Freelancing and oDesk.com

oDesk.com is an online service aimed at businesses and individuals that seek to hire and remotely manage freelancers with varying specialties. oDesk Corporation, the company behind this website, is located in Menlo Park in California, and was established by Stratis Karamanlakis and Odysseas Tsatalos. The name “oDesk” connotes the nuance of “no desk“, and its founders even considered 0desk (zerodesk) in its infancy.

A Description of oDesk

oDesk.com has facilities allowing employers (or what oDesk calls “buyers”) and freelance workers (or “providers” at oDesk) to form online workteams. Buyers can then post job ads that directly request for proposals from these freelancers. Both service buyers and freelancers need to be registered at oDesk.com to participate, but after a simple registration process, employers can then post job ads for free and workers can create an online profile and portfolio, also for free. oDesk screens freelancers by implementing a basic “oDesk Readiness Test“, to help ensure that listed freelancers know and understand the work process and basic site usage. The company also verifies a freelancer’s work history and certification. It doesn’t vet previous work done elsewhere or individual resumes, however.

oDesk collects payments on behalf of the freelancers and takes out ten percent as its commission before crediting the provider with the difference of the agreed upon costing between the buyer and freelancer. Besides providing the venue for employers and service providers to create work agreements and transactions, oDesk uses its own proprietary collaboration software they call “oDesk Team” that records a freelancer’s computer screenshots and keyboard activity level. This information is then reported back to buyers as proof (or not) that the provider has been working on the job and the corresponding billed time is then due and collectible. This aspect of oDesk’s work process has drawn criticism and controversy.

The company calls itself a “marketplace for online workteams“. oDesk reports that as of January 2009, nearly 37,000 out of 170,000 providers registered on the site are based in the US. All transactions are conducted in US currency, and the website itself is entirely presented in English. oDesk.com doesn’t disclose information regarding the locations of buyers and employers, but it does post various statistics of workers and freelancers on the site’s “oConomy” pages. As of January 2009, oDesk reported that the aggregate amount of services paid via the site passed $55 million, and as of the time of this writing, a very obvious ticker displays more than $85 million in United States dollars had passed through the oDesk site.

The fields of expertise reported on by providers and freelancers vary widely, including web development, an assortment of software development/programming skills, writing, graphic design and many kinds of administrative support. oDesk allows for an array of voluntary skills testing across many disciplines, from English usage and aptitude, proficiency in certain popular software, and even specialized programming or technical skills. Job assignments also provide a feedback and rating mechanism to allow buying and selling parties to inform everybody else of their experience working with each other.

The Outsourcing Trend

The current trend of contracting jobs out (or Outsourcing), allows for the use of employing labor from lower-cost regions. This has inspired the proliferation of many online services for freelancers with the intent to provide a similar marketplace where potential employers and freelance workers can connect with each other. oDesk.com is one of these emerging services, including Guru.com, Elance.com, RentACoder.com, and GetAFreelancer.com. All of these websites manage payments, and charge for membership fees to generate revenue and/or get a cut from the payment that passes from employer to worker. Their commissions range between four to fifteen percent.

Criticism and Controversy

The company’s “oDesk Team” software records the time a worker has spent online in the oDesk “Work Diary“. oDesk’s practice of collecting this information has drawn controversy because some find this being too intrusive. Other information reported in this Work Diary includes a measurement of work activity via keyboard stroke recording (not keystroke logging). Also, screenshots of a freelancer’s workstation are taken by oDesk Team at approximately 10-minute intervals. oDesk Team is required to be downloaded and installed by freelancers, who sign on to log work hours voluntarily. oDesk.com has indeed posted a privacy policy, but nevertheless, this monitoring activity is uncommon among independent/freelance providers, and has elicited an outcry from critics that consider this as unfair and intrusive. Critical questions about this practice have also been brought up in articles that talk about oDesk, and even other competing sites. theglobeandmail.com, owned and operated by Canadian CTVglobemedia, notes that although in-house and permanent employees may be subject to some form of supervision, what oDesk is doing does remind one of George Orwell’s Big Brother, where an authority wields power for its own sake over its constituents. There is also a suggestion of “eSlavery 2.0” in Lesley Taylor’s blog, Healingtheworkplace.

On the other hand, oDesk maintains that this “transparency” helps a buyer invest more trust and confidence in a freelancer or provider he or she may not have seen or met previously, and may even be located on another continent. In October 2008, Web Worker Daily interviewed oDesk CEO Gary Swart, where he explained that oDesk’s Work Diaries offer unprecedented transparency and visibility into the actual work performed by providers, and that the oDesk Team software can and does guarantee accurate, safe, and convenient billing for work performed.