If he is serious about actually working and making a living, oDesk is not the right place to work. I wrote about it a few days ago - https://medium.com/startup-shenanigans/66896bbf21da - cheap labor and sup-par clients, yeah, oDesk is definitely not the place.
Not to mention that a good portion (I'd say about 20-30%) are asking for blatantly illegal or unethical activities (e.g., scraping proprietary data, building spyware, etc.)
I would disagree here. You actually can find well paid mid-term and long-term contracts on oDesk. Classification obviously depends on your expenses but I would say it's quite possible to get more money on oDesk than in most IT companies in EU.
Well, you could get money by working a lot and doing cheap crappy jobs, that doesn't make it a good job. Besides, I've heard stories for clients being scammed out of their money on oDesk and developers losing reputation because of jerky clients. I bet there are outliers, but overall, it's sup-par, imho.
Yeah, but I would say it's everywhere like that. You have good developers and bad developers, you have interesting projects and bad projects, you have good customers and bad customers. You can find YC companies on oDesk, you can find cool startups there. IMHO it's not difficult to filter good projects.
It is probably worth noting that this guy is probably somewhat biased due to being the founder of (as far as I can tell) a similar hire-people-from-me-I'm-not-quite-a-recruitment-agent type website.
However, I'd like to point out that we are not at all a recruitment agency, but rather a community of awesome freelancers. We do curate the talent to make sure you only get the best, but we are certainly not recruiters.
The goal is to allow any great freelancer to setup their own shop online without much upfront work. We support them by building tool that ensure security, timely payment, accurate project management and so forth.
In my opinion the only way to use Odesk (or any other similar site) is to have a trusted client in mind that will post jobs there for you. That makes it easier to get paid internationally and was an option for me when I took my current position. I declined, however, as I like to keep things simple and so I don't want to add an additional step between me and my money ;-)