oDeskReviews 140

Odesk has a really good concept. My company hired a Freelancer from Odesk and the best part is that i can check his activity level any time and also can see monitor screenshoots from the freelancer's computer. 5 Points for the site and 0 for the support. I am waiting from 20 days to change the company owner name, because now the name is wrong and invoices are also wrong. They sad to me verification process takes between 7 and 10 days but now is the 20th day and still nothing. I have also tried to reach them on the phone but nobody answer. After that i write with live support chat and they take my phone number and told me after 1 or 2 hours they will call me back. It was 4 days ago and still nobody connect me.

I don't understand why people complain about oDesk in a few areas...

It's not oDesk that offers jobs for $2 an hour... it's people who use oDesk that do. It's competition at it's finest. If you can't afford working for $1.50 an hour (which i hope most of you don't) then oDesk isn't for you. This isn't their fault as the service works well to connect employers and contractors. And ultimately this is for many kinds of programming and virtual office type jobs. I find that Illustrator jobs as well paid and the offers aren't ridiculously low.

It's not oDesk's fault that the work paid for was $#*!ty and out of spec. You are given the chance to see people's portfolios and interview them. When they offer work for a dollar an hour, don't be made with what you receive. How does oDesk have anything to do with a person halfway around the world not doing the work for you. Their job is to connect you, not be a supervisor. If you don't trust online work, the oDesk isn't for you.

If you live in the United States forget this site. There are a high volume of so called "Software Developers" who's hourly rate is $2.00/hr or less. Today I found a job that had been filled at. 83 cents an hour. What amazes me even more is that companies would trust their data and code to someone in a foreign country charging nothing. Remember you get what you pay for and in today's world security is everything.

Look at the link right from their site:

https://www.odesk.com/jobs/VBA-EXCEL-EXPERT-MUST-GOOD-PROGRAMMING-MACROS_~01d8c5a3a*******?search_result=1

STAY AWAY from odesk and their freelancers.
Most of the freelancers are liars, they say 100 things and can do maybe 1 if you have luck. They log in on odesk and do some things checking, and put all of this as debug. Even if we dont ask to debug the freelancers will do things, that will not help anything for your site, but the money is counting. This means that even if you are not agreed with the work the freelancer done, you have no other option to pay! Cause the money will be taken away from your paypal. Than if you try to tell this to odesk, they will say " You have to ask the freelancer for a refund" if they dont wanna, than contact us back again. This is very smart told from odesk, but just bunch of CRAP! Which freelancer will return the money from India or East Europe?

Trust me peeps stay away from odesk, and certainly DO NOT apply your paypal to them, you will be the biggest loser...
For us NEVER AGAIN odesk, we better pay $250 per hur to a normal company, than you will be sure that things will be fixed as it should be and you won't loose money than. Learned a very good lesson, hope others will read this before hiring some freelancer on odesk.

I have mostly loved working from oDesk and I have had some wonderful jobs and wonderful clients. ODesk recently changed its interface, which if a little complicated at first, is actually very workable and it looks great. However, I have experienced some serious technical difficulties which has resulted in a serious setback to my normally 100% profile. ODEsk's help desk and chat system has gone completely down the drain. The agents haven't a clue what they're talking about, and refuse to admit there is any problem at all. It is extremely frustrating and oDesk is certainly not doing itself any favours by adopting this attitude. I wonder if I'm the only person to have experienced problems when trying to contact someone on oDesk's helpline. Chats used to be pretty well immediate; now there is a minimum of 20 minutes wait, if you are lucky.

These people are committing fraud on a massive scale. We lost over $50,000 and eventually our business was wiped out because of the so called SEO experts you hire on their site. ODesk does nothing to get your money back when you have been ripped off and it is because they make money on every hour you waste. Worse still are the tactics of their debt collection agency 'True Accord' who will send you endless emails when you refuse to pay.
I intend to lodge a complaint with the FBI and the local state police. ODesk know their contractors do not have the skills that ODesk represent and therefore they are knowingly engaged in fraud and blatantly misrepresent their contractors skills. Don't get sucked in - many of the contractors we used were just pure scammers. Don't think it won't happen to you. One of their contractors managed to upload a trojan to our server to send traffic to porn sites. What a joke!

Nice site to seek for a job, personally I like Elance more but oDesk gives me very good contracts thus I'm working on both sites.

ODesk's advantages:

- Lot of clients, many clients who are willing to pay good money for very good service
- When you have a rating people keep inviting you to projects. Some invites are very lucrative!
- Overall experience is good, there is no catches on a site, it's fair, it's not overcharge you or take money for example if you just won a project, like freelancer.com does.

Odesk's disadvantage:

- Support answer tickets very slowly. I've written ticket 5 days ago still no reply. No urgent help expected.

- LOT of competition, some project may have 50-200 bidders, it's very pity when you see a project you may do better then anyone else but you understand that it pointless to bid - client most likely stop reading proposals after 30-40 bidders

- Much more then on Elance (but much less then on Freelancer.com) very cheap clients who seeking someone who will work for them for rate 1-3$ per hour and expect to do Google like projects.

- I find system for searching projects and overall experience too simple, it's not functional, for example I can't even sort project by amount of bidders to find projects where bidding is reasonable. Everything too big and contain just portion of information. Working area little more complicated then I would like to see it.

-HUGE waiting time before you may withdraw funds - 6 days. I then withdraw them to my bank account and from time to time it takes up to 12-14 calendar days before I can get funds I've earned.

- Too much attention to numbers, oDesk hours, tests, scores. Examples:
I am fluent in English but write with lot of errors, I have 3/5 points in English, while some guy from Asia had 4.5 point while he can't say a word on Skype and understand just small portion what is written to him (real story told by my client).
I'm Ruby and Rails expert, I may do and did almost anything on those languages but I'm unable to pass their test because they questions about how to make one thing in 10 different way while I know only 3 of them. What does this question tests? Memory? I'm able to achieve a goal and don't feel like I need to know all methods to do that.
Odesk hours - I'v been rejected on several very lucrative projects because client thinks that quality of product comes with 500-1000 oDesk hours, while I work always with fixed price and have no hours at all.

But despite of those disadvantages I'm still oDesk's client because they have I think the biggest market share and despite of everything it is possible to find very good contracts, but experience of finding one could be frustrating.

This is a great site too get help with any tasks that you can outsource online. I like it because there's a lot of talented people on there offering services at good prices so you can find people who are in your local neighborhood or abroad. You can also get a pretty good level of quality from them. It's always painful when the website takes a cut out of every payment on there; however, I just appreciate that everything it does and I think it's worth it.

There is a Work Diary in there with random screenshots of the person working for you so that does give you a level of confidence that you're not paying for work when somebody was just goofing off. So overall my experiences have been good and the site makes it very easy to hire somebody without having to do all the administrative tasks.