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oDesk - down the virtual, global company and collaboration rabbit hole
I just created an account on oDesk and, frankly, have fallen down a rabbit hole.
Of course, Drupal was the vector once again: I had Daryl leave a comment, with his username linking to a trends page showing Drupal jobs on oDesk. This intrigued me, so I dug into the system a little more.
For starters, there is a Drupal 5 test. I haven't taken it yet, but I fully intend to kick the tires on it. The testing system is run through Expert Rating. I want to explore this more, maybe even to the degree of developing tests for modules and components ... this feels like a useful function that could kickstart a lot more items.
Finishing up the Drupal bits, it looks like the oDesk Community section is Drupal-powered. The oConomy section is particularly interesting -- you can see that $48M worth of work have flowed through oDesk, and that the odometer is part of a custom module that they've developed (view source shows you all this).
The Global Provider Map has tons of interesting information -- Canada has 3253 Providers, with an average hourly rate of $24.92, and average feedback score of 4.29. And then there's Iceland -- 24 providers, $50.19 an hour average. Where the hell is Bouvet Island? The Maldives?! 11 providers...
Do work, get paid. I'm excited to think about how this can be used by startups especially, or to prototype startup ideas. Or, for that matter, working with global communities to build their knowledge worker populations. Hey Evan, it's time to bring the world to to Whitehorse, and vice versa.
I could go on to describe some details on how this works -- a crazy desktop app that monitors your "Activity" levels at the computer, takes screenshots and webcam shots (yes, webcam shots -- wearing pants is required), and creates your time log. But, I'm really just scratching the surface myself as I familiarize myself with the system. Has anyone out there used oDesk before? As a programmer or a buyer? I'm interested in feedback from people that have actually gone through the process...
The rabbit hole? I can truly run and interact with teams, companies, and businesses all over the world. This is the ad hoc network of professionals with varying sets of skills that I've been thinking about since a bunch of university friends and I sat down in 1995 and thought about online pizza ordering for Toronto.
Update: OK, I took the Drupal test and got 92%. Not bad, and I was impressed by the depth of some of the questions.
I thought about a similar collaborative platform based on Drupal a long time ago, and also started to draft many thoughts into a rough concept. Would anyone be interested in joining up into a team to plan, develop, and realize such a project?
PS: Your editor is not based on Wysiwyg API! ;)
Daniel
We tried oDesk several times, along with other similar (guru.com, elance.com) sites. The first company we hired, despite referencing Drupal expertise in their profile, knew absolutely nothing about Drupal. The second company we screened much more carefully, looking specifically for several Drupal projects in their feedback. They... had a passing familiarity of Drupal and had written some modules, but tried to tell me that they needed to write a custom module in order to display a list of news on a page, etc etc. These were Russian and Ukranian firms. We had a Russian designer from oDesk working for us for a while, who was ok, but not anything to write home about. We then found a US-based themer through one of these sites, who had even worked for recognizable names in the Drupalsphere. He completely disappeared on us, after a couple of long absences with excuses.
Things that HAVE worked well to outsource from these sites:
I totally understand where these experiences come from. My feeling is that the management system of oDesk represents a large opportunity for local providers (i.e. North Americans) to reach a much larger audience. i.e. see beyond the providers that are in the system today, and think about moving your current relationships ON to oDesk.
This should not be seen as a wage arbitrage exercise, but instead a set of tools for working with a shifting set of people that can move in and out of projects.
And, of course, setting the rules. I'm going to want modules created the right way, contributed on Drupal.org, and so on. Of course, I am a technical project lead, so I think I will get the most out of this system.
Just for fun, I decided to take the test. As you know Boris, I've been using Drupal for my blog for a while now, but have done ZERO development work with it (or anything else for that matter). Just from my limited knowledge of using Drupal, I was able to score a 65% (3.25/5). The fact that I was in the 60% percentile (better than 60%) of the people who took the test - that doesn't say much for those people below me who managed to 'pass' the test. I certainly wouldn't hire me to do any development work on Drupal. :) I'm not saying I couldn't do it, I'm just saying that I haven't put the time into learning at all.
Anyways, good fun, thanks for sharing Boris.
The idea of embedding test questions / answers for humans into modules, as we do with Simpletests, seems interesting.
I just signed up there, just to find out how good the Drupal test was.
IMO it sucked.
There were lots of irrelevant questions in it (such as: "How does Drupal override PHP's default sessions settings?"). It does prove a general knowledge of Drupal, but it doesn't prove any true knowledge. But I guess that's good enough – if somebody really is bad at Drupal, their feedback score would be painfully low.
P.S.: I scored 93%.
However, since we currently have exactly zero Drupal tests / certifications, I thought it was interesting that one exists at all.
Did you give feedback? I gave feedback on several questions and made suggestions to split the test into general, administration / server, and theming.
And yes, I would be skeptical of anyone that scored below 80% on that test.
I looked at oDesk at least twice in the last 12 months, but both times reading the terms of service made me cancel my registration. Some of their clauses are either in violation of most licensing terms, illegal in my jurisdiction, do not make sense to accept, or all three.
Did you really read them thoroughly, maybe with legal advice ?
@FGM - Would you mind sharing more detail on the problems you found with Terms of Service? We certainly don't want to turn off potential users for legal concerns. I would be happy to incorporate your feedback in the next version of the agreement.
-Josh Breinlinger
oDesk
This is all a "first impressions" post. I'll go back and look at the ToS and get a few people to look it over.
If it's not oDesk, where else does this functionality exist? It's sure as heck not RentACoder...
Hearing all these laudation I have to comment and say that my experiance with oDesk was nothing but negative.
I used oDesk twice when I started with Drupal and wanted to work with some experts to make quicker progress. One time I hired the person who made the Drupal Part of oDesk and though thats gotta be a sure thing but while the contact started nice after weeks of mails without responce and no progress at all to the project I had to search for someone else. (The Drupal part at oDesk is 4.7.6 so I guess the oDesk people aren't to happy with it either) I opened another project with a fixed price and a development team from India who claimed to be drupal experts got the job. From what I know now about drupal I should/could have ended the appointment right after the first few hours but back then I trusted the "experts"... and was left with a fully hacked drupal without documentation, things like sql querys in the them to to display a list of events, a unfinished project, a overruned budget und quite some frustration.
So yes - theoreticaly oDesk is a nice idea but practically I learned my lesson and woul reccomend everyone looking for a drupal expert to find someone to meet in person who has proven to be reliable and knows what he/she is doing. Then maybe send this person to hire people through oDesk.
Cheers
Sebastian
I don't think your experience is any different from anyone else that has done outsourcing to India. It's still "you get what you pay for" -- I'm interested in the team forming concepts and other abilities, but wouldn't expect to pay significantly less for quality work.
I think "I don't think your experience is any different from anyone else that has done outsourcing to India" is an unfair generalisation.
and I've learned my lesson but just to not only blame it on "outsourcing to India" - The first women who got the job was from the United States.
As I said - not a bad idea in general just my bad experience.
Someone (presumably) working for Odesk is leaving comment spam with the keywords "drupal trends" and "joomla trends" on all the big Drupal and Joomla blogs. I've seen the same generic comment from "Daryl" show up at least 5 times in the last week, including on my own site.
Oh, I know. I get that kind of astro turfing from a lot of stuff. However ...
Definitely relevant to the post -- I would have liked to see the link in the body, but, ya know...
I'm going to "ding" oDesk and let them know that such astro turfing isn't appreciated.
At the end of the day, lots of interesting stuff there, and I'm glad I found out about it.
Hey All,
I'm the Marketing Director at oDesk and I appreciate all the comments, both positive and negative. We have been trying to get the word out about our Trends and Maps that we provide based on all the data in our network. Apologies if it was perceived negatively but per some of the comments, we also believe it is interesting information for the community at large. We've worked hard to compile all of the data in our marketplace and would welcome any feedback on how to improve the trends or oConomy. The data is being put together for you, so if there are other things you'd like to see, please let me know. We believe in transparency and are happy to share any stats about our network.
As for the test content, we encourage all users to perceive the tests as a simple yes/no flag for if the provider has a skill. They are not meant to be the SATs of programming skills, just a simple verification to see if they have a skill or not. Since most marketplaces out there have only "self-reported" skills, we believe these certification tests represent an improvement over those systems.
@bmann - your "ding" is noted and we'll be more careful moving forward.
-Josh Breinlinger