
Ask HN: Elance or Odesk? - kiraken
I&#x27;m a freelance web developer, and i have a decent profile in freelancer, but the website is infested with bot bids and cheap employers, plus indians have completely taken over the website. So i&#x27;m thinking of changing to oDesk or Elance. Which is better?
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davismwfl
Neither honestly. All of these sites are a race to the bottom from what I have
seen.

There have been a lot of questions like this on HN, a semi-recent one:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9030790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9030790)

There was good advice given in that thread as to the ways to get work without
using these sites too.

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justfalcon
I've been having nightmares using oDesk as of late. Almost every job I post is
95% bots and when I try to bid on jobs it's difficult to cut through the noise
when developers are working for $5-10/hr.

My biggest issue with oDesk though is the language barriers (on both
client/freelancer sides). I really wish there would be more accountability for
this...

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brandonlipman
They both are equally difficult to get work on with many of the same issues as
you stated on Freelancer. Strictly looking at interface I really like oDesk.
There's a thread on Hacker News where you can post out what you can do/see
what others are looking for. I would suggest that.

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yetanotheracc
Based on my experience, the quality of workers on Elance is so bad that it is
easy to be the top or the only worthwhile applicant for most jobs. Which makes
it easy to win the good clients when they come to Elance and they do come
occasionally.

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kumkum
oDesk/Elance is no different than freelancer. oDesk was bit better before its
merger with Elance. Now it seems like because of over dependence on algorithms
to weed out the bad, the ecosystem is getting worse.

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JoeAltmaier
I was going to answer, then the explicit racism in the question choked me.

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altern8
How about peopleperhour.com? I've been using it and it's not bad.

There's a screening process to start selling on the site, and there are a more
people from England rather than India.

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deathtrader666
Maybe you could try out Dreamlance.io[1]

We started it precisely to solve the problems mentioned in this thread.

[1] [http://dreamlance.io/](http://dreamlance.io/)

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icpmacdo
An additional question I have, related to these services is, on average how
long does it take for clients your doing work for to pay you?

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gyre007
Both of these are total jooke from my experience. I've yet to see a proper
freelance site for professionals.

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phazmatis
oDesk has mainly repeat clients who don't get frustrated by the 20+
bots/agencies/morons for every 1 real applicant.

