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Comment by staticautomatic | Hacker News Reader

I've hired a lot via UpWork and consider it the lesser of evils among these platforms. It is still all kinds of evil, though. I've heard it's at least as bad for the contractors.

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I tend to hire off Freelancer. I haven't seen too much difference in people found. It seems more in the way of how you filter people as there is a bunch of poor performers.

I find Upwork seems to give people high summary ratings and when you look at their history and there is a bunch of bad reviews. There is something dodgy going on there which is a main reason I flipped to Freelancer. That and I thought it was good to support a company from my country.

The one or two times I've used Freelancer, the quality of the candidates was quite poor (at least what I was hiring for). But what really annoyed me was how conspicuously Freelancer nickle-and-dimes on fees for various things just to post the job.

After evaluating both platforms in more detail I will probably start with freelancer.com as it is possible to have an arbitrary name (e.g. "elephantdesign") instead of real name only. This makes it simpler to tailor your profile to a specific niche in my opinion and seems more privacy aware. Obviously both platforms are pretty intrusive, but at least freelancer.com guard your real name.

However there seems to be an agency mode on Upworks which might be similar.

I may be alone in this but as the one doing the hiring I strongly prefer individual freelancers who use their real names. Fraud is a very real problem on these platforms.

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