Is oDesk a scam

Answer 1

I really don't think sites like oDesk are a scam but you do have to be careful when you are dealing with both providers and buyers as well. I personally have had the most success with Elance, the leading online marketplace on the 'net. To date, I have completed over 800+ Elance projects and highly recommend Elance to buyers, experienced freelancers, and newbies too.

The key to succeeding as either a buyer or provider is to be clear about what you need/what you can do and always be willing to communicate and scrutinize buyers/providers before working with them. By doing this, individuals can definitely succeed on sites like Elance, oDesk, etc.

Good luck!

Kristi

Here are a few best practices I find:

1. Try not to hire someone with less than 100+ hours of odesk experience, let someone else deal with the newbie and train the person.2. Try to find a contractor that is in the same timezone so you can monitor the progress and not wake up realize he went down the wrong path and you are billed 8 hrs.3. If you interviewed someone will good review, insisted on dealing with that account, don't get talked into bait and switch to deal with an unknown account. People with good review cares about their reputation, people doesn't have any review can create a new account.4. Review the work every day and dispute it right away, once it falls outside the disputable window, it will be difficult to dispute.5. Give very detail instructions. Use Skype as much as you can. English comprehension skill is important.6. Ditch the guy if he is not good. It is meant to make your life easier, if you ended up spending more time communicating or getting frustrated, it is not worthed, put up a craiglist ad at your local college. As lot of smart local kids out there.7. Hire from countries that have good average feedback. http://www.odesk.com/community/oconomy Sometimes you get what you pay for in terms of quality, remember, the feedback should already factor in the price, if average feedback is a 3, that means someone really got screw and gave a feedback of 1.