Upwork Freelancers Who Want Guaranteed Pay Have to Opt in to Tracking Software

Disclaimer: I was working as a freelancer/subcontractor for most of my career, am now a CTO with all sorts of employees & (a few) freelancers in my team.

The biggest difference between a freelancer and an employee is one of expectations on both sides. The freelancer doesn't/shouldn't expect the company to provide him with a career path, personal growth opportunities and job security.

He expects to be paid for services rendered, a service he in many cases only can provide because of the specific freedoms he enjoys that allowed him to develop himself into a position that is particular valuable and not present at the contracting company.

An employee on the other hand is a completely different beast and can and should expect the aforementioned things and more of the company, at least in Germany where our company is based and which labor laws & and history influences our/my attitude towards these things.

To your question: An employee planning the company picnic is actually doing his job, discussing their spot in the company fantasy football league could be seen as "enjoying, participating and nourishing workplace culture".

A freelancer doing the same would be out of place, simply because he isn't awarded those privileges one gains with employment. It's not part of the contract, neither the physical one, nor the social one. Some companies blur the lines between freelancers & employees to foster more cooperation and give their employees access to more outside viewpoints, but this is largely a factor of company style.

Netflix for instance in their famous Company Culture Deck [1] even mentioned in the very beginning that "Our hourly salaried employees are important, but have more structure job roles".

From this point of view, "to micromanage the keystrokes" is basically just an extension of that, more structure, less freedom in the way the service is rendered and more transparency for all involved.

As a former freelancer it bothered the heck out of me seeing freelancers that I knew negotiated higher rates just slacking of and parading my work around. The only recourse was talking to managers of the customer and working on being viewed as a better "friendly problem solver" then the other freelancer. Any structured way to ensure there was some kind of fair measurement of productivity would have been a giant boon back then.

[1] https://de.slideshare.net/BarbaraGill3/netflix-culture-deck

This, while not really being nuanced, strikes the most important point. Trust.

Building trust for a freelancer is hard, especially one working remote with little on-site. Transparency usually helps in these settings.

I've had to work on projects as a freelancer where there simply wasn't much progress for weeks because they were such monstrosities, that trust and a prose-documentation of my work was the only thing keeping me afloat. (think 5 different languages talking to each other via SOAP, consuming 3 different databases, all with encoding problems between every possible step)

Just being able to point at all the screenshots from the bazillion different debugging windows, log diffs, etc. would have made things much easier back then. Swapping me out for someone else two weeks into this project would have been a terrible mistake, but besides my assurances and some prose the manager had to trust me. Bad for him, bad for me.

They've done this for a decade since odesk. I've caught many freelancers watching porn or one was trying to sell data off the backend and freely chatting about it.

But I like the feature as an employer. I like seeing the process of the work being done.

I'm a consultant and have been for a long time, and I know this business. I don't think counting keystrokes and in many cases screenshots make any sense, so I think the implementation of this is totally bogus, but the concept makes complete sense.

"I've never had a client expect to be able to look over my shoulder"

Right well UpWork isn't your client. I don't think your clients should, and to another person's point, yes your clients should trust you.

But this is in the case of when you do the work and the client _doesn't_ pay. This is UpWork covering your ass, when they really have no obligation to. They want a way to prove that you are least did some work, so likely they can go after the client later and recover costs.

This seems absolutely reasonable and honestly a heck of a bargain. Again, I think the implementation of counting keystrokes seems like a stupid way to do it, but coming up with a tracking method to _optionally_ guarantee payment even in the case of client non-payment is the deal of the century in the freelance world. Don't believe me? Try freelancing for a while and see how many clients stiff you after you've completed the job. There are literally advertisements in the NYC subway about it.

(Yes, retainers, payment up front, et ceteta -- no the world does not always work that way.)

You're certainly right that the systems in use by Upwork and others are currently skewed in favor of @techcompany, but does that necessarily mean that it has to be this way?

In my career I had plenty situations where I would have loved to be able to be more transparent without putting so much effort into it.

Documenting one's work at the end of the day is valuable, annotating screenshots to do it sounds like a great workflow for it.

Using this to negotiate higher rates because you delve into territory that usually is more expensive as its very specialized know-how? I immediately come to think of two gigs of the past where I probably could have made this work.

What I don't understand is your latter point of view. Why is lack of control something a freelancer has? I'd see this completely the other way around.

I can basically end a freelancers contract on very short notice, negotiate all kinds of special needs into his contract, with an employee I have much less freedom in that matter and a much higher incentive to make it work, meaning more lack of fine-grained control of the employee versus a freelancer.