Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences. and congratulations on your successful projects. I wish you the best in all of your future endeavors.

We are building a marketplace to make both the freelancers and clients happy. From talking to people, reading tons of blogs, and our own personal experience, your results are the exception rather than the rule. In general, you are unlikely to get great results as a client or get paid well as a freelancer using elance, odesk, rent-a-coder, guru, etc. Your results are in spite of how the sites (their bidding and revenue model) are setup instead of because of them.

We believe that the people involved in the project and personal relationships are incredibly important! Hiring a freelancer is not like buying a cell phone charger on ebay!

Long-term maintenance is a huge concern especially for software development projects. I also don’t think that you can build an application quick and dirty. You can only do quick and clean and that requires skill and a lot of communication between the client and the freelancer. Also, doing it right the first time will save you from spending 10 to 100 times as much time and money fixing it down the road!

You can find article after article of how people tried to use these sites and got poor results. Common problems include picking the wrong technology platform, poor software design, poorly written software, poor communication, poor project management, missed deadlines, etc.

Glad to see posting on the subject continues.