[gs7]

I started looking for freelance jobs on Elance at the end of June for fun. I've since completed 7 super simple tasks and made $1200. It's definitely a race to the bottom and I'm lucky to have a cushy fulltime web developer job because it'd be hard to live off of Elance earnings alone. But as a hobby it's not bad. Completely agree though, clients tend to be super vague in their job listings and their budgets are miniscule. Every once in a while I find a gem though and it can be satisfying to help someone out remotely for some extra cash.

[PopeOfNope]

Do you have any ideas on what changes could be made to make it less of a race to the bottom? Charge a fee to post jobs? Enforce a minimum $/hr?

[gs7]

I honestly don't know if it's possible or even something that should be prevented. There will always be people in countries with lower costs of living that can offer to do a job remotely for cheaper. I don't know if it's fair necessarily to exclude them and keep pricing higher artificially just for our (developers) benefit. This is supply and demand on a global scale. Fortunately, I found that overseas developers who offer to do those jobs for pennies also often deliver subpar quality and have poor communication skills. That's where I can stand out and capitalize on that competitive advantage. Clients that want to pay ridiculously low amounts for huge, complex tasks are clients I don't want to work with anyways. They tend to be a giant pain in the ass. The overseas developers can gladly take them. Clients that know the value of my more expensive rates are the ones that tend to be easier to work with and have less unreasonable expectations. It's just a matter of trying to find those clients that get it.

[PopeOfNope]

> Clients that know the value of my more expensive rates are the ones that tend to be easier to work with and have less unreasonable expectations. It's just a matter of trying to find those clients that get it.

Based on your previous post, it doesn't sound like you get these kinds of clients on elance often. That makes perfect sense to me; elance and odesk have a reputation of being race to the bottom sites, so why would somebody go there looking for quality devs?

Thinking about this some more, it's possible the site I wished existed isn't in the same field as odesk and elance. Those tend to be for shorter, cheaper projects. What I'm looking for is a marketplace for higher end freelance devs, so it's easier for work to find me and so somebody else handles all the escrow details.

[gs7]

Absolutely. I skim every single job posting under web programming on Elance and sometimes a week goes by before one shows up that's promising enough to apply to. It's not ideal, but to me this is fine right now because I'm really just doing this as a hobby. I like the short and sub-$500 fixed price projects because it allows me to test the waters with a new client. If they are too annoying to work with, I get the job done quickly and move on. My goal is to pick up recurring clients this way over time that have already been vetted by me with these smaller projects. For that Elance is not too bad. Upwork on the other hand is a huge mess...

There are definitely some sites out there that help higher end developers and clients to find each other. I see gun.io mentioned a lot. Someone posted about trygigster.com here too. The problem I have with those sites is that they focus too much on the top 5% of developers and huge company clients. There are plenty of competent freelancers that aren't rockstar developers and many good clients that aren't Fortune 500 businesses. It seems there isn't a marketplace for those mid-range freelancers and clients. I'd love a site like that!

[vsakos]

I never understood how can people earn that much on these sites. I'm trying since mid-july and earned about $120. I'm looking for HTML/JS/PHP jobs with little/no luck. Can you give some advice?

[gs7]

I focus on job posts by people in the US and emphasize my almost 2 decade experience in web development, my location (California), and my reliability. Clients in the US often prefer freelancers in the US because they've been burned by overseas devs before. I also mostly apply to jobs that aren't that easy to people with less experience (so I avoid any Wordpress/Joomla/Magento jobs, or any of the "convert PSD to HTML" jobs). It always helps to read the job posting entirely and ask clarifying questions in the proposal (shows that you've read it). Also, try to customize your proposal to each client as much as possible.