We continue to work on oDesk
A couple of months ago I wrote an article about how to start working for oDesk to people accustomed to ordinary freelancer exchanges like free-lance.ru, weblancer, getafreelancer, etc. It is time for the next article with tips for people who have already started and want to unwind on this exchange.
Everything stated in the article is my opinion. You can agree or disagree, but for me these rules work.
')
Before you say “OK. getting started"...
1. Follow the track record of the customer.
When viewing the project description at the bottom of the page shows the track record of the customer. This list indicates previous projects of the customer, the duration of these projects, their results and mutual feedback / evaluation. Carefully look at these indicators. If you see that the 10 previous performers who worked with the customer said that he was a goon and a petty tyrant, then consider whether you want to work with such a person. You can even earn some money, but if he gives you low marks after finishing a well-done project, then you may have trouble finding the next order. Therefore, before you say the final “I agree,” restart your computer, and while the OS logs flash on the screen, think again about the decision you are making.
2. Understand, but do not overstretch the hourly rate
Suppose you decide to first work on "reputation" to the detriment of your wallet. After completing a couple of orders, you decide to finally make money and set your normal rate. Customers are missing. They ask themselves the question: “If this comrade did the same work for N, then why should I pay him 4 * N for the same work? He wants to throw me? ”Remember the moment that many customers come to freelance to save money and the increase in rates makes them pay attention to your competitors from India and China who are ready to work for rice and water. Even if you decide on such a sharp increase be prepared to answer the customer's question "Why should I pay much more?"
Some time ago, hourly rates for previous work in the profile began to hide. However, remember that “the old customer is better than the new two,” and these old customers are quite aware of your previous rates and may be upset when they see a significant increase.
3. Do not put all eggs in one basket.
Do not agree to work full time. If this single customer leaves for some reason, then you will be left without work at all. Find yourself two or three independent customers and work for them for several hours a day. In this case, if one leaves, then you will be able to work for the others, slowly looking for a replacement for the one who has left.
Communication skills
Here, for all residents of the former Soviet Union, the position is initially unprofitable. For example, many oDesk customers live in California. California is in the GMT -08 time zone. Ukraine is in the GMT +02 zone. Thus we get a 10 hour time difference.
On the other hand, in Brazil, not only football and carnivals are developing now, but also IT. And in some areas of IT development is very rapidly. If you look at the globe, you will see that Brazil is located in approximately the same time zones as the United States.
The time difference hinders much. Very much. Therefore, in this part I will try to tell you how to (try) to compensate for these inconveniences.
4. The rule of the first paragraph.
The Americans and the British read only the first paragraph from the entire text that you sent them. Moreover, in this paragraph, it is desirable to express all thoughts in the first three lines. In the second paragraph, you can write your favorite anecdote and they, perhaps, will read it. In the third paragraph, you can write launch codes for long-range missiles — Rodino is safe.
5. The rule of the first question.
The Americans and the British answer only the first question encountered in the text. Why this happens - I do not know. Perhaps answering the first question, they have a feeling of the work done and they press the Send button with a clear conscience. The fact that they need to "answer the letter," rather than "answer the first question," they somehow forget.
These two rules (4 and 5) relate to mere mortal customers who are not techies.
6. The rule of 100% response.
All questions the customer must receive an answer. It is very important. You may not be told one or two times if you do not answer the question posed, but they will look askance and will tilt not only your head but also your hourly rates.
For the 6th rule, the reverse also works: if the customer for some reason does not answer you serious questions or even just letters, then you should think about your mistakes lately. Somewhere you could be lazy. Think.
How to work considering these three rules. In each letter, ask one question or answer one question. If the question was asked in some context, then you need to very briefly recall this context and immediately write your answer. In the mail client, take it as a rule not to close the letter from the customer until the answer is written. In extreme cases, create one draft for each question / topic. Your email client in bold lettering "Draft" will remind you of the unfinished letters.
7. The rule of the English language
English is necessary to know. First, when filling in a profile, it is desirable that there are no sign errors. For example, if a person writes about his expirience, then immediately a doubt arises as to the quality of this experience. Secondly, for a literate self-presentation during the initial negotiations. Thirdly, during the routine correspondence with the customer.
8. Customer - singular noun
When working with Americans, I personally had a case when it was necessary to coordinate a document with several people in the company of customers. The company itself was distributed to different parts of the United States. Next in steps:
1) Wrote the first version of the document
2) Sent to the first customer representative, say, John
3) John wrote what to fix.
4) Corrected and again sent the document to John. John was pleased.
5) The document approved by John is sent to the second representative of the customer. Let's say his name is Mike.
6) Mike finds errors and says what needs to be fixed.
7) Correcting and sending Mike a new document. Mike is pleased.
8) I send the document approved by Mike for approval to John.
9) John asks to correct the changes requested by Mike
10) Go to step 4.
Is the idea clear? To prevent this from happening before starting work, identify one person with whom you will be dealing. Your job is work, not internal political / organizational squabbles of the customer.
In the ideal case, the person with whom you will have to deal should be a techie. That is, a system administrator or support manager. You will be unlucky if it is a lawyer or an accountant, but even in this case, it is better than one lawyer than 10. It is easier to beat Dad and Dad. © So dad in this case you will.
9. Daily reports.
Make it a rule to send a report on the work done to the customer every day. It does not have to be any particular form of reporting. A brief description of specific things done for today is quite enough. The keyword in the previous sentence is specific. No need to "pour water" type "conducted a thorough comprehensive study of the business logic of the application in the field." Write about the results that the customer can see: changes in the template / layout for designers, notifications about commits in SVN / git for programmers, links to new layered page files for web designers, etc. The customer will be glad to know what exactly he received today for the money he spent on you.
By the way, the customer most often will not demand from you such reports explicitly, but you still write and send. I have not met yet a single customer who would be against receiving such reports.
10. Cultural differences.
During the late Soviet Union, sometimes foreigners were given access to Soviet computing centers. These lucky people were very, very surprised when they heard how often workers talk about CC (WC - water closet, CC - computer center). Do not forget that the attitude to many things depends on the culture of the interlocutor and on his position. Many things that are obvious to us may not be clear to Americans. Many things that are obvious to project managers may not be clear to an ordinary developer. It is better to clarify the terms and definitions at the very beginning of a conversation than to find out at the end that each meant something different.
oDesk client
11. Monitor your status in the oDesk client.
If you are not working, turn off (Exit) or stop time tracking (Suspend). Separately, I want to note that disconnecting (Disconnect) from the server does NOT mean that time tracking is stopped and you can go read Habr. In the disconnected state, all data will be stored locally on your machine and will be sent to the server the next time you connect. However, it is believed that you are still working for the benefit of your customers, even in such a disconnected mode. Do not give your customer a reason to doubt your honesty. If you have duped and / or forgot to turn off the client, you can go to Work Diary on the site and remove screenshots during the period when you didn’t actually work.
12. Who do we work for?
If you are working for several customers at the same time, then carefully watch that the oDesk client selects exactly the customer for the project of which you are working. You have every chance to quarrel with the customer if you take money from him for the time when you were working on someone else's project. Even if you do not quarrel with him, you will have to manually add time to the project you really worked on and convince the customer to confirm this time. Do you need this hemorrhoids?
oDesk as a service
13. Be prepared for the unexpected.
oDesk develops and changes. Sometimes these changes are annoying. For example, in October-November, there was such a chip in the customer's interface that when the application was rejected, the reason for such an action was the default “Spam in the application”. This means that the application was automatically attached by some script. This caused a storm of emotions among users who were unreasonably called spammers. This trouble was later corrected, but add the fact of such surprises to bookmarks.
Responding to such things is calm. If what you are faced with is clearly a functional error, then immediately create a ticket for the support service. If you doubt this bug or a feature, then read the forum. You can write to the forum if no one has created such a topic before you.
14. Tests can (and should) be taken more than once.
If you did everything correctly and completely filled out your profile and passed all professional tests that concern you, this does not mean that you can rest on your laurels. You can improve your performance in the tests passing them again and again. Usually the test can be taken once a month. Do not lose the chance to improve your professional skills in the eyes of the customer.
15. Explore and benefit from oDesk.
Hourly billing and automatic billing at the expense of the oDesk client frees you hands. You do not need long and tedious to negotiate with the customer about the price of a new feature, to draw up and approve the TK or addition to the main TK. You do not need to paint by the hour what you did and provide evidence of their work. These all tasks are automated. You just have to do your favorite work. To act according to the usual prepaid schemes or escrow is much more inconvenient, in my opinion.
16. Rating
The rating on oDesk is considered taking into account the money paid by the customer. The more money the client has paid, the more weighty will be his estimate when calculating your overall rating. For example, you have two reviews. For one job you were given $ 100 and a grade of 4, and for another $ 200 and a grade of 5. Your average score would be (100 * 4 + 200 * 5.0) / (100 + 200) = 4. (6). The conclusion from this is very simple: hold on to normal customers as long as possible, and get rid of the abnormal as quickly as possible, so that good relations with the first influence your overall rating as much as possible and, conversely, that the rating supplied by an inadequate customer does not spoil your picture.
17. oConomy statistics
ODesk has excellent statistics on wages, types of work, demand for workers, etc. It is located in the main menu -> Find Providers & Jobs -> oConomy. This statistic is good, but always consider the data source clearly when considering this data. Remember the existence of a wild army of Data Entry workers who are willing to work for pennies. This is their right, but this work strongly pulls the general schedules of hourly rates down. Therefore, either look for separate graphs for your narrow field of activity or make a correction for the Data Entry rates.
Organization of your work
18. Never hope for the last day.
Never think that you can get together on the last day and do 90% of the work. Plan your work to complete one or two days before the deadline. In this case, when the customer wants - and he necessarily wants - to change something an hour before the end of the work, you will have enough time for these pre-release changes. Remember the law of “five minutes before release”: testers / customers find all high priority bugs five minutes before release. Most likely, only at this moment they begin to seriously test your work. So here. It takes them a couple of minutes to write an error to you. To you in order to fix it - at best an hour. Get ready and pledge for pre-release problems in advance.
19. Nobody needs supermen.
Working on a project you do not need to save the galaxy. You need to do all your work correctly and not interfere with your project colleagues. All & Right. Do not think that it is simple and that many do. If you can help your colleagues, it is good, but this should be your personal initiative and, most importantly, it should not affect the quality of your duties. Legends about “ne $ # @ * & ne but an active lifestyle” leave for HR and horny-haired bosses. Your task is to do a quality job. If you can do all your work with quality and on time - honor you and rating. If you can not, then no one will remember that you once helped someone - get a scandal, and reputation.
In the comments you can add your own rules and tips. If they are logical and reasonable, I will add them to the article.
ps My profile on oDesk.
Everything stated in the article is my opinion. You can agree or disagree, but for me these rules work.
')
Before you say “OK. getting started"...
1. Follow the track record of the customer.
When viewing the project description at the bottom of the page shows the track record of the customer. This list indicates previous projects of the customer, the duration of these projects, their results and mutual feedback / evaluation. Carefully look at these indicators. If you see that the 10 previous performers who worked with the customer said that he was a goon and a petty tyrant, then consider whether you want to work with such a person. You can even earn some money, but if he gives you low marks after finishing a well-done project, then you may have trouble finding the next order. Therefore, before you say the final “I agree,” restart your computer, and while the OS logs flash on the screen, think again about the decision you are making.
2. Understand, but do not overstretch the hourly rate
Suppose you decide to first work on "reputation" to the detriment of your wallet. After completing a couple of orders, you decide to finally make money and set your normal rate. Customers are missing. They ask themselves the question: “If this comrade did the same work for N, then why should I pay him 4 * N for the same work? He wants to throw me? ”Remember the moment that many customers come to freelance to save money and the increase in rates makes them pay attention to your competitors from India and China who are ready to work for rice and water. Even if you decide on such a sharp increase be prepared to answer the customer's question "Why should I pay much more?"
Some time ago, hourly rates for previous work in the profile began to hide. However, remember that “the old customer is better than the new two,” and these old customers are quite aware of your previous rates and may be upset when they see a significant increase.
3. Do not put all eggs in one basket.
Do not agree to work full time. If this single customer leaves for some reason, then you will be left without work at all. Find yourself two or three independent customers and work for them for several hours a day. In this case, if one leaves, then you will be able to work for the others, slowly looking for a replacement for the one who has left.
Communication skills
Here, for all residents of the former Soviet Union, the position is initially unprofitable. For example, many oDesk customers live in California. California is in the GMT -08 time zone. Ukraine is in the GMT +02 zone. Thus we get a 10 hour time difference.
On the other hand, in Brazil, not only football and carnivals are developing now, but also IT. And in some areas of IT development is very rapidly. If you look at the globe, you will see that Brazil is located in approximately the same time zones as the United States.
The time difference hinders much. Very much. Therefore, in this part I will try to tell you how to (try) to compensate for these inconveniences.
4. The rule of the first paragraph.
The Americans and the British read only the first paragraph from the entire text that you sent them. Moreover, in this paragraph, it is desirable to express all thoughts in the first three lines. In the second paragraph, you can write your favorite anecdote and they, perhaps, will read it. In the third paragraph, you can write launch codes for long-range missiles — Rodino is safe.
5. The rule of the first question.
The Americans and the British answer only the first question encountered in the text. Why this happens - I do not know. Perhaps answering the first question, they have a feeling of the work done and they press the Send button with a clear conscience. The fact that they need to "answer the letter," rather than "answer the first question," they somehow forget.
These two rules (4 and 5) relate to mere mortal customers who are not techies.
6. The rule of 100% response.
All questions the customer must receive an answer. It is very important. You may not be told one or two times if you do not answer the question posed, but they will look askance and will tilt not only your head but also your hourly rates.
For the 6th rule, the reverse also works: if the customer for some reason does not answer you serious questions or even just letters, then you should think about your mistakes lately. Somewhere you could be lazy. Think.
How to work considering these three rules. In each letter, ask one question or answer one question. If the question was asked in some context, then you need to very briefly recall this context and immediately write your answer. In the mail client, take it as a rule not to close the letter from the customer until the answer is written. In extreme cases, create one draft for each question / topic. Your email client in bold lettering "Draft" will remind you of the unfinished letters.
7. The rule of the English language
English is necessary to know. First, when filling in a profile, it is desirable that there are no sign errors. For example, if a person writes about his expirience, then immediately a doubt arises as to the quality of this experience. Secondly, for a literate self-presentation during the initial negotiations. Thirdly, during the routine correspondence with the customer.
8. Customer - singular noun
When working with Americans, I personally had a case when it was necessary to coordinate a document with several people in the company of customers. The company itself was distributed to different parts of the United States. Next in steps:
1) Wrote the first version of the document
2) Sent to the first customer representative, say, John
3) John wrote what to fix.
4) Corrected and again sent the document to John. John was pleased.
5) The document approved by John is sent to the second representative of the customer. Let's say his name is Mike.
6) Mike finds errors and says what needs to be fixed.
7) Correcting and sending Mike a new document. Mike is pleased.
8) I send the document approved by Mike for approval to John.
9) John asks to correct the changes requested by Mike
10) Go to step 4.
Is the idea clear? To prevent this from happening before starting work, identify one person with whom you will be dealing. Your job is work, not internal political / organizational squabbles of the customer.
In the ideal case, the person with whom you will have to deal should be a techie. That is, a system administrator or support manager. You will be unlucky if it is a lawyer or an accountant, but even in this case, it is better than one lawyer than 10. It is easier to beat Dad and Dad. © So dad in this case you will.
9. Daily reports.
Make it a rule to send a report on the work done to the customer every day. It does not have to be any particular form of reporting. A brief description of specific things done for today is quite enough. The keyword in the previous sentence is specific. No need to "pour water" type "conducted a thorough comprehensive study of the business logic of the application in the field." Write about the results that the customer can see: changes in the template / layout for designers, notifications about commits in SVN / git for programmers, links to new layered page files for web designers, etc. The customer will be glad to know what exactly he received today for the money he spent on you.
By the way, the customer most often will not demand from you such reports explicitly, but you still write and send. I have not met yet a single customer who would be against receiving such reports.
10. Cultural differences.
During the late Soviet Union, sometimes foreigners were given access to Soviet computing centers. These lucky people were very, very surprised when they heard how often workers talk about CC (WC - water closet, CC - computer center). Do not forget that the attitude to many things depends on the culture of the interlocutor and on his position. Many things that are obvious to us may not be clear to Americans. Many things that are obvious to project managers may not be clear to an ordinary developer. It is better to clarify the terms and definitions at the very beginning of a conversation than to find out at the end that each meant something different.
oDesk client
11. Monitor your status in the oDesk client.
If you are not working, turn off (Exit) or stop time tracking (Suspend). Separately, I want to note that disconnecting (Disconnect) from the server does NOT mean that time tracking is stopped and you can go read Habr. In the disconnected state, all data will be stored locally on your machine and will be sent to the server the next time you connect. However, it is believed that you are still working for the benefit of your customers, even in such a disconnected mode. Do not give your customer a reason to doubt your honesty. If you have duped and / or forgot to turn off the client, you can go to Work Diary on the site and remove screenshots during the period when you didn’t actually work.
12. Who do we work for?
If you are working for several customers at the same time, then carefully watch that the oDesk client selects exactly the customer for the project of which you are working. You have every chance to quarrel with the customer if you take money from him for the time when you were working on someone else's project. Even if you do not quarrel with him, you will have to manually add time to the project you really worked on and convince the customer to confirm this time. Do you need this hemorrhoids?
oDesk as a service
13. Be prepared for the unexpected.
oDesk develops and changes. Sometimes these changes are annoying. For example, in October-November, there was such a chip in the customer's interface that when the application was rejected, the reason for such an action was the default “Spam in the application”. This means that the application was automatically attached by some script. This caused a storm of emotions among users who were unreasonably called spammers. This trouble was later corrected, but add the fact of such surprises to bookmarks.
Responding to such things is calm. If what you are faced with is clearly a functional error, then immediately create a ticket for the support service. If you doubt this bug or a feature, then read the forum. You can write to the forum if no one has created such a topic before you.
14. Tests can (and should) be taken more than once.
If you did everything correctly and completely filled out your profile and passed all professional tests that concern you, this does not mean that you can rest on your laurels. You can improve your performance in the tests passing them again and again. Usually the test can be taken once a month. Do not lose the chance to improve your professional skills in the eyes of the customer.
15. Explore and benefit from oDesk.
Hourly billing and automatic billing at the expense of the oDesk client frees you hands. You do not need long and tedious to negotiate with the customer about the price of a new feature, to draw up and approve the TK or addition to the main TK. You do not need to paint by the hour what you did and provide evidence of their work. These all tasks are automated. You just have to do your favorite work. To act according to the usual prepaid schemes or escrow is much more inconvenient, in my opinion.
16. Rating
The rating on oDesk is considered taking into account the money paid by the customer. The more money the client has paid, the more weighty will be his estimate when calculating your overall rating. For example, you have two reviews. For one job you were given $ 100 and a grade of 4, and for another $ 200 and a grade of 5. Your average score would be (100 * 4 + 200 * 5.0) / (100 + 200) = 4. (6). The conclusion from this is very simple: hold on to normal customers as long as possible, and get rid of the abnormal as quickly as possible, so that good relations with the first influence your overall rating as much as possible and, conversely, that the rating supplied by an inadequate customer does not spoil your picture.
17. oConomy statistics
ODesk has excellent statistics on wages, types of work, demand for workers, etc. It is located in the main menu -> Find Providers & Jobs -> oConomy. This statistic is good, but always consider the data source clearly when considering this data. Remember the existence of a wild army of Data Entry workers who are willing to work for pennies. This is their right, but this work strongly pulls the general schedules of hourly rates down. Therefore, either look for separate graphs for your narrow field of activity or make a correction for the Data Entry rates.
Organization of your work
18. Never hope for the last day.
Never think that you can get together on the last day and do 90% of the work. Plan your work to complete one or two days before the deadline. In this case, when the customer wants - and he necessarily wants - to change something an hour before the end of the work, you will have enough time for these pre-release changes. Remember the law of “five minutes before release”: testers / customers find all high priority bugs five minutes before release. Most likely, only at this moment they begin to seriously test your work. So here. It takes them a couple of minutes to write an error to you. To you in order to fix it - at best an hour. Get ready and pledge for pre-release problems in advance.
19. Nobody needs supermen.
Working on a project you do not need to save the galaxy. You need to do all your work correctly and not interfere with your project colleagues. All & Right. Do not think that it is simple and that many do. If you can help your colleagues, it is good, but this should be your personal initiative and, most importantly, it should not affect the quality of your duties. Legends about “ne $ # @ * & ne but an active lifestyle” leave for HR and horny-haired bosses. Your task is to do a quality job. If you can do all your work with quality and on time - honor you and rating. If you can not, then no one will remember that you once helped someone - get a scandal, and reputation.
In the comments you can add your own rules and tips. If they are logical and reasonable, I will add them to the article.
ps My profile on oDesk.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/52297/
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