Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Freelancer.com has ruined my life

trustpilot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 359 posts

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#241

Post by sgt101 »

TomMarius wrote: post #152
twic wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of a friend got such an order for Tesco, our biggest supermarket chain, a few years ago. Needless to say, their invoice was paid very soon after that.

Can you share more? Sounds interesting, especially as I'm reading your comment inside a Tesco store.

In big companies there are often things like this, if you have 5K people working in finance or procurement and 1 in 100.. and you run it for 10 years... well you can see where this goes with the tail cases. Things like the person handling the case has a break down, or someone didn't put a transaction lock in the workflow, or two accounts got set up because there was a delay and someone helpfully restarted the set up process.

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#242

Post by mantas »

quickben wrote: post #191
mantas wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those platforms are designed to make developers platform-exclusive. The rating on a platform is extremely important to get new projects. You're shown higher, as more "relevant" offer and so on. At the same time, it's hard to have enough of good and recent feedback on multiple sites. The market is so saturated that staying relevant (in platform's and clients' eyes) is getting hard. Even if you work on a single…

So the harder, and more long term rewarding option, is to stay away from platforms.

The things is many of the clients are not really reachable without such platform. How would one advertise to a random mom&pop non-IT company on the other side of the globe? Personal site w/ portfolio would barely cut - they wouldn't even know what to google for. Arranging payment would be a huge hassle too. Working only locally is not a solution either.

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#243

Post by ilaksh »

Sites like Freelancer are another type of centralized platform that will probably eventually be replaced by decentralized peer-to-peer systems. This should result in more fairness and better pay since there won't be a middleman.

One way that could work would be to require payments at short intervals, allow people to optionally opt-in to an arbiter who is also rated or reviewed, and also to not have a facility for freezing funds, and using direct cryptocurrency payments.

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#244

Post by JamesBarney »

notatoad wrote: post #236
dhimes wrote: post #82

Well, first let me say that my experience as someone who has hired on freelancer has been very good. I have found some excellent developers there. But I'll also point out that (1) I spec my projects pretty carefully, almost to the point of 'hell I might as well build it myself'; and (2) I pay. And when the project is harder than I originally thought, I don't say "tough shit you signed a contract dumbass" but rather I…

yes, it seems entirely likely that freelancer.com is awful and online marketplaces withholding payments for nebulous reasons is a real problem, but i have a hard time trusting this review. Specifically, this: "The first time I asked for the reason I was told that there's no reason and that I should keep working, then I was told that because a client complained, and in another occasion, i was told something else that…

As someone who has been bounced around customer support before I can testify that I have forgotten reasons they've given me for why they weren't able to help me.

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#245

Post by wpietri »

wool_gather wrote: post #192
watwut wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think inability to imagine bad luck or own mistake is proof of intelligence. It is proof of ego or arrogance or an attempt to mask I security. Smart people made mistakes in the past, smart people can imagine situations where they become victims (whether by own fault or not). Some smart people do have inability to imagine themselves in other people's shoose - but dumb people are often similarly disabled

You're right, it's a one-sided kind of intelligence. Maybe what Casseres said would be better phrased "people who are proud of being smart". The fact that it's one-sided smarts, the fact that one is probably not as smart as one thinks, and the ability to imagine another person's shoes, are all life lessons that may click into place at different times for different people.

This definitely seems like a major factor to me. If I'm proud of being smart, I'll be inclined to perform smartness. And one easy way to perform smartness is by making somebody else look dumb.

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#246

Post by paulie_a »

HaoZeke wrote: post #232
omegote wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Upwork is a little more protective in that aspect. You can clearly see from the beginning whether the client has a verified payment method.

UpWork is completely biased towards their work force. They treat freelancers like shit and the client is always right. The rating system makes it impossible to have any benefit from conflict resolution. Then again some of the people hiring there are really professional. I was scammed by some guy who gave me a 1 star for overworking me and exploiting me, in spite of showing evidence that his work was completed (and mu…

So basically they are paypal and ebay combined in business model and should have equally crappy reputations?

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#247

Post by wirrbel »

justboxing wrote: post #210
jondubois wrote: post #189

I worked for Freelancer.com briefly as a software engineer at their HQ in Sydney for about 1 month (that was in the year before their IPO) - I was fresh out of university. The culture within the company was toxic. They treat developers like crap - Both those who use the platform and those who work at HQ. They fired me after 1 month during my probation because I was too slow to implement a feature because I was spendi…

> because I was too slow to implement a feature because I was spending extra time writing tests. This. Just yesterday, I was asked by an interviewer at a Startup. "How do you test your code? Do you write tests? What's your familiarity with TDD." My answer: "I prefer to do a test driven approach. However, none of the companies I worked for allocated time for writing tests in the sprint, so I have not been able to actu…

I couldn't imagine to work without writing tests and I firmly believe it actually makes me quicker than manual coding. Sure, if you aim for 100% code coverage it takes time, but instead of trying out my code a few times, I just write those try-outs as tests and am happy ever after.

I don't really mention tests to my management. To me, they are just part of coding. My coworkers don't mind, they are happy when maintaining or changing my code that they have tests for support.

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#248

Post by cgb223 »

lsmod wrote: post #73

Stay away from Freelancer.com They reversed two milestone payments i had received, becasue they had to suspend the buyer's account due to some issues with the buyer's payment method. Note that this is after completing the project fully and leaving feedback for each other. I left the money on my Freelancer account, becasue they are/were having issues with Skrill withdrawals. It was there for about a month and they sud…

You should sue them

They owe you money, they didn’t pay. A lawyer would love this case

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#249

Post by nkristoffersen »

wirrbel wrote: post #247
justboxing wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because I was too slow to implement a feature because I was spending extra time writing tests. This. Just yesterday, I was asked by an interviewer at a Startup. "How do you test your code? Do you write tests? What's your familiarity with TDD." My answer: "I prefer to do a test driven approach. However, none of the companies I worked for allocated time for writing tests in the sprint, so I have not been able to actu…

I couldn't imagine to work without writing tests and I firmly believe it actually makes me quicker than manual coding. Sure, if you aim for 100% code coverage it takes time, but instead of trying out my code a few times, I just write those try-outs as tests and am happy ever after. I don't really mention tests to my management. To me, they are just part of coding. My coworkers don't mind, they are happy when maintain…

I just started learning how to write tests for my APIs. Changed my life! Now when I need to make broad changes I can easily tell what needs to be fixed because my tests cover each end point with multiple success and failure cases. Love it.
Post reply on HN