About 6 years ago, I used Elance. I actually had a full time job. I need a simple C++ utility to download a file once a month from a password protected ftp Internet site and parse it. Simple, but as a data architect outside my coding knowledge. I wrote detailed and precise specs and put the job to bid on Elance. Within a day I had hired a programmer in India who was moonlighting on Elance. He asked the right technical questions about the Specifications. I hired him and within 24 hours he provided the source code. When I could not get it to run, with great hesitation I let him logon to my computer remotely and identify the setup difference that was causing a problem. I paid him, and I setup the application to run. It was ideal.
Fast forward a few years and Elance is merged with their competitor owork to create a hybrid firm, Upwork.
This time I needed a legal document translated from Spanish to English I wrote the specs, and searched by qualifications and ask a person in Venezuela to bid on the job. She lists herself as a lawyer. Of course, it does occur to me that she may not be who she says she is. But it’s a small job, and the results will tell me if I can use her again.
In my experience, the more specific your requirements documentation is, the more likely you are to get what you want.
I will be interested to see her work and find out if I wasted money or saved money. If my specs were specific enough.
I can see that Upwork is similar to Elance but makes it more difficult to search for particular qualifications and to view completed jobs.
But it is still brilliant for small jobs, bringing savings to expensive areas and sending cash to areas with faltering economies and particularly to areas with social unrest keeping people from working.
For my purposes it does not displace any local workers because my jobs are too small to hire people, but specific enough that finding a niche firm would result in an expensive project, too expensive for me to do. So I would live without getting the work done or spend huge amounts of my free time learning new languages whether programming or linguistic.
There were certainly times in my life when making a few extra dollars freelancing online would have been helpful to my cash flow situation.
A more in depth look might turn up some abuses. Unfinished work, or agencies hiring people for a pittance and charging US prices for them. This was a classic Kanbay/Capgemini strategy in the ‘oughts. They brought in “freshers”, paid them $3 per hour and billed the client corporations an offshore rate of $30 per hour. Since they pushed off the training onto anyone they could on the client side, they made a tidy profit.
But in an open marketplace such as Upwork, that should not happen. The lower prices generate more work. Work which may have lain fallow if costs were to high. Everyone gains efficiencies.
dudgirl press 