

Working with freelancers and telecommuting employers is a pain - elisk

Some of you may find this situation familiar: You need something done, you post a job description - either a one time freelancer that will do the designated task or a full time employee that is going to work with you telecommuting - you get a bunch of applicants, you work for a couple of weeks trying to find the right person, explaining the project in details, answering the same questions over and over, and eventually settling on someone.<p>The first couple of days everything works well, but a week or two down the road you begin to notice first communication breakdown - emails are ignored, tasks are pending, and the developer? not answering his skype for 10 days straight. Is he dead? did he abandon the project? No idea, just you with a half of the work done, and some money that you will never see again.<p>After five-six weeks you start the process all over again.<p>I've been there countless times, on both sides, and it always looks the same, you pay the money, a few weeks go by, features are not coming in as fast as you initially expected, and the dev starts loosing interest as time goes by - no face to look at in the morning means you can simply ignore the person. Not a fun way of doing business.<p>What is needed is some kind of a freelance report card - where employees and employers can post their own experience working with the other party, think of it as linkedin with employees/employers keeping tabs on one another. Item delivered on time? that's +5 points, two weeks late? that's -10 points. Your client haven't paid in 6 weeks? that's -50 points.<p>At first it will need to build up reputation and network - but once the network is sufficiently large, both sides will go to this report card to check on future employees/employers to see how well they worked in the past. No score on a particular freelancer? it might not be that good of a deal to make.<p>Good freelancers/employees will work harder to maintain their report card, and will request from employers to post a report.<p>You might say "But that's what Elance is for", wrong - elance is a platform designed to maximize profits for themselves - they care not for the employees nor the employers, and if you've ever worked with a freelancer from Elance you know that the scoring system there is not really genuine, and people (freelancers) often change names when they get bad rep and continue onward.<p>To fix this, the freelancer report card should care only about creating profiles of work-providers and work-consumers, with full on details about the person as much as required - Facebook, LinkedId, past clients, past employees, and sincere commenting/scoring that would require users to provide genuine information about themselves, and work to maintain their report card in good condition.<p>Reporting on employees/employers would require connecting at least one social network profile, and I think that the "quality" and "trustworthiness" of a particular profile would be calculated based on the number of "positive" connections that link to the profile - if you plugin a fake facebook account with 2-3 friends, and zero users in the report card system, you won't get a high score, but the more social networks you plugin, the more active it is, the more followers it has, and the more users are linked both in the system and in your social network the higher score you'll get.<p>"Unregistered" users will still be reported on - so if you work with a freelancer that isn't registered to the system, you still can report on them, providing social network handles and some review details. The only thing that "registered" users can do is to report on others and attach different social graphs to the report card.<p>I'd like to hear your opinion on this, and answer questions if you have them.
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gexla
Good developers likely wouldn't bother with something like this just like they
don't bother with Odesk or Elance. They simply have enough demand they don't
need to jump through these sorts of hoops.

Another issue with a report card system is the different standards from
different clients. Interestingly, there seems to be a seriously high
percentage of developers charging third world / poverty rates who get
excellent reviews (I don't have stats to back this up.) Are they getting 5
star reviews because they are as good as any other developer getting five star
reviews? I'm guessing someone specifically shopping for a developer charging
$5 or less / hour is far less demanding than someone shopping for the best
developers available.

The problem with freelancing is that every freelancer is running a business
and while most freelancers may be good technicians, most aren't good business
people. Coding may be easy for these people, but running a business is crazy
difficult. Most freelancers would probably be better off having someone else
handle much of the management layer.

You get what you pay for. How many people have seen this scenario...

Your buddy is trying to build an app and wants any advice you might have. You
cringe when you hear the first candidate for developing the site is quoting a
rate that you know the developer can't live on (this shows inexperience and a
lack of understanding on how to set rates.) You cringe again to see that your
buddy is happy to find someone at such a bargain (your buddy also hasn't done
the math to see the new developer won't be able to make a living) and makes
the selection. Weeks later the developer disappears (maybe he lost his
internet connection, maybe he had a better paying offer he couldn't pass up.)

Also, your quote.

"What is needed is some kind of a freelance report card - where employees and
employers can post their own experience working with the other party, think of
it as linkedin with employees/employers keeping tabs on one another."

And.

"...no face to look at in the morning means you can simply ignore the person."

A freelancer is not an employee. A freelancer may have to juggle multiple
projects and certainly has to juggle multiple roles (sales, accounting,
development, etc.) The person you hired shouldn't ignore you, but don't think
you should have the same attention from this person as you would an employee.
Of course, that's all part of the expectations both sides set at the
beginning.

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paulhauggis
odesk has a rating system. It usually gives you a pretty good idea on the
quality of the freelancer.

