Why you should never use Upwork

How is this falling off the front page?

FROM THE AUTHOR, PLEASE READ:

Apologies for the capitals, ladies and gentlemen. Please can I remind all of you to be Civil.

I've just received an email from the man himself, suggesting that I'm getting people to give his FB page 1* reviews and to spam his email. He's threatened (implied) legal action directly against me.

Publicly let me say, for the record (Hopefully it doesn't get wiped), that I do not encourage any of the aforementioned behavior, nor do I condone it.

He's currently posting on reddit and generally acting like a massive douche over email to me, still. After all of this. So the above was quite hard for me to write, but remember there may well be a lot of people working at said company, that have families and lives beyond this.

So please refrain yourselves.

Appreciate all of the support and input, from everyone.

As another freelancer who has been there, done that (not quite at Upwork, but at three other platforms namely Freelancer.com, PeoplePerHour and Fiverr [yes, Fiverr - and unlikely as it may sound, I found individual clients who placed thousands of dollars worth of work with me there,]) I can only and totally identify + sympathize with the OP here.

Of the three platforms above, I've found PPH to be the best in terms of overall mix/quality of clients as well as the platform's fairness (such as it may be) towards me (the freelancer).

After over two years of doing this almost full time, here is my takeaway:

The platforms have no love lost for the freelancers. Their first and foremost loyalty is (almost exclusively) reserved for the buyers, even to the point of being downright unreasonable in terms of favoring the buyers.

While I've been fortunate enough not to end up with the terminal outcome (yet), I have come close a few times and every time that happens, it is such an emotionally upsetting and disappointing experience that I feel I could write a whole book about it, but then lose the inclination after a while.

Such then, is the state of affairs and I guess there's little anyone (well at least I, at any rate) can do about it.

> I’m not going to talk about the impossibility of competition they offer due to being seriously undercut by those that live in countries with lower costs of living.

As a freelancer/contractor working exclusively for customers that have large budgets and pay a lot I'd advise against ever using such platforms.

You are going to compete with very cheap labour (and often low quality services) and businesses will expect that and pay accordingly.

Even if you have no projects lined up it's better to create your own small service or product which you can use later to advertise effectively what kind of value you could create for prospective customers. (go to local events and get into contact with future customers this way)

It's also interesting to note that Globalisation is so heavily pushed on all levels of our society although we can clearly see that it sucks for the majority living in rich countries.

Most people here probably do recognise (at least subconsciously) that it's impossible for them to compete with persons doing the same job in a third world country, no matter if they do a worse job. They make up for it by offering their services at such a low rate that they offset this easily. (some of them live in countries where you can easily feed, clothe and house a family with $200 a month - it's impossible to compete with that)

You could argue of course that it's great for third world countries (it was) lifting many people out of poverty, but would you want to get poor in the process? (take a look at Detroit, this could be our future)

Google, Apple and other large IT corporations (or really any large corp that needs IT services) of course are interested in lowering the cost of labour for them (which is a legitimate interest for them), so make no mistake, what they try to push politically in this case is certainly not in your interest.