How much did I make from oDesk in 2008?

I recently tweeted that I made most of last year's income from oDesk.com.

Well, according to my accounting, from oDesk alone I made just shy of $40,000 last year.

That's pretty good, considering I took a short break, and when I got back into the swing of things I decided to only work about 20/hrs a week (sometimes more, depending on client need). It helps that I get more things done in 20hrs/wk than some people do for 40hrs/wk, though. :)

Obviously I could have made way more.

But besides being a valuable income stream, oDesk has given me something much more valuable than that: freedom. Freedom to work my own hours, sure, but more importantly, freedom to do what I want. And what I've always wanted to do is be an author. Yes, that's right, Mr. Computer Programmer wants to be Mr. Writer.

Since I started freelancing, I've never really had the time until recently to unlock all the thoughts bouncing around in my head and unleash them on the world. When I was in college, there were huge gaps between classes that I filled with anime, video games, writing and code. But when I started freelancing, an incessant nagging in the back of my head ('money! money! money!') kept driving me to spend all my free time thinking about work, working on work.

My free time became a narrow slot that I could only fill with one thing. Should I play a video game? Read a book, watch an anime, rent a DVD or write? My free time was so thin I felt like I'd cut myself if I wasn't careful with how I used it.

When a long term contract on oDesk ended in 2008, I was between jobs with nothing much to do. So I wrote a little as I browsed for jobs; I had enough in my savings account to skate by for months without work, if I wanted. I went back and revisited old works, frowned at how bad they were and toyed with them in my spare time. I kept peeking at job openings, but my A-game was absent when trying to land a few big, "easy" jobs.

Then I realized something: with my skills and expertises, I didn't have to spend every waking moment working. After all, people always need something done. 

So I said to myself, "Why not split my time between writing and work?"

So I did.

Because with oDesk, I could, and with oDesk, it was simple: apply to jobs that would take less than 20 hours a week. That's it. There are thousands of those jobs on oDesk -- maybe even tens of thousands. When one job ended, there was no mad scramble looking for new work. The market place there is huge. If you have talent then you've got a job waiting there for you. And me? I've got it up to HERE, baby. I made a hand symbol just now; you know, the hand at the neck thing to convey how much of IT I've got.

So, thanks to oDesk I can continue to spend time making kick-ass web stuff for clients, and use the rest to pull out my hair out over my insecurities about my writing or smashing my head against the wall because of writer's block or whatever weird thing it is that week that makes me think that every word spilled from my fingertips is crap.

But hey, that's freedom for you.

The tools! Use the oDesk tools!

Wow, I totally cannot stress this enough: monitor your providers. If the job is really important, hire a project manager.

I was browsing through this thread on the oDesk community forums; posted a few months ago, but it recently surfaced again when someone posted a little ditty on "Providers that lie" further down the thread.

One problem both buyers encountered was the assumption that they didn't need to monitor their providers at all. It is vital to communicate constantly and ask for tangible updates from your provider when starting a new relationship. You don't know him, he doesn't know you. He might think he's doing "OK work" and in your eyes it's garbage. He might be trying to cheat you and sweet-talk his way out of it. You might not have explained your project clearly and now the provider is wandering astray.

oDesk has plenty of tools -- the work diary, the time analyzer, etc -- to keep you and your provider on the same page, but you have to use them to be an effective buyer. This is less of an issue once you and your provider have established a bond of trust, but before then you're just tenuous associates.

Another problem both buyers faced was not knowing the difference between the hourly model and the fixed-price model.

The hourly model is based on labor: they work, you pay them. This is similar to hiring a contractor to come paint your house. You pay him by the hour, he paints. If you're going over-budget, you can stop paying him, but that means he'll stop working -- even if he's only painted half the house.

The fixed-price model is based on the tangible end-result. You're not paying for the labor involved in creating the product

With both the hourly model and the fixed-price model, you have the same goal: completing the product. However, in the hourly model you pay for the labor to complete the product, where-as in the fixed-price model you're paying for the product itself.

By now, I'm sure you're wondering what this has to do with the thread I mentioned earlier. Here's the answer.

You can't refund labor.

You can't turn back the clock and give the provider his hours back. If he's been working on your project for 6 hours straight and suddenly you decide you don't like how it's turning out, you can't just straight gank his cash -- you can ask for a refund, and they may feel obligated to give you one out of a sense of professional courtesy (this happened to me with one provider), but not necessarily.

Ah, but what about fraud, right? What happens to cheaters?

First we have to distinguish the difference between fraud and disputed hours. Fraud means the provider was "cheating" -- they said they were working, but they weren't. No labor, no pay. However, disputed hours can stem from a few issues: maybe the provider was working on your project, but he wasn't working diligently because he was too busy chatting with his girlfriend by IM in the background. Maybe he was working, but doing it abnormally slow, trying to bill extra hours.

oDesk has policies in place for dealing with disputed hours and fraud. I've never dealt with disputed hours myself, but oDesk publishes their dispute policy online.

You're probably asking yourself right about now why you should bother with the hourly model at all. After all, isn't it safer to work with a fixed price project?

Maybe.

For complex projects, an hourly model is the way to go. When you use fixed-price, the more time a provider spends working on your project, the less they make an hour. So it's in the providers best interest to take short-cuts and be messy. For a smaller project, such as a personal website, fixed-price is much more suitable: the provider has plenty of time to finish the assignment. No need to rush or be sloppy.

An hourly model assures the provider that he has time to work on polishing your project and making sure everything is going as smoothly as possible. If a serious issue comes up without warning, he has the option of fixing it the correct way instead of the fast way.

To sum it up, let's say you're going to a restaurant:

The restaurant employs the hourly model to pay the chefs to cook food for the customers.
The restaurant is paying for the labor.

The customers employ the fixed-price model to pay the restaurant for their delicious meal.
The customer is paying for the product.

I hope that analogy made more sense to you than it did to me.

Anyway, use the tools. Keep an eye on your provider. Ask for tangible goods -- screenshots aren't good enough. If the provider says he isn't ready to set it up the project for you yet, ask the provider to use oDesk Share. oDesk Share allows you to view a provider's desktop in real time.

oDesk will connect you with qualified (and sometimes not) providers: it's up to you to manage them. If that sounds like hard, try to hire a project manager who will micromanage everything for you.

Man, I love me some bold text. Bold, yet smooth.

Logins! Logins! Logins!

A few days ago I received the IT equivalent of a battlefield promotion and suddenly found myself tasked with commanding and conquering a team of developers that I had to first assemble. I was given end-to-end hiring responsibilities, and since we decided to use oDesk to search for talented developers, it meant that I now had three accounts: provider, buyer, and now the enigmatic "Company User."

Also, there's this reality-bending feat:

Yeah, that's two of me. As if one weren't bad enough.

Frankly, what I need right now is some kind of keychain. I've got 3 logins for oDesk alone, and God knows how many more for various sites on the Internet. Hotmail, Yahoo!, Google... I know there's software out there to "coalesce" the experience, but that software doesn't integrate with the browser at all, isn't stored in the cloud so I can easily move from one computer to another seamlessly, doesn't have an easy-to-use every day interface...

Hey, I'm a PROGRAMMER! Maybe I'll make a website and Firefox Addin that does just that and become a millionaire. Man can dream, can't he?

Hm, I'll probably post more about the oDesk hiring experience later. Seems like good blog fodder, don't you think?

oDesk Team Software vs Privacy Concerns.

You know, when I first started using oDesk Team (that's the software that monitors your keyboard / mouse activity and periodically took screenshots), I used to be super paranoid about what kind of pictures it was taking.

I was always staring at my Work Diary screenshots, mumbling to myself when I accidentally tabbed to the wrong browser window and oDesk Team happened to take a screen-shot right at that very moment.

Hasn't been like that for months, to be honest. Months? More like a year. Christ, how long have I been on oDesk? Feels like forever.

One thing I learned about the Work Diary's screenshots: Nobody cares. Nobody. Not unless you're cheating the buyer, or the buyer thinks you're cheating him, or the buyer's new to the system and is staring in wonderment at the screenshots page.

The real appeal must be that "safety-net" feeling for both buyers and providers: the buyer can't cheat you because you've got proof (work diary) that you worked those 8 hours, and the provider can't cheat the buyer because the buyer has proof the provider wasn't working at all (again, work diary to the rescue).

Don't get me wrong, providers try every once in awhile: you'll see an angry buyer posting on the community forums because some guy in Urbekestianiza was running a simple mouse macro and stole about $1k from this guy, followed shortly by oDesk personnel announcing they're "handling the issue." I suspect they've got some guy that just monitors the forums all day, waiting for those kinds of posts to crop up so he can alert the rest of the A-Team.

Honestly, I'm surprised at the number of "cheats" that still try to make some quick illegitimate cash. There's, like, a 2 week lag time before the money is actually available for withdrawl in your account, and then there's another 3-5 days for the withdrawl to be posted and end up on your Payoneer MasterCard or ACH-enabled bank account.

There are way easier, way more successful ways to scam someone out of money than trying to fool them on oDesk. The company is just way too alert and quick when handling these kinds of issues.

Back to the issue of privacy: eh? Seriously, what are you doing while you're working that makes you feel as if your privacy is being invaded? Typically when I'm working that's all I'm doing -- working. Not chatting, maybe listening to music, definitely not video-camming nubile young women.

Of course, maybe it is because I have another, dedicated work computer -- the one I'm typing on right now has a billion different windows I wouldn't want anyone to see. My work computer is completely clean: some dev tools, that's it.

This post went on way too long.

Using oDesk as a buyer: the other side of the coin

So, I recently created an oDesk Buyer's account -- I wanted someone to redesign the front-end of a website. I don't have the time, skills, or aesthetics sense to do it myself as quickly as I want, and so like all great Americans, I'm willing to throw money at the problem until it goes away. =D

I chose oDesk because I'm comfortable with how it works from the provider's point of view. There's a few downsides to having both types of accounts (they're not tied together Single Sign On style): you can't use the same email address you use as a provider, although if you're using gmail you can use an address like mymail+odesk@gmail.com and it'll work.

Signing up was pretty easy -- took me about a minute, 30 seconds of which was trying to figure out whether it was a + or a - in the trick I just described above.

Lots of candidates, but I've noticed some providers just spray and pray -- not reading the cover letter is a good example of this, but inviting a provider to an interview and then having them cancel a day later due to them trying to "maintain their job application quota" is kinda like, "omg wtf?"

I've narrowed it down to about 3 providers -- I know for sure I'll pick one of them, so I wish I could close or hide the job entry so new applicants can't waste their time applying to it.

Also, interestingly, one of the provider's emails went straight to gmail's spam box. The weird thing is, nothing in the email seems like it would have marked it as spam.

Anyway, so far so good. It's kind of a pain working at oDesk + buying from oDesk, since I keep having to sign out of one account and into another, but, besides that, big thumbs up, yo.