I'm a consultant and have been for a long time, and I know this business. I don't think counting keystrokes and in many cases screenshots make any sense, so I think the implementation of this is totally bogus, but the concept makes complete sense.
"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.)
I've been freelancing for ~6 years now, it really depends on the initial time you spend knowing about your client. If you set the expectations right to your client about payments upfront and send them a contract that clearly has consequences for them if they don't pay on time, and if you walk them through it, you shouldn't have any problems getting paid.
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..
Yes but Upwork wants a metric that doesn’t need a software engineer to adjudicate. If you say “this XHMTL validator works as specified because RFC 1913 was never formally accepted” it takes someone with a clue to figure out what you mean. Upwork would rather say “you types all day, you get paid.”
Still very easy for people to bypass. Just pushes the adjudication into the "interpret screenshot" layer. The screenshot can be a completely valid Photoshop mockup that looks exactly like the client's specifications for the Rails app they hired you for, showing that you pretended to do the work.
I'm guessing that that ploy would work once or twice before you got pushed off the platform anyway.
Same goes for a client that regularly claims the work is incomplete.
Of course, and if you're delivering work and that's working out all well for you, then great. And it appears that you can go that route instead on UpWork, agree on milestones, and no tracking required.
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.
Could you explain a bit why Upwork, who are a company that have countless forum posts, blog posts, ... about non-payment, clawing back payments in entirely unjustified circumstances with zero recourse, ... I'm saying they have a very bad reputation in this regard.
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.
I've used Upwork in the past with no problems (from Upwork, I've had problems with clients). I ready the links you posted and not one of them mentions Upwork cheating or clawing back payments. Only the first article is really critical of Upwork per se, and all the truly damning stuff, if it exists, has been removed, so it's hard to judge.
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?
I’ve had a company owe me about $14,000 for....15 years now. I’m guessing it won’t be coming in anytime soon! Back when I was younger and naive about such things it would have been nice for a larger organization to have my back.
No, I think the reality would be that you'd have never allowed that client to run up $14k. You'd have had a payment plan in place so that at each milestone you'd get paid. If they stop paying, you would down tools.
You don't need a big brother watching your every working hour. There's happy mediums, this Upwork spy thing certainly isn't it.
I've been consulting off and on for the past five years and I've steered way clear of these marketplaces. It's a very obvious race to the bottom sort of situation they're plotting for which I get. I'd be optimizing for that outcome too if I were one of them.
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.
> Here's my advice to developers who want to freelance: network and network some more. Write blogs, create content marketing material for yourself.
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.)
Eastern Europe or Asia or Latin America and speak only conversational English.
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
These markets rarely pay as much as US or even UK. I've seen dozens of developers with 2-5 years of experience earning more on Upwork than senior developers in their countries.
Also, it isn't a "race-to-the-bottom" if you have a good portfolio and know how to present your skills.
You want access to the market with the most money because you want some of their money. I bet there's very little competition in the Somali language software community but the upper limit for what you're going to get paid is going to be substantially lower than that for people who can speak English, or even Spanish or Russian.
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.
I’d like to extend your point about the first meeting being free. I have a long standing principle I borrowed from lawyers. The first consultation is free. I try to keep it to an hour, but I don’t hold clients to that time limit, if it takes half a day to wrap my head round a project, that’s what it takes and it’s still just one consultation and it’s free. I’m not about to charge you to find out that I’m the wrong guy for you, or that you’re the wrong place for me.
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.
Just chiming in that this is how the bigger software dev agencies do it as well. I worked at Viget (www.viget.com) and now at Pivotal (pivotal.io) on the biz dev / sales side and spending time on pre-sales analysis is key to making a software project successful and thus winning the deal / securing the contract.
This is pretty fascinating to me, thanks for sharing. The analysis you're referring to - how long does it take for the big clients you deal with? Is it mostly meetings?
Happy to talk in more detail directly (email address is my HN username at gmail) but in terms of the analysis done for software projects, the timing is generally a combination of 2-3 meetings over a period of a week or two. Each meeting can be an hour or three, but the goal is to get a sense of a) how mission critical the app is b) what are the primary challenges the client is trying to solve w the app in question c) who are the users of the app d) what does the client know about the users and their needs / pain points e) what are we going to prioritize when building f) who are stakeholders involved to get buy in g) what does the codebase look like and can we build atop it or is this gonna be a net new effort.
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.
That doesn't even scratch the surface of Upwork issues though. Has anyone recently seen how much clients are willing to pay for work? I'm seeing avg pays of about 9-10$ an hour for mid-complexity jobs. Even see some clients willing to pay 600$ for fully functional IOS, Android and Web App iterations of an App.
We pay $20-25/hr for entry-level developer work and $40-50/hr for intermediate developer work from Eastern European countries, which is super competitive over there. We've got a pair of excellent developers that we've had for a long time and we're extremely happy.
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.
There definitely are clients who are happy to pay $40-$75 an hour for senior full stack eng talent. We are such a client, and two VPE friends also commonly use upwork for 1-3 month gigs where they don't want to pay $175/hour for an sfbay contractor. The reason you're not seeing them is good clients eventually find a good contractor and either just run fulltime ongoing work through upwork (for eg payment convenience) or move off upwork.
I was earning $95/hr as a ux UI designer. Now I run a consultancy and charge per project which equates to 260-300$ an hour. Upwork has many issues and limitations but if you do well by good clients you can make it work pretty well.
No one is obliged to bid on such projects. You'll find clients who pay good rates too. I have been freelancing on Upwork since 2010, I never bin on low budgeted projects and usually I'm happy with $35+/hr rates.
That may sound to low in US but where I live it is very high pay rate.
I've done a few projects on Upwork in the past. Most of the web development work is WordPress based sites.
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.
I once worked on Upwork. Getting the 1st project is really hard. And seeing quotes of USD 500 for entire fully functional applications was depressing. There were people from India remote places like small city Chandigarh or small town in Kerala or people from Bangladesh who would actually bid for these. I finally asked Upwork for a feature where I could blacklist clients who I thought that the price offered was too low. I wanted a feature like - "dont show me any bids from this client" . But unfortunately Upwork didnt create such a feature
Not to shamelessly plug, but this Upwork monolith (and the general sub-optimized gig economy right now) is harmful not just for the freelancers themselves, but also the clients (from a price optimization perspective).
We're trying to solve it with a blind marketplace model at ContentFly (http://contentfly.co/)
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.
Would you care to elaborate how you see the Upwork Monolith is trending to become harmful to freelancers? It would be nice to see your thought on this.
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.
I just looked at your home page and that just seems incredible to promise to your clients. Do you actually have writers taking this gig? I know of no professional copy (or other) writers that would write unlimited articles for $250 a month, esp. "on demand" and "in brand tone." Not to mention all the back and forth that goes with client writing.
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?
It did/does. I did not have an issue with it, besides occasionally having to go delete a ton of screenshots when I accidentally left the tracker running while I wasnt working (not attempting to be fraudulent, just careless)
I wonder if anyone in developed countries can actually make a living from something like Upwork. It seemed to me whenever I have looked at it, that it's mostly people and companies from the developing world who work for less than minimum wage or close to it in developed countries... and the expected cost matches these sorts of rates. So it does not make sense for anyone other than the most desperate people in the first world to try to get work on these sorts of sites.
As such that sort of labor is easy to exploit. They have no bargaining power and are already working for peanuts.
I make 75 to 150 per hour on upwork. The biggest thing I find is a lot of clients are uncomfortable with a 150 per hour contract, but very happy about a fixed price 3k project that takes me 20 to 25 hours.
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.
He's an outlier at best. Just search through the listings: the vast majority of them are extremely low paying jobs with vague or outlandish requirements.
This is most definitely true. Most aren't great. But I need to land a couple jobs a month and there are ~250 new a day in looking for US Devs only. Even at 1% thats 2-3 relevant decent jobs a day.
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.
You want to be an outlier on sites like that. You need to be.
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.
Back when they were oDesk, I lived in a remote area with no technology jobs. I ended up working for oDesk for a 6 mo stint (Actually for oDesk not a third party). So I'm familiar with the ecosystem. I was just wondering if it was web dev or something more specialized.
I build websites and apps. Nothing crazy, but it can be a lot of fun working with lots of new people trying to better their business through tech or start something new.
"Not in San Francisco" and "easy to exploit" are very different. I had great, professional work done in Russia on Upwork. It didn't cost $200 per hour, but it didn't cost $2 per hour either. The engineer who did the work was the vendor, and I was the client, so I was definitely the boss and treated as such, but he was clearly not hurting for work and if I started behaving inappropriately he could have easily dumped me and found another client. I don't know how far his salary went where he was living, but there are many places in this world where 20 US dollars per hour can sustain a very nice lifestyle.
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.
God that's horrid. Not to mention the slew of taxes one pays by being a 1099 contractor. And it's not like the clients one attracts on Upwork are particularly good.
Are you working constant 80 hour weeks? Is everyone lying about big city costs? Or do you consider 3 housemates and a 2 hour commute to be not hurting for cash?
40 hour weeks, 45 minutes to midtown one way. $20 pre tax pay, $15 post tax pay, roughly $2600 a month with even some shitty health benefits thrown in there.
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 did vworker for a big part of my income years ago. Almost all of my business came from a tiny number of repeat clients (in fact, mostly one) who had already learned the pain that comes from optimizing only for cost.
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.
It probably depends on the domain - I've hired people domestically across a few different fields for rates in the $50 - $150/hr range when I was looking for specific expertise that I wasn't able to find in my network. It's sort of niche and I don't know if they were making a full time living from it, but I think we paid fair and got what we paid for.
It's definitely a race to the bottom but it also represents a good opportunity for junior developers even in developed countries. I've gotten $35/hour jobs before which isn't great but it isn't peanuts either.
Can you elaborate on the sort of work and what you would be paying locally for the same sort of work... i.e. is it something that requires quite a bit of specialization, etc.
rails + ruby + a bit of frontend. It's not super specialized but rails can easily become a huge mess if you don't know what you're doing. So we're definitely interested in more senior talent, ideally someone that has made all the new rails eng mistakes in someone else' codebase.
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.
I do some freelance work through Upwork. I like the tracking software, it shows that I'm doing work, all my hours are verified and they are guaranteed to be paid. It's completely worth it, people who have been stiffed on contracts before, its a no brainer.
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.
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.
Anybody who dealt with upwork knows perfectly well that "guaranteed" ... there is nothing guaranteed with these systems.
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.
I worked at a company with multiple teams doing basically the same job at multiple sites. The guys out in CA were always talking on the conference calls about the metrics being gamed by some other sites. It was all blame and innuendo with these jerks. Their numbers weren't as good as other sites (despite being paid substantially more than anyone else).
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 see many comments saying that this is fine because it's optional. Based on the previous posts discussing Upwork (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=upwork), it seems to me like today this is optional and tomorrow this will be mandatory and the next day it will add machine learning webcam face detection technology.
Hahaha. What? That’s awesome. What did the macros do?
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.
The thing is if you are working on a serious team there is no value to cheat. You need to generate quality code at a reasonable pace. Custom solutions don’t appear out of nowhere.
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.
You get one week to dispute, and let me tell you -
Upwork staff are not quick to accept your claims.
By the time my dispute was manually reviewed the payment was already passed to the freelancer and could not be reclaimed.
Only the most recent week's pay was refunded, even though the evidence suggested the developer was cheating for a long period of time.
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.
I’m not a fan of it, but it is a necessary evil sometimes. I had a client dispute my work after he asked me to spend hours on tangential crap, then claim I wasted his time (he asked me to do the work and bill the time, approved of it at the time too, but later reversed his decision)
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”
> approved of it at the time too, but later reversed his decision
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.
I've been using Upwork for side gigs since it was Odesk. The tracking system (which has scarcely changed in 5+ years) has always seemed fair and flexible to me. the tracker works well cross platform.. I can move from OSX to Win10 to Ubuntu (previously they supported Debian, and in the past I've managed to get it tracking successfully on Slackware) .. minimal downtime, good communication from their engineers. Being able to selectively trim the fat from my diary in 10 min increments on Sunday night is helpful in preparing clean weekly reports and reviewing my own workweek.
I am absolutely not surprised about this BS tracking software stuff. I was interviewing with Upwork a couple of month back. I live in "western Europe" and what they offered me was actually less pay than being employed full time here. For the moment I accepted but more out of interest to see what the rest of their interview looks like.
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.
Shamefully hijacking, I’m actually building something similar but it _does_not_track_keystrokes_or_take_screenshots_ because we agree that that is too intrusive. It’s made for lawyers to match their file activity with time entries.
I believe ‘his’ should be ‘he’ in this context - “His has built widely used software ranging from award-winning individual apps to corporate workforce software.”
They've done this for a decade since odesk. I've caught many freelancers watching porn or one was trying to sell data off the backend and freely chatting about it.
But I like the feature as an employer. I like seeing the process of the work being done.
Knowing multiple business owners who have complained about remote employees faking hours, installing mouse simulators to trick time tracking software, etc, I'm not particularly sympathetic.
Semirelated but I run timesnapper, which is a private tracking software running only on my PC so I can check if I've forgotten to save a doc and wanted to see what it looked like 2 hours ago.
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.
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!
I don't think this is a bad idea at all. Micro-work should be tracked for both the worker and client's sake. Paying hourly is highly inefficient as we all know it's very difficult to work every second of an hour. So if something could more precisely track how often you work during an hour it may encourage you to work less not more as you'll be able to see when you start to taper off; the longer you work the less efficient you may become.
I'm confused, why is this news? This is how its been for ever. I get my most interesting projects form upWork since I can check before applying what the job is about, which is something carder to do when you talk with a client of the street. Not to mention that you get guarantee pay every week. You don't have to spend time and energy to force the client to pay you. Which is the best part of upWork. Sure they get a 10% cut, but perennially is well worth it for the ease of mind.
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 ;)
"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.)