Philippines & Pakistan top oDesk’s “value for money” outsourcing rankings: Odesk

Today we’re going to have some fun with numbers by trying to calculate “value for money” between countries in hiring contractors to your workteam. The following table summarizes oDesk’s average hourly rates and feedback scores in each of our top 7 provider countries.

United States
Pakistan
Ukraine
Canada
Russia
Philippines
India

*We’ve broken out the rates for software development and data entry since they vary quite a bit in both dollar amounts and proportions of work between countries. Note that other categories of work exist on oDesk as well, that aren’t listed here. Looking at this data, it’s obvious that there is much greater variance in average hourly rates ($6.33 to $19.60) than feedback scores (4.01 to 4.40). We therefore scale the numbers to percentiles to compare between countries. We then use a quick-and-dirty calculation, averaging the percentiles, and finally rank the countries to determine their relative “value for money.”

The results … the Philippines and Pakistan rank the highest in this admittedly simplistic analysis, which must be taken with a grain of salt. There are many factors to be taken into consideration when hiring contractors to your workteams. But, in the meantime, congratulations to providers in these two countries for topping the list! Fans of outsourcing to the Philippines and Pakistan will also be glad to know that they were also the fastest growing countries on oDesk, by hours worked, from 2007-2008.

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