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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

#111

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

severine wrote: post #65
swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #31

Semirelated but I run timesnapper, which is a private tracking software running only on my PC so I can check if I've forgotten to save a doc and wanted to see what it looked like 2 hours ago.

Interesting! Link: http://timesnapper.com/ What would be the *nix alternative?

Great question, I needed a macOS equivalent for my macbook. Technically this is *nix since its unix flavored

https://alternativeto.net/software/timesnapper/

I haven't tried any personally, but digging through the alternatives I actually didn't see any resembling it. All the other alternatives were designed to manage employees & their time. None of them seemed to offer video playbacks like timesnapper, only screenshots. And they worked online which is a giant red flag for me.

The closest one I could find though for linux and macOS is this one called productivity-peach https://www.etopian.com/software/automatic-screenshots-windo... . I strictly wanted to avoid "remote monitoring" or "employee-tracking" type software

I did pay $30 for timesnapper (one license works on more than 1 PC). Timesnapper is nice, you can playback your entire day and see everything that was done. Super useful if you do sysadmin stuff as well, sometimes you might change a setting on AWS/cpanel/etc and it screws up everything. Now you can go back and see what you changed. You can add a password too which I do as well, your video playbacks are encrypted

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

#113

Post by teh_klev »

theshadowknows wrote: post #103
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.

No, I think the reality would be that you'd have never allowed that client to run up $14k. You'd have had a payment plan in place so that at each milestone you'd get paid. If they stop paying, you would down tools.

You don't need a big brother watching your every working hour. There's happy mediums, this Upwork spy thing certainly isn't it.

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

#114

Post by severine »

swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #111
severine wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! Link: http://timesnapper.com/ What would be the *nix alternative?

Great question, I needed a macOS equivalent for my macbook. Technically this is *nix since its unix flavored https://alternativeto.net/software/timesnapper/ I haven't tried any personally, but digging through the alternatives I actually didn't see any resembling it. All the other alternatives were designed to manage employees & their time. None of them seemed to offer video playbacks like timesnapper, only screenshot…

Funny, I did the same thing.

The answer below by mmel is more appealing to me after looking through those alternatives...

I agree, that the closest is Productivity Peach, but being a closed source Java app, and my circumstances, that one liner could be going more my way, thanks swaggyBoatswain and mmel!

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

#115

Post by ivm »

realusername wrote: post #99
ivm wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These markets rarely pay as much as US or even UK. I've seen dozens of developers with 2-5 years of experience earning more on Upwork than senior developers in their countries. Also, it isn't a "race-to-the-bottom" if you have a good portfolio and know how to present your skills.

If they want to be paid well, they are probably not going on Upworks anyway... These websites are the bottom of what you can get as a consultant.

But where should they go with no presence in English-speaking Internet and only conversational language level?

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

#116

Post by cryoshon »

slig wrote: post #48
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/ )

I've been looking for a service like yours. Are all your writers native speakers? They work "in house" or they're contracted? Thanks

this guy hasn't replied yet, so i'll bite.

i can probably help you find what you're looking for.

shoot me an email (it's listed on my profile) and we can chat.

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

#117

Post by ahmadss »

dopeboy wrote: post #107
ahmadss wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Happy to talk in more detail directly (email address is my HN username at gmail) but in terms of the analysis done for software projects, the timing is generally a combination of 2-3 meetings over a period of a week or two. Each meeting can be an hour or three, but the goal is to get a sense of a) how mission critical the app is b) what are the primary challenges the client is trying to solve w the app in question c) who are the users of the app d) what does the client know about the users and their needs / pain points e) what are we going to prioritize when building f) who are stakeholders involved to get buy in g) what does the codebase look like and can we build atop it or is this gonna be a net new effort.

When I'm trying to closing six, seven, or eight figure software dev deals, this process definitely involves a "sales" type of person as well as two - three devs and architects.

The outcome is a proposal that sometimes is just a powerpoint deck with a summary of our understanding of the problem and the process / cost / timeline we'll take to solve it.

Once I deliver the proposal, then it's all about getting to agreement on cost, timeline, and then getting signed contracts. Rule number 1 is that a deal is never ever a deal until the contract is signed and executed.

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

#119

Post by theshadowknows »

teh_klev wrote: post #113
theshadowknows wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I think the reality would be that you'd have never allowed that client to run up $14k. You'd have had a payment plan in place so that at each milestone you'd get paid. If they stop paying, you would down tools. You don't need a big brother watching your every working hour. There's happy mediums, this Upwork spy thing certainly isn't it.

That’s a really good point. I was young and just sort of “trusted” people and clients to do the right thing.

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

#120

Post by alihan »

fipple wrote: post #19
devoply wrote: post #4

I wonder if anyone in developed countries can actually make a living from something like Upwork. It seemed to me whenever I have looked at it, that it's mostly people and companies from the developing world who work for less than minimum wage or close to it in developed countries... and the expected cost matches these sorts of rates. So it does not make sense for anyone other than the most desperate people in the fir…

"Not in San Francisco" and "easy to exploit" are very different. I had great, professional work done in Russia on Upwork. It didn't cost $200 per hour, but it didn't cost $2 per hour either. The engineer who did the work was the vendor, and I was the client, so I was definitely the boss and treated as such, but he was clearly not hurting for work and if I started behaving inappropriately he could have easily dumped m…

Always looking for recommended devs on Upwork. What was their expertise and do you have their contact details?
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