oDesk - linking freelancers and service providers
Submitted by Robert Douglass on Wed, 04/30/2008 - 11:19.
Tagged: drupal
This very useful Drupal partly Drupal site is also a good place to go if you are a Drupal freelancer looking for work or a Drupal contractor looking to hire. It isn't limited to Drupal, but there are lots of listings for Drupal jobs and Drupal service providers.
UPDATE: Looks like only the community section is running Drupal.
.thumbnail.JPG "Brixen/Bressanone 2005")
Nice idea
But you really should be careful who you work with. I’ve only tried oDesk twice but with two total failures. One provider did nothing at all for weeks (with no response to emails etc.) another company claiming to be drupal professionals hacked drupal core without any need to do so and with no documentation so I had to rebuild the site as it is not upgradeable.
I’d really like to use something like oDesk but for me it clearly did not work.
Do you have a positive story to tell?
Similar to Elance
I’ve not used oDesk. It looks similar in conception to Elance which I’ve used extensively. Since the site only links people together, and doesn’t do their business for them, it really can’t be blamed for project failures. If my experience with Elance is any indication, the service buyer has to do a lot of work to vet the service providers and provide ample guidance for the quality of work they’re doing. It doesn’t make doing the projects any easier. It just makes meeting people easier.
I also had mostly negative
I also had mostly negative experiences with odesk. With my first mini-project, the developer was fine - punctual, communicative, and delivered the goods. A couple of weeks later, on another smallish bit of work, he was unavailable, so referred me to his college, who was lazy and non-communicative. When I repeated my queries about progress etc, he complained that I was bothering him so he couldn’t get any work done. When I explained that communication was part of the job, he told me he didn’t do that, and was a programmer. Sheesh.
The second one tried to jack up the $/hr price in the middle of the project, when he was half finished, and when I resisted, stopped replying to my emails at all.
It might look cheap, but it’s a big headache, and risk for your projects.
An oDesk problem?
Note that I’m not endorsing oDesk. I know next to nothing about their business, so getting these testimonials is good. However, I still have to ask, is this an oDesk problem? Or a problem with vetting the service providers? After all, I’ve heard similar stories about service providers hired through different channels. For me, the bottom line is, be careful when hiring anyone to do work for you.
-Rob
Not in particular
It is not a problem of oDesk in particular I guess. Only maybe the concept wich oDesk shares among others of hiring people you’ll never meet and where when things go wrong you can’t get your hands on. This is a little different for example if you get to know someone through drupal community or if you are working with another company you got to know through the work they’ve done for example.
Btw. oDesk Community runs on Drupal 4.7.6, 2007-01-29
A Drupal site?
If this is a Drupal site, it means they spent a lot of effort to make it look and behave differently.
No clean-urls, no standard Drupal paths, no CSS aggregation or any of Drupal’s CSS files…
Are you sure it is a Drupal site?
Yup, just community section
The rest is something else. Thanks for the catch.
-Rob
Mixed feelings about oDesk
I went through three companies on oDesk who claimed to know Drupal, but the first ones tried to insist that they needed to write a module to post news stories and the other ones weren’t much better. They can be good for some things, but anything outside of common tasks, or if there’s something that you need done a certain way… yeah, not so good.
And yep, I don’t think their entire site is Drupal, but the content/community parts definitely are: http://www.odesk.com/community/forum/28 (probably looks more familiar)
Post new comment