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Upwork Freelancers Who Want Guaranteed Pay Have to Opt in to Tracking Software

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Re: Upwork Freelancers Who Want Guaranteed Pay Have to Opt in to Tracking Software

#71

Post by mike503 »

I’m not a fan of it, but it is a necessary evil sometimes. I had a client dispute my work after he asked me to spend hours on tangential crap, then claim I wasted his time (he asked me to do the work and bill the time, approved of it at the time too, but later reversed his decision)

Upwork’s mediation process was hokey at best but in the end they reviewed the time logs and gave me all but a couple 10 minute chunks of time worth of payment.

I have just gotten used to being monitored while the clock is on, and don’t do sensitive things while it’s happening... I can always turn off the clock quick if needed.

I do feel like if I was buying services I would want some way to guarantee someone isn’t billing me time for doing nothing, this encourages some sort of transparency and attempts to curb timecard “fraud”

Re: Upwork Freelancers Who Want Guaranteed Pay Have to Opt in to Tracking Software

#72

Post by dopeboy »

I've been consulting off and on for the past five years and I've steered way clear of these marketplaces. It's a very obvious race to the bottom sort of situation they're plotting for which I get. I'd be optimizing for that outcome too if I were one of them.

Here's my advice to developers who want to freelance: network and network some more. Write blogs, create content marketing material for yourself. Go to meetups, tap your alum networks, go to hackathons, and work your networks. There's a lot of noise on LinkedIn but if used correctly, it can yield a lot for you.

Every single client I've had is someone I've met in person. I get to know them, they get to know me, we establish trust. Any sort of opening meeting or two is free. Formally, we use it to talk requirements. Ostensibly, we use it to vet each other.

Re: Upwork Freelancers Who Want Guaranteed Pay Have to Opt in to Tracking Software

#73

Post by bredren »

nihil75 wrote: post #10

Had a dev use macro keystrokes to cheat it. worthless.

The thing is if you are working on a serious team there is no value to cheat. You need to generate quality code at a reasonable pace. Custom solutions don’t appear out of nowhere.

So sorry to say but your dev setup was not good because you get 2 weeks to dispute this.

I know because I have hired on here too and been scammed once. I raised all the red flags and ended up getting some money back even past the guarantee.

Thing was that if I had reviewed the screenshots it was obvious it was bullshit.

Re: Upwork Freelancers Who Want Guaranteed Pay Have to Opt in to Tracking Software

#74

Post by sjburt »

sdegutis wrote: post #68
ggg9990 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but Upwork wants a metric that doesn’t need a software engineer to adjudicate. If you say “this XHMTL validator works as specified because RFC 1913 was never formally accepted” it takes someone with a clue to figure out what you mean. Upwork would rather say “you types all day, you get paid.”

Still very easy for people to bypass. Just pushes the adjudication into the "interpret screenshot" layer. The screenshot can be a completely valid Photoshop mockup that looks exactly like the client's specifications for the Rails app they hired you for, showing that you pretended to do the work.

I'm guessing that that ploy would work once or twice before you got pushed off the platform anyway. Same goes for a client that regularly claims the work is incomplete.

Re: Upwork Freelancers Who Want Guaranteed Pay Have to Opt in to Tracking Software

#75

Post by x0x0 »

lechiffre10 wrote: post #64

That doesn't even scratch the surface of Upwork issues though. Has anyone recently seen how much clients are willing to pay for work? I'm seeing avg pays of about 9-10$ an hour for mid-complexity jobs. Even see some clients willing to pay 600$ for fully functional IOS, Android and Web App iterations of an App.

There definitely are clients who are happy to pay $40-$75 an hour for senior full stack eng talent. We are such a client, and two VPE friends also commonly use upwork for 1-3 month gigs where they don't want to pay $175/hour for an sfbay contractor. The reason you're not seeing them is good clients eventually find a good contractor and either just run fulltime ongoing work through upwork (for eg payment convenience) or move off upwork.

Re: Upwork Freelancers Who Want Guaranteed Pay Have to Opt in to Tracking Software

#76

Post by techdragon »

dopeboy wrote: post #72

I've been consulting off and on for the past five years and I've steered way clear of these marketplaces. It's a very obvious race to the bottom sort of situation they're plotting for which I get. I'd be optimizing for that outcome too if I were one of them. Here's my advice to developers who want to freelance: network and network some more. Write blogs, create content marketing material for yourself. Go to meetups,…

I’d like to extend your point about the first meeting being free. I have a long standing principle I borrowed from lawyers. The first consultation is free. I try to keep it to an hour, but I don’t hold clients to that time limit, if it takes half a day to wrap my head round a project, that’s what it takes and it’s still just one consultation and it’s free. I’m not about to charge you to find out that I’m the wrong guy for you, or that you’re the wrong place for me.

It’s always worked well. So well in fact that I’m pretty sure I’ve beaten out less expensive people by virtue of being first through the door, signing paperwork and seeing source code... because I’m “free”.

It might not work for everyone. But it’s working for me.

Re: Upwork Freelancers Who Want Guaranteed Pay Have to Opt in to Tracking Software

#77

Post by neya »

aclimatt wrote: post #38

I'm a consultant and have been for a long time, and I know this business. I don't think counting keystrokes and in many cases screenshots make any sense, so I think the implementation of this is totally bogus, but the concept makes complete sense. "I've never had a client expect to be able to look over my shoulder" Right well UpWork isn't your client. I don't think your clients should, and to another person's point,…

I've been freelancing for ~6 years now, it really depends on the initial time you spend knowing about your client. If you set the expectations right to your client about payments upfront and send them a contract that clearly has consequences for them if they don't pay on time, and if you walk them through it, you shouldn't have any problems getting paid.

That's why understanding your client in your first few meetings before you commit to the project is SO important. I let go of a lot of deals in my career because the client was very stingy - they want to know how you spent every second of your time or they want to know how many vacations you take, etc. It boils down to trust.

It's your responsibility to instil trust and this trust will pay itself off in the long run.

Also, I work with Google cloud, I'm always the project owner and at no point my client has access to the source code until full payment for the project has been made. So, it also depends how desperately they want that software/product.

They stopped paying? Simple. Just add an auth layer to the app (very simple to do with Google Cloud). They will come to you if they really need that product that bad. They didn't get back to you? Too bad, in my contract, it says this is now your IP and you can do whatever with it, including selling it off to a competitor or someone else who can find use for this.

The point is, I don't see why your personal space needs to be violated by an intermediary agent for you to be guaranteed to be paid..

Re: Upwork Freelancers Who Want Guaranteed Pay Have to Opt in to Tracking Software

#78

Post by cryoshon »

naeemtee wrote: post #23

Not to shamelessly plug, but this Upwork monolith (and the general sub-optimized gig economy right now) is harmful not just for the freelancers themselves, but also the clients (from a price optimization perspective). We're trying to solve it with a blind marketplace model at ContentFly ( http://contentfly.co/ )

you're marketing upwork as harmful for the freelancers, but then you offer writers 5 cents per word, according to https://insertly.typeform.com/to/qr6pHF.

for standard quality work on any kind of topic requiring any kind of finesse, at least 10 cents per word is standard. you can easily pick up these arrangements at the same throughput (1k words / week), too.

so, where's the value for freelancers? looks like you are advocating that you aren't as big of a rip off for them -- yet you're still paying 50% lower than market rate.

reprehensible.

Re: Upwork Freelancers Who Want Guaranteed Pay Have to Opt in to Tracking Software

#79

Post by jhabdas »

dopeboy wrote: post #72

I've been consulting off and on for the past five years and I've steered way clear of these marketplaces. It's a very obvious race to the bottom sort of situation they're plotting for which I get. I'd be optimizing for that outcome too if I were one of them. Here's my advice to developers who want to freelance: network and network some more. Write blogs, create content marketing material for yourself. Go to meetups,…

TL;DR it's all about who you know and what you've done. Remove the ‘who’ part and all your left with is an algorithmic self-perception.

In Becoming a Better Freelancer I give you three valuable lessons learned in just one year of freelance work. Learn from my mistakes.

https://hackcabin.com/post/become-better-freelancer/

Re: Upwork Freelancers Who Want Guaranteed Pay Have to Opt in to Tracking Software

#80

Post by ahmadss »

techdragon wrote: post #76
dopeboy wrote: post #72

I've been consulting off and on for the past five years and I've steered way clear of these marketplaces. It's a very obvious race to the bottom sort of situation they're plotting for which I get. I'd be optimizing for that outcome too if I were one of them. Here's my advice to developers who want to freelance: network and network some more. Write blogs, create content marketing material for yourself. Go to meetups,…

I’d like to extend your point about the first meeting being free. I have a long standing principle I borrowed from lawyers. The first consultation is free. I try to keep it to an hour, but I don’t hold clients to that time limit, if it takes half a day to wrap my head round a project, that’s what it takes and it’s still just one consultation and it’s free. I’m not about to charge you to find out that I’m the wrong gu…

Just chiming in that this is how the bigger software dev agencies do it as well. I worked at Viget (www.viget.com) and now at Pivotal (pivotal.io) on the biz dev / sales side and spending time on pre-sales analysis is key to making a software project successful and thus winning the deal / securing the contract.
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