It isn't worth the time or effort to do so. I tried it out (elance) a couple of years ago as a worker.

My impression of it is that basically it's a place for two kinds of employer: 1) the "I have this idea, code it up for me for equity in my 'company'" employers who either don't actually have an idea of what they want (and will needle you to flesh out their idea more fully) or have a generic "let's build the next X" (where "X" is usually "Facebook") idea; 2) the lowballer who wants to pay $500 for a job that would take a proficient team weeks or months to do.

As a "senior" level developer, I absolutely avoid these places. And I absolutely do not recommend anybody use them for work. There are far better ways to 'practice' with new languages that involve better compensation and better actual experience.

Umm, no not really. I charge around 60$/hr on oDesk.Have closed to 5000 hours and can easily pull in upwards of 5K USD a month, which is an extra ordinary sum for someone sitting in a country in Pakistan where the conversion rate i 104 PKR to a USD.You can easily get well paying clients if you spend a little time building up your history, and are really good at what you do.

An exchange rate will tell you absolutely zero about one currencies relative worth to another. By your logic, someone in Japan, whose currency trades about 100 to 1 USD, would have about the same buying power as you per USD, when in fact, assuming you're both earning the same in USD, you would almost certainly have much, much more purchasing power.

To accurately compare purchasing power among currencies, you need to use a metric like Purchase Power Parity (PPP): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

You are probably right but i was just trying to give a ballpark estimate of how good is a 5K USD income in pakistan.The conversion rate is a fair if not a perfect gauge.I can sustain a full family of 5 with an excellent lifestyle in about 2K here in Pakistan so its a very decent amount.

Well, I won't argue that some developers can do what you suggest. I'd be shocked if it weren't the case, in fact. My point wasn't meant to be applied universally to all the projects there. It was simply a statement of what I observed.

First, it's great to hear that you're getting work; but are you only working part time? 5K at 60 an hour is only about two weeks worth of work (83 hours)?

Hey, Yeah for the past year i have been working on a startup so i only do about 20 hours per week. I turn down all projects that demand more. Thankfully i have a few very decent clients who have given me an extraordinary amount of runway on the project, in terms of the time they need , the hours i work,and the exact scope of work. Basically the conversation is mostly like, hey i think it would be cool if we put in this feature, and the client goes 'yeah sure' and i go ahead and do it, this frees me up to bootstrap a startup and at the same time make a very decent living out of it :) But the more i dive into my own projects the less appeal freelance work holds the the point that i barely do enough to get by in terms of money i can make and not an hour or penny more :)

These sites have always been a race to the bottom. If you're not in a market where you can lowball you're definitely losing money.

To be clear, this wouldn't be my primary income earner. I have a lot of experience with languages like ColdFusion, PHP, etc, but really want to get some Rails work in. Of course, my "low" rate might be too high (I was thinking in the $15-30 range, where I'd normally bill $50-75 for work I have experience in)

If you know what you're doing, I'd say you should stay around 100 USD/hour -- anything else sounds very low?