their business because of bankruptcy of the Wall Street issue. The big hit was on America and United Kingdom, where most of the major companies that being affected are existed, and forcing their employees to be laid off. Not only America and United Kingdom were being affected, but also all of the countries around the world. But, there’s a catch. If we have a chance to find alternative ways to make money for ourselves, why don’t we try for alternative jobs like freelance jobs opportunities? Freelance jobs are meant to be one of the most fascinating jobs that existed today, and it has been practiced for years, either a quick work, short-term work, long term work and eventually, permanent work. There are lots of freelance jobs which you can choose, but the thing is, you may find it hard manually, but if we use the internet, we can find it easily by just one keyword to search. Right now, there are many sources which you can find various freelance jobs, but if you are looking for a professional site that many freelance job opportunities are being posted and you might have a chance to apply for them base on their qualifications, then we are talking about oDesk.
But what is oDesk anyway for those who are newbie’s around here? The On Demand Global Workforce – oDesk is a professional site which is more on freelance job opportunities where you can act as a job hunter or a service provider. It is where all buyers and sellers meet in one place, or at the same time, clients and applicants. It requires you to sign up for a free account, with no startup fees, and it’s easy. The after you sign up, you can now start looking for available jobs or post your own job, but there’s another catch. oDesk has an examination required for you in order to become a verified buyer or seller in the company, and it means that you need to know about oDesk’s features and rules in any form. If you have passed the examination, then you are now a verified buyer or seller, and you can continue to search anything that would you like to apply or you want to hire. There are lots of freelance job opportunities in oDesk under the Web Development, Writing and Translation, Customer Service, Sales and Marketing, Administrative Support, Software Development, Networking and Information Systems, Design and Multimedia and lastly, the Business Services, and all of them have sub categories that you would like to choose what fits for your freelancing skills. oDesk also has a referral program, which you can be paid as much as $50 for just referring a person here on oDesk. When it comes to payments, they usually use five different payment methods like oDesk Debit Mastercard, Moneybookers, Paypal, Direct Deposit or ACH, and Wire transfer which fees are also being practiced by the oDesk team, and you can request a withdrawal anytime you want as long as you want the money. This is how oDesk has provided for those who are jobless or anyone in the world who wants to earn extra money for their precious efforts, especially as we are still under the global economic downturn.
After having initiated a number of projects on oDesk with varying success, my biggest concern is that the feedback system is completely unreliable for ranking the developers who will be providing services.
Feedback you make appears to be weighed by the amount of payment you make so that providers who abandon jobs and receive no payment for those jobs are then not penalized. Despite abandoning job after job they retain a high rating. This encourages providers to bid far lower than they can accomplish the job for and then abandon the job when they realize they can’t do it. It’s a tremendous time waste for the buyer. But that is not the worst of the feedback system. I even had a provider who hacked into my system to extort money from me when they failed to complete the project because despite their earnest efforts they simply were not qualified. Understandably I gave them very poor ratings and complained about them hacking my site, but despite the complaint having been verified by oDesk support, when I checked again any details of the incident were gone.
Looking over the online work history of other providers who have performed poorly for me, I have seen numerous cases where negative feedback from buyers other than myself appears to have been erased. I am extremely generous with praise when a provider even comes close to fulfilling specified requirements, and I generally pay a bonus when they do so. When I make a negative comment about a developer it is only done when they REALLY mess up. It is dishonest that my negative comments and those of others are erased when my positive comments are featured so prominently.
Overall the oDesk provider rating system is not credible and introduces too much risk into the IT process. I recognize the company’s need to have a rating system that doesn’t thin the ranks of developers too much, but that must be balanced with the need for a rating system that rewards providers when they pay attention to detail in reading specifications and when they exercise diligence in completing them. I fully support that a feedback system should provide an opportunity to improve on poor feedback when received, but feedback should be improved by the developer’s gaining technical knowledge and experience at completing projects, not by the oDesk administrator hitting the delete button on negative feedback.
I have used both Elance and oDesk in the past and I find Elance’s system and site much easier to navigate and the qualify of providers on Elance, very hard to beat! Although I could be biased, I think that Elance’s system is beneficial to both providers and buyers equally.