danj

I was having very similar thoughts to you about a month ago. For me I decided to take a bit more of a “holistic” approach in the sense that I wanted to learn backend development, architecture etc so decided to create a website and set everything up by scratch.

I over engineered everything - I have a CI/CD pipeline for a wordpress website that I really do not need but it meant that I now know how to do it.

Not only that I force myself once a week to write about what I’ve learned that week for my development for my blog that nobody really know exists. But it keeps me accountable for having to continuously learn and improve.

I’m currently setting up my website in various regions then knocking them out to see how I can make sure everything stays online whilst also piping all my server logs to a logging platform.

Thank you! For all the suggestions, I'll definitely be adding all of these to my list. Any more suggestions is greatly appreciated!

We have such a solid team now and we have lots of other channels for hiring people now but thank you!

I’ve probably hired about $150,000 of contracts through up work and never once have we required the monitoring app to be used. However, we have a bit of a different approach, we will “pay” you through upwork for the first month, but if we are satisfied with your work after a month we pay you directly through PayPal or wire transfer and then we cancel the contract on upwork. Out of all of the contractors we have hired (20-30) I can only think of one who wanted complete payment through upwork.

I know how bad upwork is and when we hired we genuinely always set out to get the contractors we worked with off using it so they can keep more money.

I would argue that from my experience generalization is not welcomed at all. I'm a founder for 3 companies (in order of starting: ran its course, successful exit, wound down). I have a huge array of skills that I have learned but because I've been a founder and kind of have to have been involved in everything my skills are too general.

What's worse is that there seems to be a real push back against serial founders who are looking to transition from founding companies to working for another company. I've A/B tested my resume with changing my latest startup title from Founder to Product Manager and even though the job requirements state extensive startup experience required, being a founder gets rejected for not having the relevant experience, whilst being a Product Manager I get to the next round as my experience matches what they are looking for.

All in all it's becoming a rather depressing affair.

I have used e-lance and upwork to the tune of about $140,000 and in my last year of hiring on UpWork we plugged $36,000 through them. Generally they've been pretty good and usually fast and fair to act, though in all my time of using them I've only had 3 bad experiences, 2 of them were resolved quickly and well, the third was a shit show.

I think a lot of people get screwed on UpWork because someone posts a shitty outline of a job and then expects the world to be delivered for $5. I don't operate like that, we treat it like hiring normally - we thoroughly interview and the spec is very detailed.

The last contractor we hired was for firmware and an issue we had, we needed someone with Rockchip experience and someone who could work on it full time. We explained the problem and the spec of the job repeatedly to him and he agreed. We agreed a fee - a little higher than what we budgeted but honestly didn't care - we were getting this solved.

Anyway fast forward and he has done about 50% of what we agreed - we ask him when can we get the next 50% he said when we pay him more - we said, that's not what we agreed, it's in the contract (on the job spec) in the UpWork messages (again reemphasized) and we agreed over phone calls and emails and he signed. He said he didn't care he wanted more money before he would complete it. At this point the firmware he has done is essentially useless to us without the last 50% so I go to UpWork and explain everything - hoping they would give him a nudge - we had everything outlined on their system - their response - you need to pay him. I was baffled. So I opened a credit card dispute to get the money back.

UpWork's behaviour became down right embarassing. The disputed amount was in the range of about $1000 and they became so hilariously hostile, then angry, then sorry, then hostile, then derrogatory, and eventually demeaning (offering us $50 credit if we withdraw the dispute) we said no. They said they wouldclose our account - we said fine.

How stupid of a company do you have to be - not only that - we had about $30,000 more lined up for the next 6 months - now we just go through our network and other job boards. We will NEVER use them again.