Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

ChrisMarshallNY

I have not had any success on Upwork.

100% of the “leads” I got there were scams.

Not 75%, not even 99%. 100%. Not one single honest job. Some were requests for me to participate in scams, but I don’t roll that way.

I’m sure that my experience was unique, and that my profile must have had some “scam flag,” so I won’t write off the platform in its entirety.

I heard good things about the site from friends, but every single person that extolled its virtues had used it to find contractors. Not one had used it to find work. The couple of people that I know that used it to seek work had experiences similar to mine, and nothing good to say about it.

But that is small-sample anecdotal data. Not something that I would say should be used to provide any meaningful recommendations or reviews.

But for me, the site is worthless. I was pretty appalled at the brazenness of some of the approaches. No one seemed to be worried that I would refer them to the FBI, so I guess I don’t come across as a snitch; just a chump.

A couple of years ago, I decided to “refactor” myself back to full-time engineering.

My ultimate goal was to specialize in Swift development (what I do, now).

Until then, all my work was part-time, on open-source projects; equal parts PHP server stuff, and Swift apps.

So the first thing I did, as a “self-training” project, was design and build a multipurpose, secure application SaaS backend, in PHP, because I didn’t want to waste time learning up on my JavaScript, which I planned to abandon. This was just the first-stage booster.

This was what I wrote: https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#ba...

It’s not something that folks are interested in, probably because it was written in PHP, and doesn’t really tick many boxes on a “Buzzword Bingo” card, but it accomplished its purpose.

I’ll be happy to never write PHP again, but I’m glad it was there for the experience.

And I nuked my Upwork account months ago.

My wife is a very successful marketer on upwork. However, she's been on the platform for maybe even 10 years now, way back when it was odesk and elance. She has flawless work history and over a hundred clients - and she told me that recently the number of job invitations she gets are way down and that the 90%+ of the invitations are very fishy. My guess is that platform is now so popular that the quality of its audience is very low on average.

What kind of marketing does your wife do and can you send me her Upwork profile? I’m looking for some extra help for my company. Email in profile.

She does SEM in 6 languages (Google/Bing Ads, FB PPC), helps with SEO, regularly finds broken things on clients' sites, deals with developers etc. I'll send you her profile link privately.

PHP is still big in the publishing business.

WordPress alone is bigger than HN would lead you to believe. Lots of business runs on PHP. And not just running Drupal from inertia; Laravel is a new shiny thing.

Can confirm. PHP/WP is easily 70% of my business. Virtually all of the affiliate/SEO business runs on WP, and so do basically all individual company websites. And they all need help.

And there's a reason for that, it's so simple but it works. Get a shared hosting for $3/mo, add WordPress to it by uploading a zip with cPanel and you're done. It's cheap, you never touch a line of code, there are premade resources for most niches (themes/fully fledged apps and platforms) and tutorials on how to do even the most basic things.

This works great for small business owners, web agencies and professionals (which is the majority of the people who actually need a website). When self-hosting you also have a sense of ownership and power (and you actually have them) compared to using dedicated platforms such as Shopify, Medium or Wix.

I've spent over 50k over the years on Upwork working a heap of great freelancers. Once you get into it and learn to sift through the legit profiles vs the dodgy it becomes very useful. And it's great to get to work with folks around the world

Cool, but you sound like you have used it to hire folks; not find work.

It seems that it really is a great platform to hire people; just maybe not so good, if you want to be hired.

As someone who got hired through it for years I can confirm this:

> learn to sift through the legit profiles vs the dodgy

It's also important to get longer term projects through it (either a client that brings you repeat work or short-medium term hourly contracts). It has got more and more difficult over the years imo as the various freelance sites merged and you had more crap to sift through.

Thanks for that. I couldn't believe that my experience was the norm, as the site couldn't stay in business.

I'm not kidding, though. Every. Single. Contact. that I had was "dodgy."

I really must have had something in my profile that attracted them. I don't know what it could have been. I use a similar approach in all my endeavors, but that site responded quite differently.

I remember one that was pretty scary. They kept trying to get me to meet them in rather remote places, like commuter parking lots, or hiking parks. They also tried to find out where I lived (which, TBH, isn't difficult. I own a house, and don't use an LLC to obfuscate ownership).

I come across as fairly open and credulous, but I have dealt with serious hardcases almost my entire life. The alarm klaxon was going off like crazy on that one.

Another data point: I also found multiple jobs with multiple clients through Upwork. I even built a transpiler for the most recent client, which is the coolest thing I've ever done.

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