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Data scientists shouldn't use Upwork

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Re: Data scientists shouldn't use Upwork

#131

Post by vkou »

JamesBarney wrote: post #130
vkou wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spend a year working for a consulting company, to learn the ropes. If I were a business looking to have a freelancer build something for me, 'a fresh grad, with less than a year work experience, who has never done this sort of thing before' is not who I'd hire. I have 9 years experience, and if I were to to go into freelancing (The kind where you solve problems for businesses, as opposed to the kind where you're a 9-…

> I have 9 years experience, and if I were to to go into freelancing (The kind where you solve problems for businesses, as opposed to the kind where you're a 9-5 1099 contractor), the first thing I would do is to take a job at a consulting firm, and spend my time there learning. Figure out what works, and what really, really doesn't. I have to disagree. I've worked for several tech consulting firms(8 years of experie…

> Execution - This is mostly involves a combination of being able to correctly identify requirements and technical execution skills. Most developers usually have plenty of experience hear.

How do you think a fresh-out-of-college junior with less than a year of experience going to be at execution?

Knowing nothing but that, I'm going to take a statistical guess, and say: "Probably not great." I'm going to make another statistical guess, and say: "They probably don't even know what they don't know."

Also, joining someplace that's not consultancy-focused (like Google or Facebook) isn't necessarilly going to help with building relevant experience.

Yes, you're going to learn a lot about how to move protobufs around from one distributed system to another, and how to do on-call, and how to work in the cloud.

No, this is not the most useful set of skills to have, when the insurance broker down the street wants to pay you $XYZW to build them a custom SalesForce widget.

Re: Data scientists shouldn't use Upwork

#132

Post by empath75 »

cambalache wrote: post #105
komali2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good faith attempt and I appreciate that. First, from your link: >Our data also provide evidence for shared ancestry among geographically diverse hunter-gatherer populations (Khoesan speakers and Pygmies). Would we say that pygmies, being considered black, would be likely to make it into the NBA? Second, can we guarantee that people who self identify black, would agree that the definition of someone else's…

I agree with some things you said others not so much. By the way, being this the Internet, I am not trying to push any weird racial stuff here, I am only trying to argue for the position you can operationalize the race concept based on arbitrary but objective genetical clusters in the human population. This can be useful for myriad things: Anthropology, population genetics, hereditary disease, diet requirements desig…

Guatemalans are short because of chronic malnutrition not because of genetics. Guatemalans born and raised in the us are much taller.

Re: Data scientists shouldn't use Upwork

#133

Post by social_quotient »

danj wrote: post #107
social_quotient wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might not want to post that here if you intend on keeping that account - https://www.upwork.com/legal#noncircumvention

We have such a solid team now and we have lots of other channels for hiring people now but thank you!

Care to share a channel or exchange some knowledge? We buy about 50k hours a year off of upwork, would love to learn how others are doing it. John @ curtisdigital . com

Re: Data scientists shouldn't use Upwork

#134

Post by vlokshin »

ilaksh wrote: post #115
vlokshin wrote: post #51

Upwork is ruining it for gig economy / freelancing / outsourcing. They create a race to the bottom and prioritize the client over fairness. Fiverr isn't much better. It's hard for any "we focus on everything" platform to get the specific needs of each vertical (customer + talent side) right. It's why TaskRabbit (focus on everything) never reached the scale of Uber/Lyft (press a button, get a ride). I'm not deep in th…

I'm happy to see an alternative to Upwork. I hope you will consider branching out beyond those particular technologies. For example, I'm a Node dev who has done Angular and React before but would probably rather use Vue on the front end (if it's appropriate) these days. Also have a fair bit of Linux experience which might be an important skill (as well as C++ and many other technologies from 20+ years). And I am thin…

Thank you.

We will absolutely branch out, but not sure on timing or specific skillsets.

Fixing what companies (Startups) and freelancers (React, React native, iOS, Android) are on Turtle lets us focus on our platform.

We believe the infrastructure is the biggest missing element in making remote, part-time work successful. Something as simple as how fast or reliably a chat message gets delivered becomes important in asynchronous work. Chat, tasks, meetings, payments, and vetting processes are the core elements of our platform today and these feel critical to any vertical. The vetting processes and meeting templates are the only unique pieces to each vertical.

Since most of our customers are technical, the non-visual demo is not a concern. We are more concerned with distracting ourselves away form focusing on the platform or outsourcing things that shouldn't be outsourced (ex: strategic, long-term impact decisions should not be outsourced. Co-founders should never be outsourced).

Re: Data scientists shouldn't use Upwork

#135

Post by RobertDeNiro »

cannonedhamster wrote: post #73
sterkekoffie wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually thought that line was a joke when I first read it. "We don't hire non-citizens, Hispanic people, or anyone over 30" sounds a lot worse than "we evaluate candidates according to an algorithm trained to predict work performance."

Before tech I did a stint in recruiting. We had a client demand only "white sounding" names. We ignored that and provided any qualified candidate. They complained because they mistook the recruiters name for an applicant. We fired that client the same week. It was a truly disgusting thing to be asked and I'm glad my company made the right call. Any future client that asked that was immediate grounds for client dismis…

I'm conflicted about this, on the one hand it's completely wrong, but on the other hand would a non-white person even want to work for them? In the end their own biases will cause them to fail.

Re: Data scientists shouldn't use Upwork

#136

Post by JamesBarney »

vkou wrote: post #131
JamesBarney wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have 9 years experience, and if I were to to go into freelancing (The kind where you solve problems for businesses, as opposed to the kind where you're a 9-5 1099 contractor), the first thing I would do is to take a job at a consulting firm, and spend my time there learning. Figure out what works, and what really, really doesn't. I have to disagree. I've worked for several tech consulting firms(8 years of experie…

> Execution - This is mostly involves a combination of being able to correctly identify requirements and technical execution skills. Most developers usually have plenty of experience hear. How do you think a fresh-out-of-college junior with less than a year of experience going to be at execution? Knowing nothing but that, I'm going to take a statistical guess, and say: "Probably not great." I'm going to make another…

Sorry I wasn't disagreeing that the fresh out should get some experience. Just I don't think that working at a consultancy is going to be much more helpful than working any other development job.

> Also, joining someplace that's not consultancy-focused (like Google or Facebook) isn't necessarilly going to help with building relevant experience.

It's soo much more important to have worked for one of these companies. If you have Google on your resume it will work magic. Clients love that. It'll help with leads, it will help with negotiation, and it will help close deals.

Honestly the two things I wish I'd done before I started my company was work for amagoobooksoft and put in some time at a sales job.(cold calling or some type of lead gen)

Re: Data scientists shouldn't use Upwork

#137

Post by cambalache »

empath75 wrote: post #132
cambalache wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with some things you said others not so much. By the way, being this the Internet, I am not trying to push any weird racial stuff here, I am only trying to argue for the position you can operationalize the race concept based on arbitrary but objective genetical clusters in the human population. This can be useful for myriad things: Anthropology, population genetics, hereditary disease, diet requirements desig…

Guatemalans are short because of chronic malnutrition not because of genetics. Guatemalans born and raised in the us are much taller.

Perhaps, yeah they can add some inches with nutrition. They are still shorter than much poorer countries like Haiti. A rich country like Japan has a short average height so nutrition helps up to a point.

Re: Data scientists shouldn't use Upwork

#138

Post by shims »

RobertDeNiro wrote: post #135
cannonedhamster wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before tech I did a stint in recruiting. We had a client demand only "white sounding" names. We ignored that and provided any qualified candidate. They complained because they mistook the recruiters name for an applicant. We fired that client the same week. It was a truly disgusting thing to be asked and I'm glad my company made the right call. Any future client that asked that was immediate grounds for client dismis…

I'm conflicted about this, on the one hand it's completely wrong, but on the other hand would a non-white person even want to work for them? In the end their own biases will cause them to fail.

There are plenty of people who need to work to eat and can't be picky with employers.

Re: Data scientists shouldn't use Upwork

#139

Post by Baeocystin »

ABCLAW wrote: post #121
Baeocystin wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can play a pickup game of hockey with something to thwack around as a puck, a stick, and some skates, all of which are dirt cheap. I think it's kind of a stretch to make any socioeconomic predictions when the much simpler correlate is that hockey is cheap and easy to play (and thus will have a larger talent pool to draw from) when you live where local ponds freeze over in the winter, and those parts of the countr…

Did you grow up with any competitive-level hockey players? The sport is a VERY large time and finance drain on a family.

That's a bit of a non-sequitur. High-end-competitive-level anything is a tremendous time and money sink. But that doesn't mean that the majority of the people that play the sport in question need to be wealthy to participate at the rec-league levels.

Re: Data scientists shouldn't use Upwork

#140

Post by wsc981 »

caiocaiocaio wrote: post #21

I freelanced on Upwork for a bit. It was all the worst aspects of having an abusive boss (the platform itself), and all of the worst aspects of freelancing (unpredictability, getting ripped off by shifty clients). "Creepiest shit ever" is a pretty accurate description of Upwork. If Upwork's attitudes and policies were described to me in the 90s, I would have said it was lame, unrealistic science fiction with an over-…

I've tried Upwork in the past and the platform made me miserable.

I've been using Codementor for the last year or so and been very happy with them. For the past year I've worked for a US client and since a few weeks I work for an Australian client.

Why I like Codementor:

- The payments are done on time and they don't extract some platform fee as far as I know for the freelance jobs. Or it's invisible to me (perhaps more likely). What I ask per hour is what I get.

- There seems to be a decent amount of jobs available every month and not too many people respond to the same job as me at the same time. So there's a good chance that if I respond the job, I at least will be invited for a video call with the potential client.

- The rates on the platform seem decent (they advise setting somewhere between 40 - 80 USD, no race to the bottom imo). I'm based in Thailand, so these are rather nice rates for living here - I can save /a lot/ of money every month. My costs of living is currently around 1700 USD per month, everything above I can safe.

- I don't have to install software on my computer that spies on me to make sure I put in the proper amount of hours. And I actually tend to work more hours than I bill my clients, but I don't need software to keep me in check.

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