LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

Contractors have an entirely different set of things they can reasonably expect from a client, opposed to what employees can expect from employers. It’s a different kind of relationship all together. You’re not an employee, and your relationship with your clients is exclusively about delivering a service for payment. A contractor will typically benefit from building a network of clients who highly trust their work, but relationships with new clients don’t start out that way, and you can’t expect a client to invest any effort into your relationship beyond what’s required to deliver the contracted work.

While systems like this can be used intrusively, they’re certainly not a violation of privacy on any level. The work you do for your clients isn’t a private matter. It’s theirs. They’re paying you to do it for them...

I signed up for Upwork, a couple of years ago. I knew a few people that had used the platform to hire freelancers, and they raved about it.

I never got even one legit lead. Not one.

I did, however, get quite a few scammers. One was quite scary. It was a local person, with a crazy project proposal, that kept trying to get me to meet them in person, in remote locations.

I nuked my Upwork account, months ago. Even though I hadn’t been on it for months, I would still get occasional scammer contacts. Most were pretty transparent. They didn’t make much effort to hide what they were about. Basically 419 approach.

Cofounders has been similar, but scammers try to get me to contact them outside of the system, and Cofounders has been quite responsive to my reports. I have kept my Cofounders account, as I have received legit contacts (none of which have panned out, but that’s the nature of the beast).

I did try TopTal, a couple of years ago, but that didn’t work out. I won’t get into it, but I don’t think we’re a particularly good “fit.”

Just a few days ago, I had to report a scammer on LinkedIn that had declared themselves to be one of my employees. It took LI three days to do anything, and they never acknowledged my increasingly frantic reports.

Like so many of these types of outfits, they provide no way to establish a way to actually contact people. You just have these one-way, opaque “Report” buttons, with no acks.

Scammers are very clever. I expect them to game this quite quickly.

It’s bad times. I pine for the “good ol’ days,” when there was some Honor to be found, but there’s no putting the candy back in that piñata.

Wire transfer fees can be prohibitive for small contracts, and making an international transfer is quite time consuming, in that it typically requires visiting a physical bank branch.

I see this take a lot. It couldn’t be more wrong.

Firstly, let’s talk definitions:

> A white collar worker is a person who performs professional, desk, managerial, or administrative work.

> A blue-collar worker is a working class person who performs manual labor.

But I know what you’re trying to say - that we’ll suddenly find ourselves as the contemptible lower class of workers. Just FYI though: many manual laborers make quite a bit of money and are unionized. Many make over 100k which is good living outside of the bay.

But as to why you’re wrong: There’s still an enormous demand for devs - far more than the supply. The minute that changes, people will stop going to bootcamps and pursue other fields. And even bootcamps don’t help much: someone has to then take on that junior for a few years to make them useful, and nobody wants to do that. Not just anybody can be a dev. I used to tell people learn to code, but the truth is the average person could never handle even the simplest dev tasks. Even people with CS degrees seem to struggle for their first year (some struggle for their entire careers).

ML isn’t quite snake oil, but it’s sold like it. It does some things well but it’s falling short and in need of a breakthrough.

Not to mention our work is very important to these companies. Small mistakes can kill the company. Good work can make 100x+ our cost. And the better devs are several times more valuable than the mediocre ones. If developers were under real threat of being commodified, you’d see unionization happen so fast. There’s a reason companies move from outsourcing to insourcing - if the cheaper devs were working out, it wouldn’t make any sense.

Sometimes even big ones are doing these things, not explicitly surveillance so. Also true, smaller companies are more likely to be sketchy.

And unfortunately, these large fines are rare, hard to enforce by employees. The really extreme US stuff is not used, that's true.