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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

#101

Post by jasonkester »

sidlls wrote: post #35
lemonghost wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of work are you doing? If you don't mind my asking...

He's an outlier at best. Just search through the listings: the vast majority of them are extremely low paying jobs with vague or outlandish requirements.

You want to be an outlier on sites like that. You need to be.

The median developer on a freelance site is correctly priced at $9/hr, and there are thousands of options at that price point. Your job is to signal that you are not one of them, and that you are capable of actually completing software projects. A $150/hr bill rate is a good way of doing that.

You want your client’s decision to be whether to hope for the best with one of those Lowball bids that inspire zero confidence, or whether to go with the expensive guy who will at least get the thing built.

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

#102

Post by kumarvvr »

mike503 wrote: post #71

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…

> approved of it at the time too, but later reversed his decision

This is a very serious problem with upwork. I once had a client accept a finished project, give me an amazing review and then, close the project and complete the payment. A month later, he reversed the rating and review and started an issue with the Upwork system. The problem was that the third-party software service I used (as per the clients instructions) to perform a set of tasks, changed their policy and stopped allowing remote clients to their service.

I explained to the client during the development phase itself that this could happen. He explicitly told me that it was ok, and to go ahead.

Inspite of showing Upwork all the communications, my warnings, etc, they still sided with the client, blocked my account and transferred some balance amount in my account to the client.

The last time I used Upwork.

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

#103

Post by theshadowknows »

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 had a company owe me about $14,000 for....15 years now. I’m guessing it won’t be coming in anytime soon! Back when I was younger and naive about such things it would have been nice for a larger organization to have my back.

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

#104

Post by analogmemory »

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.

I've done a few projects on Upwork in the past. Most of the web development work is WordPress based sites.

Some people have no idea how much it should cost so that's why you see complex sites with only a $500 budget. It's a smaller pool of better paying projects. You're not going to get SV rates but you could make a decent living from.

As for me one of the clients enjoyed working with me and we moved away from Upwork and just pays me directly now. Which I think is a common occurrence, and probably does reduce the amount of higher paying project. Once you find a good developer you tend to stick with them.

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

#105

Post by nihil75 »

bredren wrote: post #73
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.…

You get one week to dispute, and let me tell you - Upwork staff are not quick to accept your claims. By the time my dispute was manually reviewed the payment was already passed to the freelancer and could not be reclaimed. Only the most recent week's pay was refunded, even though the evidence suggested the developer was cheating for a long period of time.

I didn't catch on because he was producing good code and just used the macro to "inflate" his hours by about 30%. I caught on by pure chance when he happened to tweak his background macro tool just as the hourly screenshot was taken.

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

#106

Post by nihil75 »

shawn wrote: post #16
nihil75 wrote: post #10

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

Hahaha. What? That’s awesome. What did the macros do? I’ve always wanted to make a plausible code generator based on markov chains. It still seems like an effective way to trick people into thinking you’re working on some hard problem.

No need for pseudo-code, random clicks/strokes will do (he used the arrow keys to move around code and switch open Atom tab).

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

#107

Post by dopeboy »

ahmadss wrote: post #80
techdragon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is pretty fascinating to me, thanks for sharing. The analysis you're referring to - how long does it take for the big clients you deal with? Is it mostly meetings?

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

#108

Post by z3t4 »

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,…

Why not sent proof of work ? Like the actual stuff you wrote, instead of having a program constantly monitor what you do.

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

#109

Post by cleansy »

I am absolutely not surprised about this BS tracking software stuff. I was interviewing with Upwork a couple of month back. I live in "western Europe" and what they offered me was actually less pay than being employed full time here. For the moment I accepted but more out of interest to see what the rest of their interview looks like.

The questions they had were quite specific about corner cases of the language used. I liked that a lot. However, it's also just stuff that you can read in a couple of blog posts about python corner cases.

What struck me the most was that they seriously asked me to write up a program to prove my coding skills - despite having send samples - at which point I dropped out.

Several things just turned me completely off about Upwork:

1) They claim that they have the "1%" of the best developers in the world. BS. With the kind of money they offer: forget about that. Maybe you have a couple of imposters who don't know that they can charge easily double of what they offer but the majority will be mid level for sure. So this claim is a lie.

2) They obviously cannot guarantee that you will be assigned a project anytime soon once you complete the interviews. But asked as well for a lot of engagement from your end to go through the process.

3) It was something like $6.000 per month - market rate for a contractor in Germany with comparable skills and experience is more in the range of $12.000

However, and that's my take from it: if I ever have to hire mid level developers for remote positions I definitely will look at Upwork's portfolio and pirate them away. Put the 20% that UW charges on top of their salary and the deal should be golden.

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