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LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

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Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#251

Post by jtdev »

flyinglizard wrote: post #241
jtdev wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get what you pay for.

Take the very same individual and place them in India or US, or even in a high or low CoL area in the US and they would charge differently; but their work is still the same. So you're not really getting what you paid for, you're paying for many externalities.

I’ve encountered offshore devs that are actually quite good... they are by far the exception, but they also charge much more than the run of the mill folks that you’re likely to encounter.

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#252

Post by sitkack »

seanwilson wrote: post #137
tluyben2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not completely against hourly and what you describe sounds decent as long as the client has a realistic budget and is reasonable about estimates. It's hard to do fixed price when there's a lot of unknowns or there's an unpredictable workload for example. I see people mention day and week rates as well, but this forces you to work in minimum increments which is less flexible. I just can't stand getting into scenar…

Both strategies are useful. I would be interested to hear what the audience and author were in your statement about "getting away from hourly". Was that in recommendation adding business value and not being hourly labor or something else?

I see fixed price being more of a tool in design projects, where the goal might be concrete but the path to get there is open, or the client wants a basket of options.

Where as doing an n-party integration between multiple inflight projects at a fixed price would be poor idea, UNLESS, UNLESS the fixed price is some high multiple of the P99 and some low multiple of the P99.9bar

In the first case, the value is in the answer, not the difficulty in which it was arrived at. In the second case, the actual work is what is needed and being paid for.

But at a high enough level, all contracts are fixed price.

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#253

Post by WhompingWindows »

bawolff wrote: post #64
mcenedella wrote: post #19

I’ve been on Upwork as a buyer for years. It’s tremendous for getting great talent on a short term basis. Top rate I’ve paid I think is some close to or just over $100/hour, so it’s definitely not just for low-end stuff. I’ve learned (the hard way) about being very, very clear with deliverables and expectations. Based on the average response I get on Upwork, it would seem the median buyer is much more susceptible to…

> $100/hour, so it’s definitely not just for low-end stuff. Maybe not low-end, but that's still probably the lower end of mid-end.

Come again, $100/hour is the "lower end of mid-end"? The median wage is around $25 in the USA, the minimum wage averages around $10...

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#255

Post by cercatrova »

Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #178
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a freelancer. All the rave reviews were from clients. After the fact, I asked around for friends that had tried it as freelancers, and they all had similar stories to mine. It seems that Upwork is really a platform for offshore work. Some of these folks are undoubtedly good, but it's probably a crapshoot, which, to be fair, is also the case for local talent. With cheap offshore work, you can try out a couple of ou…

It's been years since I was on Upwork (started w/ Elance) and I felt similar frustrations. Then I signed up as a buyer, posted a job similar to the ones I was seeking, and analyzed the patterns of freelancer pitches and how the system was structured. I started noticing missed opportunities. As a buyer, you only see the first few sentences of a proposal unless you hit the See More option. Most freelancers weren't maxi…

Video messages work exceptionally well. I use it for my sales outreach as well.

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#256

Post by sleepyhead »

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…

First time using Upwork last week and I was shocked to see these screenshots from the freelancer. Not only problematic for the freelancer but also a huge potential GDPR issue for me. Luckily the project did not include personal data but if it had I would have to inform all my customers and the local DPA about a data leakage. Having a freelancer work on PII is one thing, it would have been solved with a contract, but for the data to be stored on Upwork servers is something else.

Yes you can ask questions, both in the job form and in the chat before hiring someone.

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#257

Post by biohax2015 »

DC1350 wrote: post #245

In the future your boss will assign work by auctioning JIRA tickets off to the team with a price ceiling set by freelancers on the LinkedIn marketplace. Payment will be through a bounty system. Salary is such an outdated payment structure

That sounds awful.

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#258

Post by loceng »

biohax2015 wrote: post #257
DC1350 wrote: post #245

In the future your boss will assign work by auctioning JIRA tickets off to the team with a price ceiling set by freelancers on the LinkedIn marketplace. Payment will be through a bounty system. Salary is such an outdated payment structure

That sounds awful.

Why?

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#259

Post by the_snooze »

DC1350 wrote: post #245

In the future your boss will assign work by auctioning JIRA tickets off to the team with a price ceiling set by freelancers on the LinkedIn marketplace. Payment will be through a bounty system. Salary is such an outdated payment structure

That's a great incentive structure to build unmaintainable systems.

Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

#260

Post by praptak »

Frost1x wrote: post #218
antupis wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah it is business model problem because those mystical 10x programmers are not commodities and Fiverr and Upwork are tuned for commodity business like logo design etc.

If you've ever tried logo design, I'd argue it's not really a commodity either. I've attempted it multiple times and it's non-trivial to create a good quality logo for a business. A lot of experience and creativity come to play in those tiny little ubiquitous graphics, not just the technical execution skill (anyone here can probably slop together a vector graphic logo in a pinch). None the less, graphic designers los…

I'd say that shifting away from these situations is fine, but it's a crappy way of dealing with exploitation. Quote RMS: "All in all, I think it is a mistake to defend people's rights with one hand tied behind our backs, using nothing except the individual option to say no to a deal. We should use democracy to organize and together impose limits on what the rich can do to the rest of us. That's what democracy was invented for!"
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