[consulting] oDesk

[Matt Chapman]

>  The client agrees that X work will be done in Y time for Z dollars, 
> why make it more complicated than that? 
 Because it's always more complicated than that, especially if you work 
in bleeding edge areas like I do. If you're changing the CSS so that 
node titles are red instead of black, yeah, that's an X-Y-Z, but if 
you're integrating Drupal with a custom application written in a 
framework that's a year old and a social networking site that just 
released it's public APIs last month, then I can't tell you if we can do 
X, and if we can, how long it will take, so there's no way to calculate 
Z. But if you trust my expertise to determine the best possible solution 
for your end goal, and you know my rate is N dollars per hour, then we 
can do business.

It's part of the difference between consultants and coders. Coders might 
not need oDesk; consultants do.

> In the land of ideal contracts, there are acceptance criteria in place 
> - if your work fulfills those, everyone is happy.
>
Please send me a map when you find this magical land. I would very much 
like to go there and see the candy rainbows. Acceptance criteria are 
worthless; the only thing that matters are acceptable deliverables. I 
don't work to fulfill a contract; I work to make my clients happy, and I 
write my contracts in such a way as to make that possible.

>> What if your mechanic is in a country where you'd have no legal 
>> recourse to recover your pre-payment if he's a con artist?
>
> Most of us don't live anywhere like that, so this is kind of a red 
> herring, right?
>
Not at all. I live in the USA. Most of the inexpensive developers on the 
freelancing sites live in southeast asia. If they screw me, I don't have 
the means to hire a lawyer in Singapore, sorry. But if I can see that 
they're spending their time reviewing the new API documentation and not 
reading Intro to jQuery tutorials, and if I have an American based 
company charging my credit card and forwarding payments to Asia in turn, 
then we can do business.


>
> Is monitoring via daily status reports not sufficient? If the both of 
> you are clear on what needs to get done and what the time frame is, 
> check ins seem reasonable. Personally I usually stay in a skype chat 
> room with the client during business hours.

No disagreement there. Depending on the nature of the work, that seems 
like a reasonable solution. I happen to think oDesk's tools are an even 
better solution in many cases, hence I think it perfectly reasonable to 
ask a freelancer to use them.

Best,

Matt