Upwork Freelancers Who Want Guaranteed Pay Have to Opt in to Tracking Software
buzzfeednews.com
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"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.)
But, if like many people you are getting burned by non-payment, then turning this feature on seems like a pretty good route to go for stability in your wallet.
Why would giving these people more power over you result in more payment ? They are looking to exploit these freelancers, and this gives them more power.
Why would any reasonable person expect that giving cheaters more power over you result in less cheating ? It will obviously increase the chance that you, as a freelancer, won't get paid.
https://hackernoon.com/why-you-should-never-use-upwork-ever-...
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.elance.com
https://entrepreneurs.maqtoob.com/a-top-rated-freelancers-ad...
https://screenshotmonitor.com/blog/how-to-avoid-scams-on-upw...
I'm not saying you're wrong, but you made a pretty contentious statement and your evidence is lacking. Do you have a more explicit link to what you're talking about?
That's why understanding your client in your first few meetings before you commit to the project is SO important. I let go of a lot of deals in my career because the client was very stingy - they want to know how you spent every second of your time or they want to know how many vacations you take, etc. It boils down to trust.
It's your responsibility to instil trust and this trust will pay itself off in the long run.
Also, I work with Google cloud, I'm always the project owner and at no point my client has access to the source code until full payment for the project has been made. So, it also depends how desperately they want that software/product.
They stopped paying? Simple. Just add an auth layer to the app (very simple to do with Google Cloud). They will come to you if they really need that product that bad. They didn't get back to you? Too bad, in my contract, it says this is now your IP and you can do whatever with it, including selling it off to a competitor or someone else who can find use for this.
The point is, I don't see why your personal space needs to be violated by an intermediary agent for you to be guaranteed to be paid..
You don't need a big brother watching your every working hour. There's happy mediums, this Upwork spy thing certainly isn't it.
Here's my advice to developers who want to freelance: network and network some more. Write blogs, create content marketing material for yourself. Go to meetups, tap your alum networks, go to hackathons, and work your networks. There's a lot of noise on LinkedIn but if used correctly, it can yield a lot for you.
Every single client I've had is someone I've met in person. I get to know them, they get to know me, we establish trust. Any sort of opening meeting or two is free. Formally, we use it to talk requirements. Ostensibly, we use it to vet each other.
It’s always worked well. So well in fact that I’m pretty sure I’ve beaten out less expensive people by virtue of being first through the door, signing paperwork and seeing source code... because I’m “free”.
It might not work for everyone. But it’s working for me.
When I'm trying to closing six, seven, or eight figure software dev deals, this process definitely involves a "sales" type of person as well as two - three devs and architects.
The outcome is a proposal that sometimes is just a powerpoint deck with a summary of our understanding of the problem and the process / cost / timeline we'll take to solve it.
Once I deliver the proposal, then it's all about getting to agreement on cost, timeline, and then getting signed contracts. Rule number 1 is that a deal is never ever a deal until the contract is signed and executed.
In Becoming a Better Freelancer I give you three valuable lessons learned in just one year of freelance work. Learn from my mistakes.
There are many developers who can't do it because they live in Eastern Europe or Asia or Latin America and speak only conversational English.
Upwork has a lot problems but it's providing $25+/h rates for thousands of professionals who otherwise would get only $10-15/h or less locally. (I'm one of them.)
It’s the opposite - they have access to markets that English-only speakers don’t. A Brazilian developer networking with Brazilian companies is going to be much happier than one scrabbling for work in a race-to-the-bottom marketplace like Upwork
Also, it isn't a "race-to-the-bottom" if you have a good portfolio and know how to present your skills.
If you're a UK developer looking for remote work you would on average do better compensation wise getting a remote job with an American company than a UK one. They're used to paying more so they do. They can because they're more profitable.
Yeah, if you live in SV and want to make $120/hr on Upwork, go pound sand. But those salaries are pretty good for people who live in modest Midwestern towns or countries that are not America.
Some people have no idea how much it should cost so that's why you see complex sites with only a $500 budget. It's a smaller pool of better paying projects. You're not going to get SV rates but you could make a decent living from.
As for me one of the clients enjoyed working with me and we moved away from Upwork and just pays me directly now. Which I think is a common occurrence, and probably does reduce the amount of higher paying project. Once you find a good developer you tend to stick with them.
We're trying to solve it with a blind marketplace model at ContentFly (http://contentfly.co/)
I'd like to see a more balanced Upwork type of freelance work, where perhaps a lot more people are given the chance to participate through quality, rather than quantity.
Thanks
i can probably help you find what you're looking for.
shoot me an email (it's listed on my profile) and we can chat.
Yes, your clients may get articles, but not quality articles (or even ones that read like they've been written by native English speakers or people who understand the topic). And if the marketing person has to rewrite everything, what's the point in buying it in the first place?
for standard quality work on any kind of topic requiring any kind of finesse, at least 10 cents per word is standard. you can easily pick up these arrangements at the same throughput (1k words / week), too.
so, where's the value for freelancers? looks like you are advocating that you aren't as big of a rip off for them -- yet you're still paying 50% lower than market rate.
reprehensible.
As such that sort of labor is easy to exploit. They have no bargaining power and are already working for peanuts.
The money still wasn’t great (although I could have made it better if I were assertive enough to raise my rates on existing clients), and there’s no way in hell I would have done it if I’d had to use tracking software, but it was sort of kind of feasible.
We would pay more locally, but we're mostly not on upwork because of money. We just needed someone we could get soon. I will say that what $45/h gets you on upwork is far more than what you get in sfbay.
Specifically, Upwork charges the freelancer a fee of: 20% for the first $500 billed with the client. 10% for lifetime billings with the client between $500.01 and $10,000. 5% for lifetime billings with the client that exceed $10,000.
Something has to be up here.
Monthly expenses: $1,000 on rent (splitting with girlfriend) $300 on train tickets $500 on food, phone, internet, entertainment
I try to save about $1,000 every month, which is not very good. I could never dream to support a family or a mortgage like this, but at least I'm not struggling to make rent or going into debt.
I live in an area that would be described as "tough", but statistically, I think we have one robbery every week and one murder every season. By NYC standards, that's very safe :)
I have to be pretty diligent about thinking through how long it will take but it works out.
Additionally, I've gotten multiple clients with constant work. Was getting paid 8k per month for about 20hrs a week. They've scaled back a bit so its 5k for about 14 hrs a week now. Not all clients are good clients though. Still figuring out how to interview them up top.
And when I last checked I get about a 40% response rate to proposals and ~25% of those convert to doing the project. I probably apply to about 20 jobs a month and each initial proposal takes 10 or so minutes. Which seems about right since they give you "proposal" credits each month and I've never run out. At the end of the day, I'm only spending a few hours on cold sales per month.
The median developer on a freelance site is correctly priced at $9/hr, and there are thousands of options at that price point. Your job is to signal that you are not one of them, and that you are capable of actually completing software projects. A $150/hr bill rate is a good way of doing that.
You want your client’s decision to be whether to hope for the best with one of those Lowball bids that inspire zero confidence, or whether to go with the expensive guy who will at least get the thing built.
I used to hate it and still I exit the app unless I’m actively working. But it assures payment which is important.
I've seen so many freelancers waste company time and endangering otherwise great projects in the past and have even done so myself that I really think a proper, fair and well balanced tracking suite would have benefited all parties as it would have created a much more formal and clear reminder of what screentime in this setting is for.
Obviously the flip side is that through the "invasive tracking", work stays work and everything not-work needs to happen on another machine. This means less mixing of private stuff into your work life which many consider something positive, but is counter to what the larger trends in IT are. (Corporate Campuses that fulfill every need...)
At the end of the day i'm really not sure where I stand on this, as it opens so many positive possibilities (f.e. proactive encountering of procrastination) but also so many negative ones (abuse of power). Surveillance is never an easy topic.
There are good freelancers, there are poor ones. Same goes for any type of employment. This is quite apart from whether it is appropriate or necessary to micromanage their keystrokes.
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
Rooting for this idea's death, personally.
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.
If you want full control of an employee don't get a freelancer. If you want to constant surveillance of any artists' computer; fuck off. If you don't trust the artist to work, get a new artist.
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.
My girlfriend is a manager at a writing company. She has a group of about 30 freelancers she keeps in touch with on top of the 10 people who work directly under her at her company. When too much work comes in she leans on the freelancer that best fits what she needs. These are people she has worked with before, has had success with, and most of all trusts. She, of course, has to try new freelancers occasionally. But the bad ones get spit back out.
It sounds like the company you were working for doesn't have very good freelancing game.
If you want freelancing to stay mostly something for people great at selling themselves, managing customer relations etc. that model works well, but that's IMO not optimal for the company nor the majority of people who would enjoy being freelancers.
I think you're right that this type of model benefits freelancers that manage their own group of clients rather than through an agency, however.
And in my experience, the people wanting more control want it because they know that they themselves would, given the chance, betray the trust. If someone demands this happen, you can bet they're looking to exploit you. You don't want to work for these people, you don't want to touch them with a 10-foot pole.
Finally the guys in CA got their wish and a stupid amount of energy was put into finding who might be gaming the system..... it turned out to be the people who worked for the guys in CA... their own direct reports.
I’ve always wanted to make a plausible code generator based on markov chains. It still seems like an effective way to trick people into thinking you’re working on some hard problem.
So sorry to say but your dev setup was not good because you get 2 weeks to dispute this.
I know because I have hired on here too and been scammed once. I raised all the red flags and ended up getting some money back even past the guarantee.
Thing was that if I had reviewed the screenshots it was obvious it was bullshit.
I didn't catch on because he was producing good code and just used the macro to "inflate" his hours by about 30%. I caught on by pure chance when he happened to tweak his background macro tool just as the hourly screenshot was taken.
Upwork’s mediation process was hokey at best but in the end they reviewed the time logs and gave me all but a couple 10 minute chunks of time worth of payment.
I have just gotten used to being monitored while the clock is on, and don’t do sensitive things while it’s happening... I can always turn off the clock quick if needed.
I do feel like if I was buying services I would want some way to guarantee someone isn’t billing me time for doing nothing, this encourages some sort of transparency and attempts to curb timecard “fraud”
This is a very serious problem with upwork. I once had a client accept a finished project, give me an amazing review and then, close the project and complete the payment. A month later, he reversed the rating and review and started an issue with the Upwork system. The problem was that the third-party software service I used (as per the clients instructions) to perform a set of tasks, changed their policy and stopped allowing remote clients to their service.
I explained to the client during the development phase itself that this could happen. He explicitly told me that it was ok, and to go ahead.
Inspite of showing Upwork all the communications, my warnings, etc, they still sided with the client, blocked my account and transferred some balance amount in my account to the client.
The last time I used Upwork.
The questions they had were quite specific about corner cases of the language used. I liked that a lot. However, it's also just stuff that you can read in a couple of blog posts about python corner cases.
What struck me the most was that they seriously asked me to write up a program to prove my coding skills - despite having send samples - at which point I dropped out.
Several things just turned me completely off about Upwork:
1) They claim that they have the "1%" of the best developers in the world. BS. With the kind of money they offer: forget about that. Maybe you have a couple of imposters who don't know that they can charge easily double of what they offer but the majority will be mid level for sure. So this claim is a lie.
2) They obviously cannot guarantee that you will be assigned a project anytime soon once you complete the interviews. But asked as well for a lot of engagement from your end to go through the process.
3) It was something like $6.000 per month - market rate for a contractor in Germany with comparable skills and experience is more in the range of $12.000
However, and that's my take from it: if I ever have to hire mid level developers for remote positions I definitely will look at Upwork's portfolio and pirate them away. Put the 20% that UW charges on top of their salary and the deal should be golden.
This is so stupid.
I don't trust UpWork anymore than I trust PayPal so as far "guaranteed" hours are concerned it doesn't matter - I withdraw my funds every week.
We’re also YC Winter 18 hopefuls..!
A lot of people bitch and moan about it. But if you go work in a factory - for instance - you'll be clocking in and clocking out just the same.
... and your best people will leave. Over time you’ll be left with just the ones who don’t have any options to go anywhere else.
It’s kind of a self-inflicted Dead-Sea Effect that you’ve set up.
But I like the feature as an employer. I like seeing the process of the work being done.
Link: http://timesnapper.com/
What would be the *nix alternative?
https://alternativeto.net/software/timesnapper/
I haven't tried any personally, but digging through the alternatives I actually didn't see any resembling it. All the other alternatives were designed to manage employees & their time. None of them seemed to offer video playbacks like timesnapper, only screenshots. And they worked online which is a giant red flag for me.
The closest one I could find though for linux and macOS is this one called productivity-peach https://www.etopian.com/software/automatic-screenshots-windo... . I strictly wanted to avoid "remote monitoring" or "employee-tracking" type software
I did pay $30 for timesnapper (one license works on more than 1 PC). Timesnapper is nice, you can playback your entire day and see everything that was done. Super useful if you do sysadmin stuff as well, sometimes you might change a setting on AWS/cpanel/etc and it screws up everything. Now you can go back and see what you changed. You can add a password too which I do as well, your video playbacks are encrypted
The answer below by mmel is more appealing to me after looking through those alternatives...
I agree, that the closest is Productivity Peach, but being a closed source Java app, and my circumstances, that one liner could be going more my way, thanks swaggyBoatswain and mmel!
And the tracking app also allows me to organize my work by living notes to the clients to let them know what I worked on. Which is always appreciated.
To sum it, up – not sure where the problem is. This is what it is, it works and if you are good you'll make plenty of money for yourself and upWork ;)