The level of fraud is now such that it is no longer cost effective or interesting to use random freelancers. The majority of clients for freelancers on Upwork are non-technical, and it is almost impossible to convince freelancers that you are, in fact, a highly technical client. The typical project progression is that a few days we see useful work, after which there is a steady decline in quality and usefulness of code. Frequently, freelancers ignore technical or functional requirements.
Overall, it is mostly a process that appears designed to maximise billable hours whilst looking busy and producing code that doesn't actually achieve anything. This nicely circumvents dispute processes, since they can claim they did, in fact, produce working code. The fact that it took too long isn't anybodies problem except yours. General quality of code produced is typically atrocious. Rating is a meaningless metric, since the majority of clients are non technical and will base their rating on things like presence, pleasant to converse with, and final result (something that mostly does what they asked for) and typically doesn't take into account quality or if in fact this was produced at a reasonable pace.
There are so many ways to scam clients, and there are no effective ways to stop these scams. When lucky, you sometimes come across good developers that do a good job and don't mess around. I hold on to those for as long as I can, but eventually everybody moves on at some point.
I'm done with this model. It has become too expensive, too risky, and highly unpleasant overall.
As this kind of fraud increases, it becomes increasingly expensive and overall unattractive to work in this fashion.
To be honest, right now the market is fucked, which is why I am eager to get out. On the one hand, pressure from "cheap freelancers" has driven down the client expectation of cost, whilst on the other hand, decent freelancers often command rates that are in excess of what I am able to bill. It is unsustainable, and I am out. I am finishing a migration project for a long standing client of mine, and that will probably be the last project I take on that will require me to engage with freelancers. I am already struggling to resource this current project, and I can do without the hassle.
I'm scoping out a new startup, and will need to find something to do to keep the money flowing in until that's done.
An easy filter when soliciting work is to include some things in the job description that the applicant has to respond to/think about. Most applicants will not, so you can throw them right out.
I also discriminate fairly aggressively based on country, suffice to say that certain regions usually match my requirements better for developers who match their advertised skill level and think critically about the tasks presented to them. Controversial, possibly unfair, but there it is.
The reality is that today, a "meatmarket" (upwork etc. al.) freelancer is good enough to throw up a nice Wordpress site with a fancy frontend. Unfortunately, the people with the skills and qualities that I look for always end up with full time jobs at some point. All my long timers now have lead-dev type jobs with large firms.
But I only outsource pieces- plug-innable- of a project. If you make the analogy to OOP- I write the interfaces and outsource the coding.
Often I'll have them modify or incorporate some existing, third-party (like Adam Shaw's calendar- case-in-point).
I've had pretty good luck overall. So I would definitely be willing to use a good site. Hell it might be fun to pick up a couple of gigs there.
I am also done with all of these outsourcing platforms. I write highly technical specifications, and I would always get results that did not match the specification.
Actual freelancers have their reputation and local network of contacts, plus maybe some attractive online presence (blogging, open source, etc).
If needed they can try reaching companies directly, circumventing platforms which otherwise would make him appear as a commodity.
Remote job boards work fine, whether you are applying as a freelancer or employee. 'Middleman' platforms not so much - in the end remote work is much about trust/communication - escrow/time-tracking can be counterproductive.
I feel that it is not just the freelancers to be always blamed. I have seen jobs wherein the client will say that this needs to be done in 2-3$ and in specific amount of time, which is impossible. Then there were those who would post jobs but wouldn't exactly know what they want and wouldn't give out details.
The platform was good when it was Odesk. With it becoming Upwork, the changes have made the platform worse in my opinion. Not that many people don't still post good work and hire good resources, but something else can sure fill the gap, if it can figure out a way to better the rating and skill selection system.
And to those who keep saying that people from 3rd world countries have ruined it, that's a totally nonsensical thought. Idiots and scammers are to be found in every part of the world. Yes, people from Africa, Asia and South America are able to charge less, which is because of low cost of living in such countries. You (people from 1st world countries) want to save money by letting a low cost worker do your work (keeping a big share of money without doing work) and happy when that happens, but the moment your job gets threatened, you start shouting. Wow!!!
Also, this would serve as the natural quality control - with hourly rate being reasonably high, low-value projects and clients would simply skip the platform. Of course, this could only work for a more niche market than upwork.
If one fixed hourly rate is just too limiting, then there could be 2-3 price tiers. Just keep it simple.
This might be already implemented somewhere. In that case, does it work well?
I have done some work on Upwork, as implied above, and here is another issue I had that makes me want more sites to market myself on:
I once filed a support ticket / complaint that my profile page only showed my very oldest (i.e. simplest and lowest cost) jobs to users who are not logged in. If you were logged in, it would show you more.
I got a response that said "Oh well, most people are logged in, deal with it".
After a ticket is closed you have an option to rate it, so I clicked "unsatsifactory - did not resolve issue"... and within 30 minutes my account was flagged for review, I was unable to bid on jobs or to withdraw money.
I'm not 100% certain, but it seems damn likely the agent I rated poorly flagged my account.
To their credit, it didn't take long to have my account reviewed / verify my identity. That said, there is no reason I should have been flagged with such conspicuous timing, being top rated, long time user, all 5 star reviews...
Or maybe a coding test, but something freeform, that could be checked for plagarisation?
However, this gave me an idea that I should enlist myself as freelancer. Now that was easier said than done, I have been submitting all kinds of revisions of my freelancer profile and have been declined with the reason that they have too many freelancers with similar profile. I say bs, because I know my domain very well. I did all necessary tests including Joomla!, php, mysql, javascript, english ... all within the highest ranks. Anyway after many efforts and even request to support to review the seemingly automated reply I kept getting I stopped trying, and the support could only advice me on some generic aspects such as changing my profile photo to be more visible and such nonsense.
For me this was quite indicative of what is going on on this market, but I am not sure why they choose to dumb it down.
Thank you for raising this question, which I think is heartfelt one both as client and freelancer.
Any platform that will allow anyone to bid for jobs will attract bad developers and developers from third-world countries, who are going to bring bid offers down and push away good developers and developers from first-world countries.
Any platform that will allow anyone to post jobs to developers from third-world countries will bring crappy projects posted by amateurs with vague specs.
The more popular it gets, the crappier it becomes. There's no way to win.
PeoplePerHour is better than Upwork, it's mostly people from the UK. There are also services where they screen candidates and only accept the best developers (I signed up but there was too much friction and I lost interest).
In general, IMHO the market for remote devs is there, but I guess most people if they had to spend a lot of money for a dev they'd much rather have him work in the office or at least meet him in person and have him come in every once in a while. What's left is people who will be ok with crappy developers that will do the job for 1/10 of the price, and they might as well give it a shot.
What's the inherent problem with 'developers from third-world countries'?
In poor countries, coding is usually the only way out of extreme poverty, unless you are born into right family. What other good careers are available in India that beat freelance coding at average ($30/h) rates? So, it attracts people who are simply after money and nothing else, they practice squeezing their clients dry and doing all kinds of tricks more than they practice coding. Because they give no shit about coding.
30$/hr is rich in India, so it's not surprising there aren't better rates.
30$×8×20×65 = 3.2 lakhs per month = 37 lakhs per annum (average Indian makes somewhere of the order of magnitude of 1 lakh per annum).
For reference, in /r/india (on Reddit--not representative of the average Indian) a person posted about how they were struggling to live with 1.6 lakhs per month, and that became a meme.
I hired a couple of guys from it last year and it was a great experience.
What's the experience like as a developer? Working for Toptal is sort of my short term plan if my startup doesn't work out in fact!
So, in short Toptal seems like they do some good screening, but may be optimizing for a certain kind of developer.
I failed my initial application due to my inability to solve a couple of algorithm specific tests as other commenters have mentioned. I reappllied a couple of months later, did a couple of codility tests to ensure I'd pass this time, and flew through the rest of the process.
Yes, their signup process will potentially disquallify a couple of good devs, but it will also weed out a lot of bad devs that can't take the time to learn the solutions to common algorithm problems.
Once in, they have a variety of jobs available, some good, some bad. Overall I don't mind working for them. I've been happy with the Upwork dev's I've hired so far, so can't comment on if I'll hire through Toptal.
If someone is better than a typical Upwork 'top rated' freelancer, he or she is probably not interested in work for hire (at least not hourly on rates one can get/makes sense to pay online). They either work full time in big companies which provides job security and stock options, make their own startups, or freelance locally to the people they know (where a much higher level of trust can be built so a higher pay is justified) at rates north of $150 an hour. They won't go to any alternative.
And yes, Upwork below top rated status just sucks.
I would really appreciate if you can help us build it with more value and with honest feedback what do you expect from the marketplace like this, but so far your answers gave us real value. Do you think there is something we can do better? What do you think is missing here?
For example, how would you improve the quality of the jobs posted? Even when I interact with users in my company to give me some direction on features they want, they usually don't understand the issues well enough to tell me. And because they don't understand the issues, they always assume it is trivially easy to do. So there is almost certain to be a mismatch between what's being asked for, what's being delivered, and what the price should be.
As for the freelancers, the only way I can think of to improve the quality is to pay them more. For example, I'm a remote contractor and I think it might be fun to do some work on the side. However, I'm not going to touch this with a 10 foot pole. As I said before, I'm almost guaranteed to have an unhappy customer who wants to pay me a tenth of what it really costs to build it. The only people who will do it are people who are desperate, or people who don't know any better. Neither are likely to be coming from a large pool of highly skilled workers.
I really can't see how you could make it work, but I would be fascinated if someone has some ideas to solve these (IMHO not-trivial) problems.
I would see things like "Senior PHP $7/hour" and never considered working myself. However, last summer I stumbled onto Upwork (actually a post off HN was where it came from) and I saw a lot of jobs I could do for a reasonable amount of money. I've increased my average billing rate 50% since then (to where it's more than I could make locally, probably) and have found some flat-rate clients that have paid a large amount of cash for simple stuff. Once in a while, the whales come in.
It did take a while to build up reviews and I spent a lot of time applying and not getting anything back. Once I hit some sort of "critical mass" I started getting responses to nearly every job I applied to.
I did have a client who changed his mind every day, then tried to dispute the entire cost of his project (which due to him was grossly overspent) and he wound up losing eventually. It was at the time where Upwork had a lot of hatred in the blogosphere and it made me nervous that they would side with the client simply because I was replaceable. Their mediation process was a joke, a nearly robotic-like woman would periodically ask "have you resolved anything?" when it was obvious it wasn't resolved - due to the caps lock yelling between us and the cursing.
However in the end, they did go back to their hourly screenshot/activity monitor, decided only like 2% of my billing wasn't guaranteed payment and I had to refund a few bucks. If only they had done that in the beginning, it would have saved weeks of nervousness (the client was holding a negative review hostage for a refund) - but they're setup to hope disputes to fizzle out on their own and someone caves in without any intervention. That sucked.
I will say, for all the negativity Upwork generates, I have made quite a decent amount of money on it just working part time (I have a day job) and find so many jobs I could apply to that I have to pass on them, and sometimes have more work than I can handle, at rates I am quite happy with. It has been a rollercoaster, where the summer was quite hot (literally) and winter cooled down a little bit, and hasn't been as hot as it was last year. I'll have to see if this year winds up being the same, with larger priced projects that I'm well-suited for.
I think it definitely depends on the type of work you do. Development has a lot of cheap asks. I would imagine artwork/design is as well. But system administration I have flourished, often after people have been disappointed by cheap overseas labor or just junior level people doing stupid things.
Kind of like a development agency but with a lot of freelance developers onsite.
They could also work remote and only come to the office when a client is there.