Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds awful.
Why?
LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace
261–270 of 341 posts
Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't feel any of that solves my main issue: that I would not want to work for someone who does not trust me. That does not seem like a good environment where I can be productive and work on things which benefit my employer. The privacy issues is not the only issue. The only case I would accept something like this is if I was working at eg the NSA, a really high value target for state actors. Then I would get why n…
The use of monitoring doesn't mean they don't trust you. Its a way to verify your trust, otherwise it just blind trust.
Let's not sugarcoat it. If you need to verify trust then it's not trust.
"Oh hey honey, mind if I look at your phone? Oh it's not that I don't trust you, I just need to verify my trust."
eyeroll
Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace
#263In 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 Salary is such an outdated payment structure
I can't tell if this is a joke or not. Sounds like an easy way to develop horrible documentation-free, semi-functional systems.
The future is gonna be filled with disinterested one time contractors and employers who fraudulently refuse bounty payout.
Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't feel any of that solves my main issue: that I would not want to work for someone who does not trust me. That does not seem like a good environment where I can be productive and work on things which benefit my employer. The privacy issues is not the only issue. The only case I would accept something like this is if I was working at eg the NSA, a really high value target for state actors. Then I would get why n…
It's not a question of trust, it's a question of time tracking for hourly employees. I agree that if you are a salaried employee this type of tracking software makes no sense.
In my head when I tell a client that a project/job is X hours it means that that is the market value in hours for that project.
There is an old Italian story - I'm sure it's common in other places - about a TV repairman that goes to fix a TV at someone's house. He looks at the TV and tells the owner: "It's going to be 100$ to fix it". The owner agrees. The repairman walks up to the TV, hits it with his fist and the TV starts working again. The owner complains: "What? A 100 bucks to hit the TV with your fist?" and the handyman: "Yeah, because I knew where to hit it!".
The idea is, say that you are a 10X performer: you have two options in front of you. Option one: you charge 1200$ for ten hours of work - this will make clients happy, even if you are only working an hour. Option two: you charge 1200$ for an hour of work: none is going to hire you because there are people that are only charging 120$ an hour.
The funny thing is: even if the math always ends up the same - 1200$ - people will almost always choose the 120$ an hour because in their heads they are getting the best deal.
Back to the topic at hand: if I say that a job is 10 hours at 120$ per hour I don't want to be monitored because trust doesn't enter into it. It's a simple matter of what's the worth of the job. If you don't think the job is worth 1200$ no amount of monitoring will fix it; if you think the job is worth 1200$ then if I do it in two minutes or 10 hours should not be an issue.
The Speed-Cost-Quality triangle is lost in translation the moment the invoice hits the printer.
* Edit 1 - Fixed some spelling.
Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace
#265Earlier 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…
> You can tell by how the project descriptions are written which ones to avoid.
What makes you avoid a project?
Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace
#266I dislike the games LinkedIn plays with hiding your phone number and email address. Then you need some level of linking and/or paid subscription to communicate with someone.
Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Good points. I think we are slowly becoming commodified or at least there will be greater stratification between different types of developer with much higher salaries on one and and much lower on the other.
Who's on the low end? Even junior positions are paying close to 100k in some areas, with juniors in the bay making more than that. There are some true-entry level positions and areas (midwest, less urban) that pay less. Academia as well. But if you're talking about overseas devs, even they are charging more these days (40+/hour) for any sort of quality work. You don't want anybody touching your app (or having access to your code) if they don't have a high level of skill and professional accountability. Outsourced teams are often used for MVPs or prototyping - but then these companies call on devs like me when they get serious about their product. If teams of poorly paid devs could compete with highly paid devs, they would already be doing so - outsourcing of development started decades ago and the trend has reversed. You get a much better product with someone who has an intimate understanding of your business and your application, so "gig economy" type of work is generally limited to wordpress-style sites for your local pizza shop.
As someone hiring devs, the push is always towards higher pay. Even with competitive salaries, it's hard to find good senior devs. That tells me that our pay isn't competitive enough (or our recruiters suck, but probably both), which is just going to push our salaries higher.
Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace
#268In 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
You may be joking, but this is already how my team has been operating for the past 6 months. Theoretically it sounds great, because you can scale up or down your engineering needs just like you scale anything on the cloud. Have 100 Github issues to fix this week? Scale up to 20 freelance devs for a week and get it done.
Practically, it doesn't work. We're going to go back to hiring full-time engineers again.
Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Presumably you went in early when the platform was still decent. I tried it in ~2013 and again recently and it's a shit-show. There's no quality control on the demand side so you waste hours sifting through crap like unreasonably low rates or unclear/nonsense requirements, then spend ages writing a proposal just to be outbid by some Indian sweatshop because the rating system has been gamed to death and there's nothin…
That was not my experience working up until 2016. My rates at their lowest was $45/hr. Double or more towards the end.
Re: LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 inv…
Agree with RMS on this point, but I think that battle is nearly lost. Opting out ("cancel culture") seems to be the only powerful choice left for your average citizen in the shambles of democracy we have left. It could just be the orchestration problem that a large population can't self organize well enough to create a healthy democracy whereas a smaller ruling class is at a scale it can orchestrate and holds the upper hand.
We currently have a system that not only enables exploitation of people but celebrates it. If you can get someone to do something for you for nothing, you're rewarded and regarded as brilliant.
Exploitation (essentially optimization) is fine when it's applied to a mechanical technique or process to gain efficiency (general technological growth), but not so fine when it's exploiting people and their lives to reach these growths. We seem to have lost the technological growth rate options that satisfy the appetites of the most greed driven (where US capitalism has historically been fantastic and deserves celebration, back when labor rights were strong and the industrial revolution was steaming ahead with no end in sight for technological growth) and moved on to exploiting people to eek out these never-ending appetites for growth (where US capitalism, I believe, has more recently begun to fail).