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LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

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Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#121

Post by [deleted] »

sergiotapia wrote: post #36
seanwilson wrote: post #31

https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/211064098-Log-T... > It’s easy to bill your time using the Upwork desktop app. ... > When you have logging turned on, the app takes random screen captures six times per hour—once per 10-minute billing segment. Anything visible on your screen will display in your Work Diary, but you have the option, in Settings, to choose whether the screen captures your entire desktop or o…

As someone who worked on Upwork for a long time and literally owe them my career, it was great and I would do it again in a heartbeat. A long time ago I made a living on that platform exclusively. Thanks to Upwork I got to work with US clients and save enough money to migrate back home to the US with my wife and children. By using their time tracker I was guaranteed to get paid for work, they take the doubt out of th…

[deleted]

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#122

Post by tluyben2 »

seanwilson wrote: post #116
EugeneOZ wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as a freelancer, I will never take fixed-price contracts. Find someone else for this hell.

> And as a freelancer, I will never take fixed-price contracts. Find someone else for this hell. Can you explain why you think this? Courses/books on freelancing I've looked at generally strongly advise getting away from hourly, so it's interesting how both extremes of this advice exist. My hypothesis is a lot of freelancers get burned on their first projects because there's a learning curving in controlling scope cr…

Hourly works really well if you do the admin in enough detail. Try to agree, on paper, about number of hours per period as you can. And that then actually makes it into 'sprints' of fixed price. I used to send over an email at least weekly with; 'X is going to take me at least 35 hours, are you ok with that?'. Of course X has to be small enough to not overshoot by a massive amount of hours and also you cannot trigger the 'at least' too often. Outside that, it works well, as there is a trace of agreed-upon hours, which helped me a lot when going over 'fulltime'. If the client asked me why 'I charged too much', I simply showed them the emails they agreed to, tallying up to 90 hours instead of 40 I would charge under the contract.

But yeah, this 'screen monitoring' definitely doesn't work for me, so I would never agree to it; in that case fixed price is simpler.

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#123

Post by robjan »

hnarn wrote: post #109
bawolff wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example developers, who are writing clean code and refactor their stuff before they deliver If you want that you probably shouldn't be outsourcing to freelancers in general. People aren't going to make clean code if they know they are never going to see it again and arent being paid for how clean it is.

> arent being paid for how clean it is To be fair, a lot of full-time developers in big companies also do not get paid for how clean the code is, because no one cares. I'd probably lean more towards personal character deciding this than just looking at people behaving only and always as incentives tell them to in any situation. Some people take pride in their code and some don't.

The difference is if you are an employee you are more likely to need to make changes to your own messy code so there is an incentive to keep it clean

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#124

Post by m12k »

seanwilson wrote: post #31

https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/211064098-Log-T... > It’s easy to bill your time using the Upwork desktop app. ... > When you have logging turned on, the app takes random screen captures six times per hour—once per 10-minute billing segment. Anything visible on your screen will display in your Work Diary, but you have the option, in Settings, to choose whether the screen captures your entire desktop or o…

Agreed, if a company trusts me little enough to want to constantly monitor me like that, they trust me little enough that they shouldn't hire me in the first place.

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#125

Post by notahacker »

Griffinsauce wrote: post #53
Gustomaximus wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a client like this for new freelancers/employees that are working full time or larger jobs. It is intrusive but 100% is needed for some people or they take the piss. I'm too busy to follow their workload and sit there estimating times of jobs match hours. I check it one a week for ~10min to see hours logged per day and quick random to check its not loads of time wasting. It feels intrusive but there is little d…

What if I sketch out a solution to a complex problem for most of the day and then execute it in an hour? This will only catch the most ridiculous abuse that will be visible from results as well and harm everybody else. And, if it's not visible in the results... why do you care?

It won't even catch the most ridiculous abuse. If I want to spend eight billable hours reading Hacker News I'll do it on a different computer, and just make sure my "work" machine periodically scrolls, switches file or opens up a new dialog.

Might catch out somebody who deals with a couple of interruptions though...

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#126

Post by tluyben2 »

tmikaeld wrote: post #35
seanwilson wrote: post #31

https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/211064098-Log-T... > It’s easy to bill your time using the Upwork desktop app. ... > When you have logging turned on, the app takes random screen captures six times per hour—once per 10-minute billing segment. Anything visible on your screen will display in your Work Diary, but you have the option, in Settings, to choose whether the screen captures your entire desktop or o…

Used to be optional, so the client could require this or not. Yeah, if you take a job on Upwork, you'll never be able to do work with that freelancer off-site ever. It seems they actually enforce this too, I've read of many that's been either banned on suspicion.

> Yeah, if you take a job on Upwork, you'll never be able to do work with that freelancer off-site ever.

Why? That happens often a lot. There is not too much that can be done against it I think. I like the ease of hiring people and not having to do paperwork, so I see little reason, but I do know companies which do it a lot and have not been banned.

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#127

Post by ClumsyPilot »

hef19898 wrote: post #80
orangepanda wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? There are products especially for europe that do monitoring like this.

A lot of stuff is more or less illegal. Especially in employment, as long as nobody sues, nobody cares. And which freelancer would sue? Or which employee, as far as that's concerned? And even if, worst case is a small fine for the employer. Unfortunately.

Indeed the UK ruling that Uber is breaking the law and theirdrivers are workers, were 5 years (!) In the making. Thats a long time to make a profit, go fo IPO, etc.

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#129

Post by EugeneOZ »

Ayesh wrote: post #29
anovikov wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just wanted to weed out small time freelancers. The fee is 5% for >$10K customer-freelancer relationship... My average fee is about 7-8%, or about 10% including what the customer pays.

Yes. But that's what market places are for, to reach out new customers. If you have a relationship with a client for more than 10K, why continue to pay 5% on top of payment fees? They messaging software is not very useful, and time tracking feature is hostile for many. A more comparable feature would be for the client to pay a fixed fee to post, and allow them to work outside upwork.

> why continue to pay 5% on top of payment fees?

Because without Upwork weekly charges clients might “forget” and “postpone” and “delay” payments. 5% is ok to know that money will be paid by the schedule.

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#130

Post by hnarn »

robjan wrote: post #123
hnarn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> arent being paid for how clean it is To be fair, a lot of full-time developers in big companies also do not get paid for how clean the code is, because no one cares. I'd probably lean more towards personal character deciding this than just looking at people behaving only and always as incentives tell them to in any situation. Some people take pride in their code and some don't.

The difference is if you are an employee you are more likely to need to make changes to your own messy code so there is an incentive to keep it clean

All I'm saying is that I don't think it's as simple as "you either have incentive or you don't", because if it was, then developers writing bad code that they themselves had to go back to wouldn't exist, but they clearly do. I'm one of them and I talk to a lot of them daily.

To say that "of course this freelance code is garbage, they're paid peanuts" is naive, because it implies that:

a) Well paid engineers always write beautiful code, and the more they get paid the more beautiful it becomes, which obviously isn't true.

b) Badly paid engineers don't care about code quality if they don't get paid for it, which isn't true because open source is a thing.

Reducing everything to economical incentives is, in my opinion, not very useful.

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