To me, Elance is more than a simple sweatshop. It is the leading marketplace for online talent. It is full of qualified professionals who take much pride in their work. Although I have seen some of the lowballing on the site, I find that the majority of providers don’t lowball and truly value their work because they’re good at their advertised skill.For those buyers who are really descriptive about what they’re looking for, they’re often flooded with requests from quality providers who submit competitive proposal.

Again, I think you should give ELance another try – you just may be pleasantly surprised with the results!

Kristi Patrice Carter

Here are a few fakes:
a) “never give money in advance” – if you know what you’re doing, why not beign confident… (confidence is earned when reviewing bids, paying upfront means a confirmation of that…); after all if you’ve done a bad choice, at least you’ll know that very fast and you can move on, and not waste 6months of your life until the “provider” learns how to make your project.

b) “working from home” – if you’re the type of person not believing in such things then simply don’t access the internet to post jobs… unless you’re at work; (if you digg a bit further you’ll be surprised to find out people working from home win more $ in avg. then then ones in office)

c) “most of the bidders on those sites are typically freelancers, self employed” – the concentration of freelancers on Elance is a lot lower then on any other such website; oDesk has leads of a few hundred $… when my avg job on Elance within the last year is around 20k (username connects, if you want to check it)

d) “Serous business can’t depend on freelancers for outsourcing.” – how do you know that? if you failed in that doesn’t assure everybody will do the same.

e) “cheap indians” – I(a Romanian) like Indians for development because they’re good and above all Fair; if a buyer takes someone because of the price is the lowest… no problem, 90% of the software done through Elance is never used (no joking), so he will be contributing to the global outsourcing marketplace by paying taxes to Elance indirectly.

Now some things which are true:
“buyers looking for free work/benefits” – yes, there are a lot of (stupid) consultants posting their jobs to get a plan done (I say stupid because if they can’t plan it then they won’t be able to manage it anyway); like there is also a huge amount of advertising within some of the bids… (most of the ones telling you to visit a website that they want to be cloned)

Very True:
“Elance has been treading water for the past 7 years and haven’t changed their model at all. They went into enterprise software for a few years, but that didn’t go very far ”
- you cannot blame them for being profit oriented(90% businesses do the same) :) the problem is to get to the next level and start using their service providers… some of them of a really good quality, if you know how to get commercial projects launched…

Full survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/sr.aspx?sm=4FKlrmsvWR0CfvHAy6s5p_2feONMYAIYK5w6O1Reo2Qlk_3d