271–274 of 274 posts
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yes, and always stay courteous even when they are total asses
I have to disagree. This is not how the business world works. If a client is being an ass, you have the right to fire them. Upwork doesn't afford you this opportunity unless you want to see your JSS drop by dozens of points.
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I am a lawyer/coder and "legal tech" is the festering ghetto of my profession. The people who peddle technology solutions to lawyers (or worse, to clients) are usually one step below car salespeople. Try popping your head in to a legal tech conference sometime if you doubt me. It's almost all e-discovery shills talking shite about AI. There are a few exceptions, but not many.
So - I have to ask (as a Graduate AI student, but no specific familiarity with the e-discovery domain) why is this the reputation? Like the applications don't work well? The salesmen don't know what they are peddling? I guess basically - could you extrapolate a little more on this group?
From the Upwork FAQ: "You'll need to download and use the Upwork Team App—this tool includes the Work Diary, which ensures you are guaranteed payment. By taking work-in-progress screenshots every 10 minutes, it provides proof to your clients that you are hard at work." Screenshots every 10 minutes? You mean... screenshots of MY SCREEN every 10 minutes? That was what made me close their website and totally forget it u…
As a long-time UpWork user, this has saved our butts a few times, especially with technical hires. We've had times we had hires billing full work weeks but seemed not to be getting much done. But how do you know if it really ought to take 10 hours or 40 hours to complete a task? I've done enough research, writing, and coding myself to know sometimes the thing you think will take 10 minutes ends up taking 2 days inste…
Screenshots seems like a privacy issue unless the worker can disable them for checking email or whatever as long as that time wouldn't be billable, but it seems like Upwork could have some better ways of tracking productivity.
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As a long-time UpWork user, this has saved our butts a few times, especially with technical hires. We've had times we had hires billing full work weeks but seemed not to be getting much done. But how do you know if it really ought to take 10 hours or 40 hours to complete a task? I've done enough research, writing, and coding myself to know sometimes the thing you think will take 10 minutes ends up taking 2 days inste…
Are you confusing "programming" with "typing"? How does taking screenshots let you know that the person is thinking? Okay, yeah, the guy who was looking at "Boob Forest" wasn't working, but just because you don't see a constant stream of keystrokes appearing on-screen doesn't mean a programmer isn't working. Edit: this famous story comes to mind. http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...
In this case, this programmer did good work for a few weeks that we had no issue with. Then his work largely wrapped, and he announced he would continue to monitor our server for errors. He also continued to bill 40 hours a week for several weeks, which surprised me, but at first I thought (as a non-technical guy) perhaps that was necessary.
After a few weeks of him billing 40 hours a week yet not saying anything to us, I began to get suspicious. When I checked his screenshots, I discovered only one or two screenshots per entire week were actually spent on anything related to our server.
As a test, I decided to see how long it would take me to do the same monitoring he was supposedly doing. It took me about 5 minutes to log into the server and run the command the first time I did it, and perhaps 15 seconds to scan the results that came back. We only needed to do this a couple times a week.
It may be he was a totally honest guy who was just extremely, extremely slow. Far slower than a non-technical guy like me, despite his experience (and he was experienced). But it looked a whole lot like a guy who'd completed his project milking the clock to keep getting paid full-time until such time as the employer figured out what he was doing, to me.
The next programmer we brought on simply fixed the error we were monitoring for so we didn't have to monitor it anymore.
I'm obviously a lot savvier about hiring programmers and developers than I was back then (this was one of our first technical hires). The point of sharing the story was to shed some light on what the value to employers is of having this technology. Without the damning screenshots, this guy may have milked the clock a lot longer, and we likely would've been a lot more sour on hiring devs in the future. You may not care if any one individual employer gets burned, but multiply that by tens of thousands who are now less willing to pay good rates for developers, more suspicious of those they do bring on, and keep their devs on shorter leashes, and there's something to be said for employee's side too of monitoring enabling employers to get the bad apples out fast and make sure the good ones have free rein to be fruitful.