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Freelancer.com has ruined my life

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Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#311

Post by featherverse »

philtar wrote: post #97
featherverse wrote: post #51

All of those "freelancer" websites are scams. Freelancing is about not working for other men. It's about being your own boss. Those websites are not really freelancing, they're temp agencies hiring out short term contract work. That is not freelancing. Those websites all share specific qualities: The salaries are too low, the service quality is poor, and you'll be outbid by unskilled indian labor 90% of the time. Put…

Freelancing is about being able to work for whoever you want to. A temp can only work for one person at a time. Those websites allow you to work for more than one person at a time. So those people are, in fact, freelancers, not temps. I hire people on upwork. My favorite person charges $40 an hour. His work is great and gets repeat business from me many times a year. I'm not sure what you're referring to as a scam. T…

You're wrong in that temp contracts have different sorts of terms. Full term temps can usually only work with one hiring customer but that is not the only model. By taking a cut of the salary as a fee, websites like freelancer and upwork are temp agencies.

Also, upwork is a shithole. You should really not use them. I spent 2 months trying to set up an account there as a freelancer and they were complete dicks for 2 months straight. They refuse to adhere to the constitutional laws of the united states where they are based, and their support department is mockingly hostile to their freelancers.

I made a broad generalization in my first comment about all of those websites being the same. Obviously I haven't used every single one, there are hundreds of them. But the ones I have used have all been the same. It's obvious you want to use them, I strongly encourage you to stop using Upwork and look for one that treats it's contractors better.

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#312

Post by featherverse »

asah wrote: post #168
philtar wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freelancing is about being able to work for whoever you want to. A temp can only work for one person at a time. Those websites allow you to work for more than one person at a time. So those people are, in fact, freelancers, not temps. I hire people on upwork. My favorite person charges $40 an hour. His work is great and gets repeat business from me many times a year. I'm not sure what you're referring to as a scam. T…

I also hire all sorts of people on upwork, both US and overseas, high-end and basic skills. Quality has been great, but as usual you need to pre-qualify.

please see my comment above regarding upwork.

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#313

Post by xelxebar »

hedora wrote: post #310
_wmd wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their web application isn't the canonical source of whether they owe you money or not, a court decides that. I don't know in which jurisdiction Freelancer are based, but if there is a low cost small claims procedure, sounds like that would be worth you time. In the UK in a variety of circumstances you can petition a court to issue a wind up ("liquidation") order for a company if it refuses to service its debt to you.

I found their EULA, and it has some crazy stuff in it. For instance, they can terminate your account becase: ... 8) to manage any risk of loss to us, a User, or any other person; or 9) for other reasons. And if they terminate the account they can keep all the money they owe you. Also, it claims contractor aren’t their employees. Instead they are “unsecured creditors”. There’s also a bunch of stuff about how they can…

IANAL, but as far as I understand EULA don't have the last say on things like this. The courts decide if the terms are reasonable.

Apparently, there is no repercussion for putting non-enforcable conditions in an EULA, so companies are encouraged to throw as much self-serving protection language in there as possible in the off chance that it will stick.

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#314

Post by wpietri »

rdiddly wrote: post #208
wpietri wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anybody have a theory as to why victim-blaming is such a popular response on HN? I don't see it nearly as much elsewhere.

Victim-blaming is rampant everywhere, first of all. And while those thoughts might not get typed in as much on Facebook where everything is happy-happy-happy and like-like-like, I bet they're being thought. Here on HN there's no such cultural slant toward positivity, but there is one toward intellectualism. And hey, whatever else victim-blaming is, it's sort of interesting as an intellectual idea.

Really? I find victim-blaming intellectually sterile. It can be done pretty much any time something bad happens, and it's not challenging to do. You just find the person who's most fucked and say it's all their fault.

I think it's much more interesting to understand the subtle dynamics that result in bad outcomes. As an example, Sidney Dekker's book, "The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error" [1] makes an excellent case that if you're going to do useful aviation accident investigation, you have to decline the simple-minded approach of blame, and instead look at the web of causes and experiences that lead to failure.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error...

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#315

Post by wryun »

jondubois wrote: post #189

I worked for Freelancer.com briefly as a software engineer at their HQ in Sydney for about 1 month (that was in the year before their IPO) - I was fresh out of university. The culture within the company was toxic. They treat developers like crap - Both those who use the platform and those who work at HQ. They fired me after 1 month during my probation because I was too slow to implement a feature because I was spendi…

I'm a slightly longer term ex-Freelancer employee whose tenure overlapped with Jon's, and I feel like I should say that my experience wasn't that bad.

As I suspect afflicts many companies, when I joined it was struggling with the transition between "hack something together so that we make some money" and "we need to care about the long term". Not to mention the usual small-ish company disregard for HR niceties. It didn't finish that transition while I was there - and may still not have - but I mostly had a good time (worked on a huge variety of stuff, and even wrote a bunch of tests).

Also, though there were other factors, I think the primary reason retention was low is that Freelancer's hiring policy was geared towards 'cheap grads', so people tended to leave for better paying positions elsewhere.

PS Hi Jon - sorry you had that experience. I wasn't privy to exactly why you were let go.

PPS And yes, I think there were definitely parts of Freelancer which were (IMO) far too focused on making money without caring about the customer experience. On the other hand, capitalism (argh).

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#316

Post by dang »

jondubois wrote: post #189

I worked for Freelancer.com briefly as a software engineer at their HQ in Sydney for about 1 month (that was in the year before their IPO) - I was fresh out of university. The culture within the company was toxic. They treat developers like crap - Both those who use the platform and those who work at HQ. They fired me after 1 month during my probation because I was too slow to implement a feature because I was spendi…

Taking to an internet forum to vent personal grievances is a shaky business. The audience is ever-eager for red meat, but that doesn't make it ok. There is also the question of how low you really want to go. And HN has rules that you need to abide by if you want to comment here.

Here you go below what's acceptable by HN's civility rule:

> The CEO of Freelancer.com is a complete jerk.

And here the bottom falls out altogether:

> gossip going round that the CEO had sex with a female employee and she got pregnant

Please don't sling mud like that here, regardless of how disgruntly you feel or how justified your grievances are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#317

Post by dang »

scriptproof wrote: post #116
BjoernKW wrote: post #90

Some people, freelancers as well as clients and those middlemen that are unfortunately very common in this market, seem to fundamentally misunderstand what a freelancer or contractor is. Freelancing is not some alternative form of employment that allows you to conveniently dispense with social security costs. A freelancer is a self-employed service provider. Like with any other kind of self-employment you’re responsi…

Maybe the OP was expecting something else than a string of blames and moral lessons in his situation. You are definitively an asshole.

Personal attacks like this are not allowed on HN and will get your account banned, regardless of whether another comment was self-righteous or had other negative qualities.

Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this again.

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#319

Post by Frondo »

nickjj wrote: post #289
Frondo wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're saying, but it's also clear that you haven't ever talked to a food truck person. They're not paying you $1000 for a wordpress site, and they're never paying $1000 on retainer. The rest is also a total fantasy. This is a misleading example because restaurants and food already operate on razor-thin margins; restaurant software is legendarily hard to break into and make money in. Source: tried to start…

I hope it's clear I haven't talked to a food truck person because I lead off my reply literally saying I haven't heh. I used that as an example because the parent comment was talking about a food truck site he made for someone. I can't force you into believing anything and that's fine but I don't think I need to defend myself here. I have no agenda. I'm only bothering to share this stuff (along with the 100+ other po…

OK, but you're basically saying, "my techniques work, except the example I'm presenting is entirely fictitious" -- and I know that it is a totally nonsensical example that simply has nothing to do with reality.

My point is that, especially if you're offering courses or trying to teach people, stick to what you know about from experience, not what you imagine might work based on an extrapolation from first principles.

That thinking, that it works in theory and that's enough to sell, is dangerous, because it lets people go a long way down the wrong path, just trying to think things through.

OR, if that's not your intent, don't make up fake examples that are obvious nonsense to anyone who's tried it.

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#320

Post by Frondo »

ufmace wrote: post #292
Frondo wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're saying, but it's also clear that you haven't ever talked to a food truck person. They're not paying you $1000 for a wordpress site, and they're never paying $1000 on retainer. The rest is also a total fantasy. This is a misleading example because restaurants and food already operate on razor-thin margins; restaurant software is legendarily hard to break into and make money in. Source: tried to start…

That did sound weird to me too on the food truck side. Most of them seem to go from place to place almost on a whim, and the customers go to them because they're pretty good and right there. I don't think anything on the internet is ultimately going to do that much for them. Their customers either already see them because they see the truck, or they aren't going to bother travelling halfway across the city for it. I…

Programmers are smart systems thinkers, or they can be.

And they (we) have a tendency to think, "here is a system that I have derived from first principles, and now I can apply it" ... which is, frustratingly, not how the world typically works.

No plan survives contact with the customer, but the kind of confidence that guy writes with can be dangerous because it can lead people down a long wrong path.

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