A friend of mine was talking about giving oDesk a shot for contracting/freelancing. Since I’m looking for various possibilities in the job market, I thought about trying to contract and decided to fill my profile in. This blog addresses some things as someone who’s primarily worked as a fulltime employee looking at a system like this.
Prior to sending in any details, I decided to glance over the available jobs in the web development category as that is my primary focus and skills. You get quite a bit of variety in terms of time, skill requirements and pay. Some I thought paid pretty miserably despite demanding quite a bit upfront. A few jobs lacked any details whatsoever beyond a title. For me, not having any description makes such jobs a waste of time since there’s no way to judge if they’re feasible or not.
I did spot a job or two that fit very nicely. Because I was interested, I decided to follow up by entering my details into their system. Their system is pretty standard these days like other recruiting systems or job boards. However, one thing that they seem to want to differentiate themselves by is several “tests” that are free to take. One test is more or less specific to all contractors using their system. I think they force you to do this to make you more aware of some of the legal ramifications in using their system. In short, you will pretty much need to read the terms of service to cover your ass.
Another aspect of their system is various skill based test that they encourage you to take in order to demonstrate your qualifications to prospective employers. Now, this part I felt was a little disturbing. I decided to give the PHP test a shot since I’m quite comfortable with PHP. What followed was a horrendous waste of time. The PHP test was nothing more than obscure/trivia type of code multiple choice questions that really doesn’t inquire about your actual fluidity of PHP, but someone going through the PHP site, picking up random functions and whatnot then slapping them together with the world’s most hated form of test taking device.
The problem with this type of test is that you can easily either look up the answers online or grab an editor and code up a sample to get the correct answer. I even discovered one such question that provided no right answers (which I mentioned in the feedback section). As a veteran of development, I found such a test to be a horrible insult to my skills. The thing is that people who lack true development knowledge might mistake a possibly good candidate for a bad one and vice versa. The thing is that people who need these types of projects require people immediately and the types of problems are not accurately covered by this type of test. Add to the fact that some of these jobs pay bottom dollar and you end up feeling incredibly discouraged to show the results of these tests to the public.
Obviously, any smart prospective employer will look beyond just the test aspect and speak with the candidate directly. Those that rely on these types of tests, imo, will more than likely find someone overly qualified for a trivial job and not really get their money’s worth.
Hopefully, for myself, I fall into the former category. But this makes me realize that permanent jobs might be far easier to obtain than going strictly contract, even though contracting has its share of benefits too.