Why I Work at oDesk

When I was a student, I lived in a town where men who wanted work could go out and stand on a street corner in the mornings, and trucks would come by and pick them up. Women never did this, so I don't know all the details of the arrangement, but we'd hear guys in our apartment building asking each other whether they planned on going out to work, and gathering up a crowd to go stand out there together, and sure enough, trucks would come along and pick them up.

This is how I saw oDesk at first. ODesk is a freelance marketplace, a place where people who do information work can hook up with people who need information workers. It's free to sign up, and oDesk is supported by 10% of the fee for the job. In return, they offer a number of safeguards for both buyers and sellers of services, as well as the initial introduction and a virtual place to meet.

I get daily announcements of writing jobs from Indeed.com, and I initially applied for an oDesk job through one of those announcements. I was particularly suited for this job, and I'm still working on it. So, since I was signed up with oDesk, I applied for another job or two when I had free time in between clients in my neighborhood. On a slow day I could go down to the virtual street corner and wait for a truck to come along, and for me it worked well.

In fact, it worked very well. Over the holidays, when my private clients were being slow to pay and slow to send more work, I really appreciated my weekly oDesk payday. When it came time to figure out my taxes, I really appreciated my oDesk 1099 form. When I got busy enough to want to pass along some work, I appreciated the oDesk colleagues whom I could recommend to clients with confidence, secure in the knowledge that their work wouldn't reflect badly on me.

When I calculated my numbers for 2008 at the end of the year, I saw that -- even though I charge less at oDesk than I do for private clients -- the far higher percentage of billable hours there made it more profitable for me than I had realized. I decided to increase the three hours a week I'd been averaging at oDesk, and very soon I was at ten hours a week. It seems to me that highly skilled people can work as much as they care to at oDesk.

It's true that there are lots of jobs there that are completely unsuitable for me, and also that there are lots of workers there who would be completely unsuitable for you. It's an open marketplace, and everyone can come. But the clients I've worked for there have been wonderful, and some of my favorite ongoing working relationships go through oDesk. The convenience of the system for international relationships means that I get to work for people I probably would not have met otherwise.

If you're a private client of mine, you get coffee. Advice. Research. Very quick service. Personal attention. Face to face meetings and quite a bit of work off the clock. If you're an oDesk client of mine, you get to see my computer screen while I'm working if you want to, and you get a bargain rate.

For quite a while, I kept quiet about my work at oDesk. I didn't really want my private clients to see me as someone who went down to the corner on a slow day and waited for the truck to come around.

The truth is, I had misjudged oDesk. Many people do. If you need an information worker on an occasional or temporary basis, if you need someone with skills you don't find in your local neighborhood, or if you need me and you'd rather have a bargain rate than face-to-face meetings, then you should check out oDesk. If you have any questions, ask me in the comments and I'll be happy to answer.

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