I work with freelancers on many tasks / projects and find using freelancing force very meaningful in many aspects. I have been working as a freelancer myself on and off as well, so to some degree I have a double insider view on IT freelancing phenomena. So when I run into an old and rather popular article 101 Reasons Freelancers Do it Better I was compelled to comment; yet while reading I realized that regular comments just won’t do it. I saw that I could play devil’s advocate pretty much on every point made in the article, e.g. just a few random notes Reasons to […]

A few posts ago I mentioned a report covering some insights on international freelancing community that was made available by oDesk. Sine then I had a chance to take a deeper look at oConomy and found information there even more interesting and insightful. oDesk did a great job on presenting freelancer statistics in chats and Google mashups. Of course when it comes to picking an offshoring destination freelancing data needs to be taken with a grain of salt. In particular a freelancer’s rate is a product of many criteria and only portion of those are locale-dependant. Freelancing through aggregators / monster boards like oDesk is […]

Very interesting statistics made available by oDesk, a freelancing marketplace that now tops 150,000 individuals worldwide in over 100 countries. Freelancing geography as seen from oDesk perspective appears quite different from what we see in trends on geography of regular IT outsourcing, for example US freelancers offer strong competition and reasonable costs. The list of top freelancer countries also includes Canada, Russia and Ukraine rather than China and Brazil. CANADA Total Number of Providers: 3,581 Average Hourly Rate Charge: $19.60 Average Feedback Score: 4.32 (out of 5.00) INDIA Total Number of Providers: 27,454 Average Hourly Rate Charge: $12.52 Average Feedback Score: 4.01 (out of 5.00) […]