

Email I received last night is one reason I no longer work on freelancer markets - loucal

Names changed to protect the (not so) innocent.<p>----Start email----
Hi Modest Freelancer,<p>I hired you on oDesk more than a year ago.<p>I have hired 50 people on oDdesk and they have all given me 5-stars ratings except you. You gave me one star.<p>I&#x27;d like to offer you the opportunity to rate me 5 stars.<p>So far, I have not rated our project together. If you do it, I will give you 5-stars in return.<p>If you don&#x27;t, I will give you 1 star also, dropping your rating significantly.<p>Let&#x27;s be frank. Very few people deserve just one star, I certainly didn&#x27;t. I don&#x27;t know what made you react to me so angrily, but you got paid for your project, so I couldn&#x27;t have been that bad, not with all these other great ratings. Whatever happened was just a miscommunication.<p>If you go to your &quot;past projects&quot; you should be able to find the project and change the rating, or contact customer support to do so.<p>Let me know what you decide. Thanks.<p>- The Man
----End email----<p>FWIW odesk responded promptly when I alerted them to this and they said it is not tolerated.  Ironically odesk feedback closes after 14 days so after I told him I would not be strongarmed he told me &#x27;Now you get the one star&#x27; and &#x27;You&#x27;re your own worst enemy&#x27;(I love that one).  Presumably, that was before he actually tried to change my feedback and realized he could not.
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loucal
I have found many more problem clients than decent ones on sites like these.
When I do find a good one, I generally finish the work very quickly in order
to impress them and it often turns out they only had a day or two of real work
to get done. I usually get great feedback, but when I ask if there is any more
work I get things like 'we are running out of runway, so just waiting for
funding' and 'we got offers for funding we just didn't like the terms' (that
"founder" squashed the project within weeks after not getting the offer he
wanted which makes me wonder if he ever believed in his product at all) and I
end up back searching for new clients and spending inordinate amounts of time
finding worthwhile contracts. I have been trying to refocus to more word of
mouth networking as it seems this brings much higher quality contracts. What
does the HN community think?

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alasdair_
Increase your rates. The people willing to pat well for your area ("well" may
mean as low as $25 if you are in the Philippines of course) generally
appreciate the value of good developers more than the people offering
literally a couple of dollars per hour.

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jibly
Wow this is pretty insane. It's crazy how those sites seem to have lowered the
standard of freelancers significantly. I also find it nearly impossible for a
pro freelancer to not be competing with $5h guys that are mass replying on
jobs (and usually get them). You should check out:
[http://www.cnnected.com](http://www.cnnected.com) an experiment to (maybe)
solve this problem.

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joshcrowder
I like the idea of this, how large is the list at the moment? I'd like to talk
more about it can you drop me a message josh[at]seriousfox.co.uk

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paulhauggis
I stopped taking jobs on Odesk because of things like this. I find that the
less a company is willing to pay a freelancer (I've seen $2/hour max on
Odesk), the less professional they will act.

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hahainternet
I have also given up on trying to find Go contracting on these markets. It's
just a complete waste of time if you try and offer anything that's well
planned.

