Ask HN: Do people have any luck using eLance or Upwork as a client or freelance?

I do gigs on Fiverr all the time, and if I'm honest it doesn't really make the money that would make the time spent worth it. If I didn't LOVE writing poetry, or tidying up Rails apps or any of the other crap I do there, I'd have quit a long time ago.

IMHO, a dev would better spend his time going from repo to repo on GitHub and cleaning up code. Like checkout random files and run Rubocop and fix it up and commit. Fast, simple tasks that get your name out there. Sooner or later you'll either become part of a larger project, or be noticed for your work and get recruited somewhere good.

Either way, e-lancing is risky altogether because of disinhibition in clients. It's apparently tempting to let someone deliver a quality product and not pay or rip them off or just be rude to them, and oftentimes a platform will have more concern with throughput than with quality so if one dev gets ripped off it's not big deal for them.

Like I said, build YOUR name and you'll go farther altogether. If you're doing it just for a few bucks, you're already doing it wrong anyways.

Na. Typically there are thousands more devs from cheaper places and although your code might be beautiful in comparison, someone who just wants "a website" is not going to care what the source code looks like.

Just my personal experience, though, maybe people with tight portfolios actually make a living.

I use these sites as a client to get work done on projects that I don’t have time for. From the hiring side it is rather hit and miss. I have found that price does not correlate with quality or reliability of freelancers. About 2/3rd of all developers flake out before delivery. This is despite me providing technically very detailed proposals and extensively discussing the projects before choosing a freelancer so they know what I expect.

What I have found works best is just hire two people to do the same project at the same time - rarely you will get two delivered projects, but since cost is not such an issue I just chose the best coded one.

I have had fair success, but not the best experience with the competition. There are far more developers that are ready to work for cheap. Getting noticed and interviewed feels like winning a battle. It has helped me by working on niche projects, and not regular websites.

Looked at eLance a couple years ago but never followed through. Appeared very tedious in terms of setting up a profile and submitting proposals, I had easier methods available to me to obtain work and utilized them instead.