oDesk - how to get up to 15-20 dollars per hour

Question

Freelance

Due to the situation at my current job, I decided to switch to odesk. habrahabr.ru/qa/40807/

According to people, the average rate of a PHP programmer for Russia is 15.66. I was horrified to find out that they mostly offer 5-7 dollars per hour, projects even for an average of 15 dollars per hour are few (for a web programmer), let alone 25. How do people earn 15-20 dollars per hour ?

And how to start? Should I start with 5-7 dollars per hour?

Answer 1

Stop whining, roll up your sleeves and get to work. I made $5 in my first month of freelancing. For the 2nd - two hundred. For the 3rd - a thousand.

Answer 2

I looked at your site www.osinavi.ru , I estimate your level of professionalism at 5-7 dollars per hour, no offense. So agree to everything.

Answer 3

I don’t know if it will help, but I didn’t start with odesk , so it was easier for me 2 or all profiles be in 10%, attach examples of work or sites, but only good ones. Maintain the profile later - make and improve tests, add good work done.
I personally made several filters for selecting works and threw them into the reader rss and calmly went through the proposals 2-3 times a day. Waiting for offers even with a good profile, rating and a large number of hours is almost useless - a lot of spam and few really good offers fall just like that - you have to look for them.
2. take small fixed jobs. maybe 3-4 maybe 10 first works will be only fixed price. You need to take what you know at least 80%, what you did or have a complete understanding of the work, you need to learn on your own on your projects, then over time you can learn in the process, but a little bit. Taking the unfamiliar is not only the risk of not doing it, but also the risk of making a mistake with the volume, time, and so on.
The first works are for feedback only, so give your best - do it quickly and well, lick the client, make his Wishlist. A small volume will allow you not to spend a lot of time (=money) on over-specified work
3. When there are good reviews 4.5 better than 5, you can watch time-based work. If the experience of the first works showed what is going on, then you can immediately jump to $ 15-20, if not very much, then try lower. When it does, then slowly raise the bar. As a rule, if you do well and exceed the customer's expectations, they easily go for $2-5 in plus. When you realize that your time is not rubber, then you can raise the default bar. Keep good customers and part with bad ones. Good customers are more likely to offer you to leave odesk for direct paypal, but you can continue to use odesk timing by creating a small fixed job and not close it.
Freelancing is all positions at once, you have to be a manager and speak with the customer in his language, his terms, be able to determine its adequacy and solvency, you must be able to evaluate volumes, technical specifications, time, priorities, you must be able to manage your time and be able to learn and plan and improve on all of the above. And of course, a good specialist, there’s nothing bad to catch IMHO in freelancing - it’s just stupid to compete with Indians and Chinese who work for food.
Raising up to $30, and in some specializations up to $40-50 is no problem if you are a really good freelancer. Yes, and you can become one in a year or two. True, in five years it can get bored to hell. But you need to start, maybe with $ 5 for work, but to work - a freelancer is first of all a self-organized workaholic, otherwise go to the office and sit your pants there.
To everyone who counts the hours. Try to work the specified 8 hours continuously from day to day, namely to work - write code, communicate in essence - that is what is paid without question. Even if you succeed, you will be blown away in two weeks. You can, of course, work for 10-12 hours, but not for long - burn out in a month or two. It is realistic to keep 6 hours a day, with days off. And even then it’s more comfortable, and even on boring tasks 4 hours or less.

Answer 4

How it started is written in the posts here.
pumainthailand.com/category/rabota-2/ the
first two jobs for fix $5 and $10 and a week later I found the first customer for $10 per hour. And there it quickly rose to 20.

Answer 5

Recently there was a need and I had to freelance a couple of thousand in free-lance Russian. There's a rate of $ 10 per hour everywhere without exception. And finally , itforge is right - in freelancing everything is rotten with the level of tasks
Tip: do not go in cycles in oDesk. The same freelancing and freelance - they give their result :) And try to take orders for the implementation of functionality: write a store - 50k, make up a layout - 5k, and not for hourly pay.

Answer 6

How do I know if I'm an experienced professional? And how experienced can you be? I graduated from applied mathematics, worked for 6 years (albeit on 1C, but also made sites in the form of hacks). I have my own website: www.osinavi.ru (this is not advertising, this is to assess my professionalism).
The fact that I passed the PHP/MySQL/HTML/AJAX/CSS/SQL/DHTML tests and got into the TOP 10-30 doesn't make me proficient, I guess? Or am I a 5-7 dollar coder per hour?

Answer 7

It seems that I'm not stupid - I passed 15 tests on oDesk. entered the Top 10-30, I have my own project, I earn money on it. I also sometimes serve 1C in the form of hacks in my city. I know English and web programming more or less.
But when I go to oDesk or other similar sites ... it becomes scary - there are practically no projects in which you can be 100% sure that I will complete it. The oDesk rules say - if you are not sure - do not take the project, and they also write on the Internet. But this only means that with this approach, a normal project will never be taken - you only need to take projects "Convert PSD to HTML" at Hindu prices - and then the probability of completion is far from 100% (the computer may break, the Internet or PSD will turn out to be especially tricky ).
I see the main problem in the fact that each project requires its own (different) technologies - it turns out every time we take on a project, we need to study new technologies - and work, respectively, for 1-2 dollars per hour. And in case of any problems, there is no one to even ask - you only need to rely on yourself - and the necessary knowledge can always be not enough for any qualification ...
How did you get out of this vicious circle?

Answer 8

It’s easy to find out the cost of one’s hour: salary / 168 (in Vologda, is it true that programmers have salaries of 80-100 rubles?).
PS: In reality, focus on 6-7 hours a day.

Answer 9

17,000 rubles per month (net). 8 hours a day, 20 working days a month. Approximately 106 rubles per hour. Including taxes - 150 rubles per hour.
That is $5 an hour. But freelancing all day (8 hours) won’t work, and besides, they don’t pay for sitting out their pants. Therefore, you need 7-8 dollars per hour to be no worse than at your current job.

Answer 10

And what about the fact that you take on a project if you are not 100% sure that you can complete it (and you are sure, for example, by 90 percent)? By the way, when tasks are given in the office, often confidence is also far from 100% and 10-20% of projects cannot be completed to the end. But nevertheless, I complete the tasks and quite well.
I am 100% sure only in the simplest projects (like making a design according to PSD, throwing a website out of 6-7 pages), but there are usually a lot of Indians with a rate of 3-7 dollars per hour.
Still, the project should be taken, if not 100% sure (but in principle, in the subject and probably can handle it)? And then with my perfectionism, the project will never be taken at all.
Do you ever take on projects that you are not completely sure about (like, we’ll figure it out along the way). If not, how do you gain experience?

Answer 11

As I understand it, the penalty is a refund (or work for some time without a tracker).
If you warn the customer that you are not sure of yourself, that it is possible that you will not be able to complete the order (although, in principle, I roughly understand), you will definitely not receive the order.

Answer 12

5-7 dollars per hour is not bad anymore (not 1-2), especially since the site was made in 2011. But I'll start, perhaps, with $ 7 per hour.

Answer 13

I took the Fixed Price task for $30 (Adsense management via Google API) - I myself did not expect that they would give it so quickly. Only now the client refuses to provide access to his account. I tried to register my own - you need to wait for Google's approval for a week - the client gets sick of waiting.
And I, naive, thought I would figure it out in a couple of days, after reading the documentation.
Trying to do and learn anything without having an account at hand (username, password, token, etc.), while not understanding the Google Adsense API well, I think is pointless (I came to this conclusion after 8 hours of hard work, which resulted in a null result).
So, it seems, it remains only to make a refund. Right in the depression now ... :( Minus!

Answer 14

For example, linking payment systems to the site (the bourgeois have different ones there) - it’s generally not clear how to approach, and even more so to understand in advance whether it will be possible to complete the task.