Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

aimgroup.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 341 posts

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#181

Post by wyclif »

fecak wrote: post #166
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…

I can't speak for all freelancers, but I do think you're missing some things. I've completed 1000+ projects on Upwork with a 95%+ success rate over the past few years (mostly resume writing and executive bios). As a freelancer, you can simply refuse the monitoring feature. I would never accept a project where the client wanted screen shots. I use Google Docs so my activity is tracked there pretty accurately as it is,…

Fascinating commentary, especially because I've often wondered what it takes to break in to the resume/executive bio writing world. I'm fairly well aware of best practices, but I don't have any experience.

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#182

Post by ldap1001 »

So, Microsoft tracks developer "productivity" and submissiveness via GitHub and now drives down salaries via LinkedIn.

The new developer career: Work yourself to exhaustion in "open" source to get noticed. If you succeed, welcome to the underpaid gig economy at LinkedIn.

As a bonus, get tracked all the time by GitHub, VSCode, vcpkg, LinkedIn and the new Microsoft in general.

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#183

Post by fecak »

wyclif wrote: post #181
fecak wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for all freelancers, but I do think you're missing some things. I've completed 1000+ projects on Upwork with a 95%+ success rate over the past few years (mostly resume writing and executive bios). As a freelancer, you can simply refuse the monitoring feature. I would never accept a project where the client wanted screen shots. I use Google Docs so my activity is tracked there pretty accurately as it is,…

Fascinating commentary, especially because I've often wondered what it takes to break in to the resume/executive bio writing world. I'm fairly well aware of best practices, but I don't have any experience.

My main advantage as a writer is 20 years of recruiting experience, mostly for east coast US startups. Being a good resume writer (and maybe any good writer?) is really about knowing your audience. And when you've written a lot of resumes it becomes a bit easier. The voice is tricky for some people.

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#184

Post by atleta »

They've been developing it for 1.5 years and still no results, no visible MVP? I guess that's how it looks like when a startup matures and loses it's core values.

I still remember hearing Reid Hoffman at a conference (well, the online stream) in 2013. It was just a few weeks after my first startup flopped and my ex-co-founder was blaming it on not building a better quality product, for which I was to be held responsible as the CTO.

So then I hear Reid Hoffman of Linkedin talking at this conference about saying that "if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product then you were releasing it way too late". Seems like they have forgotten it as an organization.

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#185

Post by KDJohnBrown »

bawolff wrote: post #75
kube-system wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, people on the receiving end of a payment love un-reversible payments. The same is not so true for people who are sending said payment and expecting that work gets done.

If only someone would make a gig marketplace website that could act as an escrow, collecting money upfront and distributing once the work is done.

Trust is difficult. How do you programmatically define “done” so that the customer cannot screw you?

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#186

Post by gota »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #143
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…

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 thoug…

> 419 approach

What does this mean?

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#187

Post by frockington1 »

ldap1001 wrote: post #182

So, Microsoft tracks developer "productivity" and submissiveness via GitHub and now drives down salaries via LinkedIn. The new developer career: Work yourself to exhaustion in "open" source to get noticed. If you succeed, welcome to the underpaid gig economy at LinkedIn. As a bonus, get tracked all the time by GitHub, VSCode, vcpkg, LinkedIn and the new Microsoft in general.

I'm not familiar with Microsofts practices, how are they driving down salaries via LinkedIn?

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#188

Post by atleta »

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…

I guess we're talking about software development. Because it depends a lot on the kind of the job (or maybe I'm just ignorant and someone else's job seems simpler ;) ).

But if we talk about software only, then estimating is hard, creating a strong and stable enough specification (that can be used for estimation) is hard, you have to sell it to the client - most clients are not willing to pay for it, for they don't understand that it would be needed in order to come up with a fixed cost. Even if they do understand the need and acknowledge the effort, they might say that if you create the spec and they don't like the final quote then the spec may not be valuable for them, because the next freelancer/company may not find it useful. (And it has some merit, though there are a lot of freelancers and companies who are willing to work and quote based on an existing detailed specification.)

And if you do the estimation (and create the quote) without quoting for the specification work then you'll put in a lot of uncompensated hours which you'll have to make up for with the paying clients, so you'll be more expensive. Especially if you find a client who shops around for quotes, plays the "lets do a spec" game (for which they don't pay), and then go with the specification (or even just the improved understanding) to the next few companies where they can provide a detailed spec so those companies can quote lower.

Oh, well and the client will compare the price tags (obviously and rightly so), so they will more likely to be choosing the offer that has the larger estimation error (as long as it's an underestimation, of course). And you can say that competition takes care of this (whoever is constantly underestimating, that constant underestimation will actually be their real price), but the above points still hold. It's just not worth it. Definitely not worth it if you don't have the client paying for the specification/planning that's needed for the quote.

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#189

Post by konha »

gota wrote: post #186
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thoug…

> 419 approach What does this mean?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#190

Post by adamcstephens »

atleta wrote: post #184

They've been developing it for 1.5 years and still no results, no visible MVP? I guess that's how it looks like when a startup matures and loses it's core values. I still remember hearing Reid Hoffman at a conference (well, the online stream) in 2013. It was just a few weeks after my first startup flopped and my ex-co-founder was blaming it on not building a better quality product, for which I was to be held responsi…

They were bought by Microsoft. There is no quick innovation in a large corporation.
Post reply on HN