Inspired by this post, here is my Freelancer.com horror story: https://www.trustpilot.com/reviews/59fe2e9231302a07249de1a7
Freelancer.com has ruined my life
271–280 of 359 posts
Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life
#272What this story and the comments here tell me is that the market for a developer focused contract bid site is ripe for competition. There are only a few well known branded marketplaces in the industry, and they all seem to be quite poor in the eyes of skilled developers. Maybe there is a continuous decline towards the bottom after a marketplace becomes a certain size, but I wish that there were more options to find c…
I’m a designer and clients always ask me if I can recommend a developer. I can’t seem to network with any good developers who I can honestly recommend to my clients. I even started a freelance slack group in hopes of broadening my network but that hasn’t really done much.
Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life
#273I remember having an account with them. It had something like $900 sitting there just in case I wanted to hire someone to do something. I had not visited the site for an year or so and then once logged in to see what's going on.
Discovered that my account balance went down to $750 or so. They quietly introduced an Idle account fee of $10 per month with no email notice or anything.
If I did not log in they would completely wipe out my money.
I withdrew it all and never looked back since.
Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life
#274I wonder why nobody has filled the gap of a job-agency for smart people (10x developers if you will) that are looking for short-term jobs (e.g. when in between jobs/projects or when their current startup is not ramen-profitable yet).
Because 10x developers are probably in very high demand and are hardly out of work. I know one such person and he makes a pretty penny on contract work with nonstop offers he has to decline 99.9% of the time because he simply can’t handle more work.
Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life
#275All of those "freelancer" websites are scams. Freelancing is about not working for other men. It's about being your own boss. Those websites are not really freelancing, they're temp agencies hiring out short term contract work. That is not freelancing. Those websites all share specific qualities: The salaries are too low, the service quality is poor, and you'll be outbid by unskilled indian labor 90% of the time. Put…
It's lead generation, which freelancers can benefit from as much as agency employment (what you seem to be implying the Freelancer.com seller is current under).
Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life
#276Like most marketplaces, they are only interested in making themselves profitable. Always remember that. Working at freelancer.com or similar sites is saying: "I should spend a large portion of my life to become an expert in my craft, and then I should agree to have my privacy stripped away from me while I race to the bottom and undercut my competition because I will actively place myself into situations where I have…
Thanks for the guide!
Btw,
>As long as you have the technical skills to do the job, you can have your first client tomorrow. Heck, you don’t even need the technical skills, but that’s a story for another day.
I'm curious, did you ever write that story?
Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anybody have a theory as to why victim-blaming is such a popular response on HN? I don't see it nearly as much elsewhere.
Another possibility is simple contrarianism. HN commenters tend to be cerebral know-it-all types who genuinely enjoy argumentation and like to pick things apart. They also tend to identify as independent thinkers and they like to demonstrate their intellect by taking unconventional positions.
If this is the case here, in what way is GP demonstrating their intellect with the position they're taking?
Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is not slave wages considering the living costs in the respective countries. This pisses me off big time. It is more expensive to live in developing countries than in developed countries. Try to wrap your head around it. These countries are developing , so they don't have infrastructure to support their populace.
For an ex-pat who wants to live in relative luxury, sure. Otherwise it is difficult to see how you can justify this claim? Have you by chance never been to a developing country? Honestly, how cheap some things are would shock you; for example, you can eat like a king in the heart of any Indian city for 1-2 dollars!
The majority of my income goes to housing and transportation though. My impression is that the programmers that work for my company from India make 1/5th what I do, but an apartment is not much cheaper and a car is more expensive. For instance, I did a search for apartments in Noida and found 900 sq. ft apartments for about 45 lakh rupees which is around $70,000. Seven times annual income is very expensive compared to where I live.
Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well you should try it next time because that's how I got one of my first clients on my own. A local food truck showed up to my uni quite often and I noticed their website wasn't great, so one day I walked up to them and asked if they were looking for a redesign. They eagerly said yes and I met with the whole family (it was a family business) 3 days later. It was a really unfulfilling contract but it illustrated to m…
Yeah, this is the type of stuff I'm talking about. But you can take these things so much further if you branch away from "just development skills" too. I never talked to a food truck person yet but I bet there's lots of ways you could have turned that unfulfilling contract into something more interesting. No business owner really cares about a site redesign. They just care about "how do I get more customers?". If you…
I get what you're saying, but it's also clear that you haven't ever talked to a food truck person.
They're not paying you $1000 for a wordpress site, and they're never paying $1000 on retainer. The rest is also a total fantasy.
This is a misleading example because restaurants and food already operate on razor-thin margins; restaurant software is legendarily hard to break into and make money in.
Source: tried to start a "make websites for food trucks" business years and years ago, talked to hundreds of food truck owners, and learned that they're largely running food trucks because they like the hours, the freedom, the scale of the business. They can make decent cash without maintaining a space or even necessarily operating outside lunchtime. They don't really need to drive more business, and won't really anyway--their fortunes are tied to geography and the economy overall.
If you have an example from your own life, please use that instead of a fictitious one that is misleading and kinda wrong.
Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment is unfair. These websites are not scams. A couple of years ago I was looking for 10-15h/week gigs and using one of competitors of freelancer.com proved to work for me. Was it annoying to bid for gigs? Yes. Was the quality of their service low? Yeah, I'd say so. Were salaries low? For someone coming from Eastern Europe - not at all. On top of that, I always got money on time, which is not always the case…
> For someone coming from Eastern Europe - not at all. > Yes, you will be outbid by competitors from cheaper countries, but hey, welcome to reality where half of the stuff you buy is produced in China, because you compete with people and companies from all around the world. That's what a race to the bottom looks like, if this trend keeps on going it won't be long before everybody has the income of somebody working in…
Even if poorer countries(and people) get the exact same opportunities for same money, they still have to compete.