Why did he censor Kevin's name in all exchanges except for one? Was that an intentional "slip"? Or was revealing his last name an accident?
Why you should never use Upwork
71–80 of 274 posts
Re: Why you should never use Upwork
#72A major theme of the story is using third parties means you have less control. So why post it on Medium?
Re: Why you should never use Upwork
#73Closed my account.
Interestingly there's very few reasons for closing you can select from the closure page. You can't even choose an 'other' category to write in the reason.
Re: Why you should never use Upwork
#74Damn, that's rough. Hard to believe customer support is this ignorant, but if it really directly comes from the CEO, I doubt they can do anything. I hope this gets some traction through HN to bring it to the attention of the right people. I am currently looking for a Freelancing platform and also looked at upwork. Thanks for that, will avoid them!
I mean, it's being handled by 3 different customer support staff, so I don't know what that actually entails. My advice, get a blog. Write about your experience within industry. My best example would be a man called Simo Ahava, whom writes about GTM and GA. Join Slack groups and communities and just network. I highly doubt he knows the CEO and even if he did, would said CEO actually act on such an inconsequential thi…
OK so I have spent the last month trying to make it on Upwork after seeing some of the "$1000 a month income on my side project!" posts here on HN and decided to start doing some side projects while building a rep on Upwork to try to get some outside clients.
I have had absolutely no success with Upwork at all and had been reaching the point of walking away from it and what should I see but this post.
I want, actually desperately need, to be working outside my day job. I'm out of my element. I realized I had to start a blog and have done so and am writing a series of articles relevant to my knowledge and experience.
Aside from that, how might you recommend I make contacts to have long term work with good clients? Your comment is the first I've ever seen about "join Slack groups" - where would I go to get started doing that?
A million thanks if you bother to read this, a million more if you reply :)
Re: Why you should never use Upwork
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just thinking out loud here (haven't tried this) but maybe a better approach would be to not mention time. Simply ask for project specs and break it down into priced components if need be. $1500 at $100 an hour sounds expensive if you're comparing to the CEO's salary. But $1500 for a piece of sales lead infrastructure that has to be built but can't be off the shelf bought. That sounds reasonable.
Heading off the objections you'll get to this: the downside to fixed-price billing is that it maximally exposes the worker both to errors in their own estimation and also to errors in specifications provided by client, and to scope changes. Fixed-price bidding forces the consultant to shoulder a lot of risk. That's fine, if you're sophisticated. Certainly I think fixed-price bids are smarter than hourly billing. In a…
Thank you for this tip. I've always steered clear of fixed bids because it seemed simply unrealistic with software engineering. The suggestion of adding a daily rate after the fixed bid makes sense and seems to solve the aforementioned concern. I'll try that out next time.
Re: Why you should never use Upwork
#76I think the worst part about this is that I wasn't even surprised throughout the entire story. Anyone who has been a freelancer has dealt with the random, uncalled for threats from clients to give you a bad review or try to suspend your account. It's the reason I gave up on working on platforms like Upwork and Freelancer almost immediately. Building a personal network is way easier to find contract work and you'll ma…
> Anyone who has been a freelancer has dealt with the random, uncalled for threats from clients to give you a bad review or try to suspend your account. It's amazing, isn't it? These are people who require outside expertise (they're hiring you after all) and yet do everything they can to make you feel small and worthless. It's utterly backwards. I wonder how many of these abusive people are "idea" guys? Regardless, u…
This has more to do with low barrier to entry in any online platform. For any job there could be zillions of bids, going down spiral. All claiming they can do the job. It creates a sort of situation where people don't realise that their task is to find needle in a haystack
As someone who has worked on oDesk and made good money. You also need to do client filtering.
1. Check their total expense
2. Number of people hired, on hire
3. How much are they paying them
4. Feedback given
All this information is available.
Re: Why you should never use Upwork
#77Totally agree with the article, and I am more than certain that such acts and extortionate behaviour are widespread on the platform. It seems it is part of their business model to allow clients in developed countries to find people in developing countries (all with weak legal systems and corruption) to commit illegal acts (both violations of public and private law). Just look at how many jobs involve rewriting, scrap…
The worst thing about what you wrote is, as I was reading it, not a trace of shock or surprise passed through me. It's like it's just now the norm for these things to happen. If you'd like to, i'd be happy to post your story in an edit below mine. I know this isn't the first time it's happened. If you want to contact me, it's shad @ the domain in my twitter bio. Good luck!
You want to add you contact info to your HN bio. I thought you did a reasonable writeup and would consider contracting with you for this sort of work. I will avoid Upwork based on their appalling behavior here and lack of willingness to engage and accept their mistakes.
Re: Why you should never use Upwork
#78I use Upwork for projects and after reading this I wouldn't mind moving away from them. What are the best alternatives to Upwork for python and data science assistance?
I've had good experience with Toptal for high end software contractors.
Re: Why you should never use Upwork
#79Although sites like Upwork make money from both sides (probably more from freelancers), they are likely to support those offering work.
Perhaps their line of thought goes like: Freelancers would always outnumber those offering work. Even if some walk away or are forced out, it doesn't matter as long as we manage to keep those offering work on board.
Re: Why you should never use Upwork
#80It's so sad to see that.
1. People that try to hire freelancers don't have the decency of considering that freelances have to pay: fees, taxes and other markups (transfer fees for eg).
2. The usual you quote me X but my budget is X/2 tops, and the failure to realize that an Z for hour = x, or i can give you z/2 and double the number of hours and still get X.
When an experienced developer in his field gives you a 15 hour quote, it doesn't mean that it's an easy job that can be done by anybody in that time frame, since if that's the case you would have done it yourself already.