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Freelancer.com has ruined my life

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Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#351

Post by notyourday »

raarts wrote: post #324
pmorici wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the time I decided to try one of these sites and ended up with a client who wanted software written to pick winning lottery numbers based on some system he'd devised to analyze past winning lottery numbers. Of course such a thing will never work in a fair lottery. Guy refused to pay the $10 price after the "work" was done. Validated my suspicions that those types of site are a total waste of time even if…

I dealt with a pair of founders that prided on having grown their company without needing funding. Turned out they deliberately forced every freelancer and supplier into arbitration. Complained about the quality and just withheld payments. It always ended up in settling, which meant that in the end they paid less. Of course they had to find new ones every time but hey, the market is huge. Ended up settling too.

That's why I'm friends with lawyers. It is like using a nuclear weapon to kill mosquito -- mosquito dies.

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#352

Post by notyourday »

Frondo wrote: post #279
nickjj wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is the type of stuff I'm talking about. But you can take these things so much further if you branch away from "just development skills" too. I never talked to a food truck person yet but I bet there's lots of ways you could have turned that unfulfilling contract into something more interesting. No business owner really cares about a site redesign. They just care about "how do I get more customers?". If you…

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…

Frondo is 100% correct. No food truck is spending $1000 on a website to outsider and no food truck is spending $1000 a month on a retainer and no food truck is spending $25k/mo on a tracking software.

Watch the Great Food Truck race. Those are the margin. Those are the $$ amounts. It is hand to mouth.

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#353

Post by olingern »

As a person who would love more freelancing opportunities, the market is littered with sketchy proposals, undercut / underpaid projects, and just a bad experience.

Software Engineering Daily had a episode[1] on Gigster that seems to be trying to solve this, but I have no experience with that. They also tout only hiring "1% of all developers who apply," which doesn't really solve the other 99% of freelancer's problems.

[1] https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/10/13/gigster-with...

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#354

Post by philtar »

featherverse wrote: post #311
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…

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 m…

You are clearly taking this very personally and not being realistic about this. You obviously have had a bad experience with them and now want all of us to stop using them too.

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#356

Post by vidarh »

walshemj wrote: post #262
vidarh wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Norwegian bankruptcy law also used to (probably still is, but I haven't worked in Norway for nearly 20 years) have a similar system where employees had that kind of protection at no cost for non-payment of wages. All you need to do is to file and the company would need to show up in bankruptcy court and explain why they should be put under administration (and really the only valid reasons would be that they don't owe…

the op isn't an "employee" in this case probably not even a "worker"

The point was not that it's exactly the same - I was responding to the comment above, not to the article.

But even so in many countries there is the concept of "deemed employment" that may or may not give rise to employment rights. Basically: if it quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it may very well legally be a duck.

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#358

Post by fooker »

freeflight wrote: post #335
fooker wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is a race to the bottom worse than getting paid 40 times more and spending 100 times more for housing and healthcare? (Comparing Bangalore or Mumbai to San Francisco, since you mentioned India.)

I didn't even compare the two, obviously having insane high living costs is another issue, but it's not nearly as bad as this current race to the bottom of labor costs. In Western Europe pretty much the whole low-income sector has been taken over by Eastern Europeans, working for weeks, sending home most of the money they make, working in conditions that nobody should have to work in (reversing labor rights progress)…

>Case in point: Try paying 100 times more for housing and healthcare in LA, once the vast majority of people are getting paid like call-center agents in India, won't work, can't work.

So, a bubble will burst and prices will decrease. You can already find cheap (as in cheaper than in India!) apartments some 30-40 mins away from Manhattan on the subway.

Re: Freelancer.com has ruined my life

#359

Post by extrememacaroni »

mrhappyunhappy wrote: post #268
extrememacaroni wrote: post #80

I always thought of freelancing websites like freelancer.com as being platforms to meet clients with the goal of removing them from the platform and establishing long term relationships. Basically, meeting clients and then quickly getting them to use a service where you and them work and manage payments directly. There's no way I could consider freelancer.com to be a worthwhile long term investment, the fees they tak…

The smart thing to do although that’s breaking TOS.

Only for the currently active project, nothing stops you to not use their service for the next project with the same client.
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