A few posts ago I mentioned a report covering some insights on international freelancing community that was made available by oDesk. Sine then I had a chance to take a deeper look at oConomy and found information there even more interesting and insightful. oDesk did a great job on presenting freelancer statistics in chats and Google mashups.
Of course when it comes to picking an offshoring destination freelancing data needs to be taken with a grain of salt. In particular a freelancer’s rate is a product of many criteria and only portion of those are locale-dependant. Freelancing through aggregators / monster boards like oDesk is still in its early stage, over time the rates and other stats will have a greater degree of correlation to local salaries, availability, etc. However, even today, these figures provide an interesting reference in terms of understanding the local dynamics. Let’s take for example geo distribution for Russia vs. population and rank for top 10 cities on oDesk list:
| oDesk Rank | City | Number of Providers | Average Charge Rate | Average User Score | Population | Rank |
| 1 | Moscow | 486 | $19.39 | 4.21 | 10,470,318 | 1 |
| 2 | Omsk | 444 | $16.12 | 4.28 | 1,134,016 | 7 |
| 3 | Taganrog | 207 | $15.82 | 4.28 | 281,947 | 66 |
| 4 | Saint Petersburg | 200 | $17.76 | 3.69 | 4,661,219 | 2 |
| 5 | Novosibirsk | 121 | $16.75 | 4.34 | 1,425,508 | 3 |
| 6 | Tomsk | 98 | $15.83 | 3.99 | 487,838 | 34 |
| 7 | Rostov-on-Don | 69 | $15.28 | 4.15 | 1,068,267 | 10 |
| 8 | Nizhniy Novgorod | 44 | $15.11 | 3.28 | 1,311,252 | 4 |
| 9 | Smolensk | 34 | $14.24 | 3.54 | 325,137 | 56 |
| 10 | Irkutsk | 32 | $24.13 | 4.62 | 593,604 | 24 |
As you can see the figures are somewhat counterintuitive. Take for example Taganrog a small city in the same region as Rostov-on-Don which is roughly 3 times bigger and considerably richer as well, yet freelancer community is 6 times the size of Rostov-on-Don’s. Taganrog is even ahead of Russia’s second largest city Saint Petersburg. Most likely these figures confirm that freelancing community’s embrace of oDesk services is in its humble beginnings and that more business will flow to companies like oDesk, Guru, eLance and others.
I hope oDesk keeps oConomy live and updated with the latest info, it would be also great to see their competitors to follow in suite.
Even if they all cost $0 there is still going to be a substantial cost to your business for using them including;
– an Outsourcing Manager price 150-200k / year to write blogs
– business analysts to write detailed specs 150k/year per analyst.
– Project Manager to keep the process working 120k/year
– Offshore dev environment
– Longer release schedule due to formalized dev process, communication barriers, etc.
– Long term damage to business due to poor quality code, slow response by IT, lower employee moral.