Comment by Roritharr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Roritharr | Hacker News Reader

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Recently a friend of mine pointed me towards TopTracker. It's an interesting concept, having kind of a papertrail for what you worked on can be really valuable in any setting, even the most friendly ones, because even yourself can loose track of all the yaks you've had to shave to fix a certain bug or make a gizmo spin a certain way.

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.

Yeah this is really dumb. If you're charging hourly, but don't trust someone is actually working, don't charge hourly.

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.

This, while not really being nuanced, strikes the most important point. Trust.

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.

If you're a company that commonly outsources, you should have good freelancing game. By that I mean you build a network of freelancers you've worked with before or have heard good feedback from trusted sources.

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.

The company actually had, that's why things worked out and I returned to more projects afterwards, but it was stressful and not a job they would have given someone else, because of the lack of trust inherent in any new freelancer.

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.

Hmmm, interesting. I wonder how important self advertising is in this case, though. I know that she usually posts content she can't get done with her normal freelancers on this writer's freelance site. Freelancers make bids, negotiate terms, etc, through the website. After she's worked with someone she likes through it she tends to keep their email and ask them directly next time.

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.

You make some good points about a useful papertrail for one's personal use, but I think the hard line here is whether the papertrail is for your benefit or for someone else's. In this case it's pretty clear that it benefits the contracted not at all, and it's a simple case of @techcompany wanting the benefits (no min wage or paying for health insurance) and none of the drawbacks (lack of control) of an independant contracting.

Rooting for this idea's death, personally.

You're certainly right that the systems in use by Upwork and others are currently skewed in favor of @techcompany, but does that necessarily mean that it has to be this way?

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.

Would you say the same thing about employees standing around the water cooler planning the company picnic or talking about their spot in the company fantasy football league?

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.

Disclaimer: I was working as a freelancer/subcontractor for most of my career, am now a CTO with all sorts of employees & (a few) freelancers in my team.

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

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