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Wanna quit your job and become upwork freelancer? Do not do that

125 points by tagfolder 11y ago

firasd 11y ago
The trick is to avoid looking for work on platforms like oDesk (now Upwork) where the world is underbidding you. It’s a positioning and deal flow issue. Ideally you want clients to refer you on to other clients. And maybe you should call yourself a contractor, agency, solo developer—something like that—instead of a “freelancer.” So it’s possible to do well if you quit your job and work as a freelancer, but you need to spend time handling the business side of things: marketing (e.g. social media presence, open source contributions, writing articles, attending events) and sales (getting referrals, closing leads, etc.)
- tagfolder 11y ago
  You're right.
- ahallock 11y ago
  Are you speaking from experience? I've found plenty of great gigs on these freelancing sites. You just have to dig a bit and know what the "crap" jobs are, so you can avoid them altogether. The world is not underbidding you. Most times, you negotiate directly with the client and the bids are just a formality.
  - firasd 11y ago
    Fair point; although I’ve done a fair amount of work as an external developer I haven’t actually tried to get work on those sites.
chejazi 11y ago
Is there much of a difference between freelancing and software contracting? I've met a handful people who are part of a company (read: agency) of 1-5 and making really good money ($60/hr+). But they're also in the Bay Area.
- alrs 11y ago
  $60/hr is not particularly good money in the Bay Area.
  - zuck9 11y ago
    Source? What is ideal for Bay Area? Most startups I see have salaries around ~$80k (~$32/hr for 48hr week or ~$40/hr for 40hr week)
    - iopq 11y ago
      You realize that the $80,000 includes completely free health care (otherwise $300 a month minimum, if not more if they offer a good plan) with no employee contribution, free dental ($20 a month?), $300 towards vision a year, minimal life insurance maybe, free meals at the office, etc. Not to mention that you get sick pay, holiday pay, retirement account contributions, etc. Including the benefits it easily adds up to $100,000 a year of benefits or more depending on how good the benefits are Besides, if it's not a start-up you're easily making $130,000+ if you have a lot of experience
      - wlievens 11y ago
        Are there any payroll taxes on top of that salary number? Where I live (Belgium) there's a 33% (probably being lowered to 25% soon) social security tax paid by the employer.
        tsotha 11y ago
        In the US your employer pays around 15% of your salary as tax. If you're not working for someone else that's an extra 15.3% you have to pay - it's called "self employment tax".
        zrail 11y ago
        It's not an extra 15%. The total amount of Social Security and Medicare taxes is 15.4%, with the employer paying half and the employee paying the other half. When you're self-employed, you pay both halves. And the employer half is always deductible on your federal income tax, which reduces the sting a little.
humble_dev 11y ago
So people should not become freelancers, based on your single bad experience, make sense. I was expecting some data backing up your statement or at least proper story. tl;dr - This guy is freelancer and few days ago he was contacted by stupid client who thought he will work almost for free.
- tagfolder 11y ago
  I was just telling about my experience working on odesk (read biggest freelance website). This is not first case of stupid client and I'm not first day there. What kind of backup? Link to my profile? Ok will update post now.
  - zerr 11y ago
    Sergey, one advice - please do NOT work for $15/hr. All it takes to charge $XXX/hr (or $8X-$9X/hr ) is just to ask for it. Seriously. And keep away from odesk/upwork/etc.. race to the bottom sites. Search and contact prospective clients yourself - as if you'd looking for standard job. No middle-man is needed here.
    - tagfolder 11y ago
      Thanks for the advice. Actually I already started to search full time job. Enough odesk freelancing for me. :)
drinchev 11y ago
This is all wrong. Click-bait title. Some thoughts by a discouraged person in a globalised world and a general conclusion that doesn't make any sense if you read the article. Maybe the OP shouldn't look for projects in oDesk-type websites. I don't do that and I'm really happy working as a freelancer. For anyone wondering how to find freelance projects. You should go and look for local clients, networking, contact companies that look for developers and try to persuade them that they can count on you too, etc. It's a really, really, really big sea of possibilities nowadays for developers.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  >Maybe the OP shouldn't look for projects in oDesk-type websites. Yeah, definitely not. Bottom feeders all the way.
  - ahallock 11y ago
    Not true at all. High-profile startups do post jobs there. You can find good clients--it just takes some digging, negotiation, and patience.
- _yosefk 11y ago
  The page's actual title is "...become Upwork freelancer", which is fairly specific and not click-baity IMO. (It looks like the HN title is the same now, changed from just "become a freelancer.")
  - tagfolder 11y ago
    yes, just updated title, because my post about upwork experience, not freelance in general, as many people pointed in comments.
- anonmeow 11y ago
  >It's a really, really, really big sea of possibilities nowadays for developers. If you are in the silicon valley or at least in some 1st world country - sure, you have a lot of possibilities and ridiculously high pay. The sad truth is that exactly same skillset can be valued 10x less or 10x more depending on your location.
erbdex 11y ago
What was that "Indian/Fillipino guy/girl" part about. Do you thing we don't code? Or is incompetence a function of race in your mind? :(
- Asbostos 11y ago
  That person was doing manual copy and paste. So yes, they didn't code.
- tagfolder 11y ago
  you missed part "without any programming skills". I know there are good coders from those countries, I was talking about those who underbidding and work for $1 per hour doing manual/low quality work
- norbytess2 11y ago
  I rather you paste the entire phrase. On a first glance, it captures right away my attention. But yeah dude he said "for some" so I just skip that and continue reading.
- tajen 11y ago
  I have solidarity with your point of view. However, I'm French and I once lived in Australia for 3 years. And I can tell you that their programmers know what they're doing, better, on a massive scale, than the French IT sector. They know when to align behind the boss (which is surprising for a French guy) but still know how to stir internal debate, they have understandings of marketing and economics, they master several languages each, they output software faster with better quality. We get paid twice more in Australia than France, and the job requirement was twice higher. It's not even personal skills, it's sometimes how we act in teams. We need to be humble, fellow Indian/Fillipino guy/girl. Yet they hired me, because as Agile as they are, they don't know anything about CMMi-based corporations ;)
- sandGorgon 11y ago
  SandGorgon's Law of Outsourcing Analogies [1] - "As an online discussion about PROGRAMMING grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving outsourcing or Indians approaches 1, if Godwin’s law has not already been satisfied" http://www.lambdacurry.com/2010/07/sandgorgons-law-of-outsourcing-analogies/ http://www.lambdacurry.com/2010/07/sandgorgons-law-of-outsou...
Asbostos 11y ago
Freelancing in IT is kind of a fantastic global phenomenon really. It allows foreigners like this guy to work "in" another country without being blocked by the artificial market distortion of immigration restrictions. Perhaps there are plenty of freelancers willing to make a web scraper for $15. In that case, this guy's got to find what advantages he has over them so he can compete. Just because American employees get paid more doesn't mean everybody else doing the same type of work also deserves to be paid more if the market decides not to. American employees have a special value of being on site in person which is a service Russians and Filipinos can't provide.
troels 11y ago
I understand your frustration, but you dug that hole for your self. If you want $15/h, tell the client that. Or give a quote. When you just leave it to them, of course they will low ball you.
6d0debc071 11y ago
People are going to try their luck in negotiations. That's what they do. "Would $15 be fair to you for this category?" Counter-offer with something that you think reflects the value you're going to provide. Will she take it? Maybe yes, maybe no - you get idiots in every line of work. If she doesn't take it, and you're dealing honestly, it's her loss. At the end of the day though, you did let her open. That's kinda on you.
- hdra 11y ago
  I'm a bit confused on that part though, the offer says $15/hour, why did the author write as if the the offer was $3/hour? Isn't that the pay for manual data entry?
  - 6d0debc071 11y ago
    The price that she quoted him was $15. It's not clear that that was $15 an hour, or whether it was $15 for the entire job (regardless of how long it might take.) Considering that the writer questioned whether she thought it would only take him one hour to complete the task, that would be the way that I would be inclined to interpret the way it was taken (if not necessarily the way it was meant): Five hours work at three dollars an hour.
d--b 11y ago
this is a post about Upwork, change the title back...
norbytess2 11y ago
The hell, the title of the blog does not even relates to the story he had. And that story, is just part of many stories of freelancing as ups and downs. Why would you ask your Client about the rate if your not ready to hear low ballers deal. Its a competition of doing the job, but that doesn't mean you have to low your price to get the deal. You may do the task for about an hour only but they have to know that you spend hundred of hours to get that done right away.
mimo84 11y ago
I used to get contracts through oDesk/UpWork as well ( https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~015eaccf9967b4f9f4 https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~015eaccf9967b4f9f4 ) However the quality of the jobs I can apply for are a continuously going backwards, even if the quality I am able to deliver is really high compared to many other freelancer on the platform. This is why I almost do not use UpWork to do my freelancing anymore.
unusximmortalis 11y ago
Well, like one of my friends is saying "friendly speaking" I think he took the right decision :)
zer0defex 11y ago
"I studied CS.." You asked someone who obviously has no clue what it takes to actually DO the work to value your work. Hence the response you got was someone thinking... "damn.. how hard is it to write a crawler, I can think that through in my head, step by step, easy as pie." You learned a great lesson - value must be shown and substantiated, clearly and succinctly. People outside of your head have no idea the effort it took you to understand and do what you do. You're putting the onus on them to recognize the effort when it's YOUR responsibility to convey and stand by exactly that. As you deal with more senior and exec management, you'll come to find that playing dumb is quite often a finely honed skill that preys upon situations exactly like this... which left unchecked, is setting yourself up for a sudden realization down the road you're killing yourself to deliver on a silly deadline at well below your normal rate. Step back and breathe this lesson in, it's so much more to your benefit than simply defaulting to indignance.
kyriakos 11y ago
Quit my job 2 years ago and went freelance. I earn just a bit more than before but I have way less stress and quality of life improved. All my clients are contacts I gathered over the years, never had to look for a client online. My advice is, before you quit make sure you are networked enough to pull it off on your own. Maybe it's a good idea to plan spending the last couple of months at your regular job arranging your first freelance gig before quitting.
- rnprince 11y ago
  It's awesome to hear that you're doing well doing freelance work. Do you have any tips for how to find clients, especially the first ones when you can't get them through existing ones?
lenomad 11y ago
It takes some effort to find jobs where clients are willing to pay a premium for quality. I've used Upwork before - if you are experienced enough, you can easily filter the client by a combination of amount spent, average hourly rate paid, prior feedback by contractors, feedback given to contractors and their estimate price (or expertise) for the project. Apply/respond only if the client matches your filter. But as others have mentioned here, it is cut-throat competition - you have to be patient and very choosy.
csomar 11y ago
The next part is to set the price for the job. Usually I would say: Ok, data scrape will cost you $75. That's still ridiculously low by any measure. I wouldn't take you seriously at that price point. Because, here is why: I was charging that much 5 or 6 years ago. How about $7,500 for manual data scraping? On a related note. A friend of mine asked the other day if I can develop for him a GPS/Google maps solution that would take 6 months to develop for a serious Full-Stack developer. He works on a multi-billion dollar company but he wants the solution for himself to show off his productivity to his bosses. He wants it on a "$50" budget. I'm guessing you have fallen at the same scenario where the lady is paying it from her pocket instead of big corp bank account.
- developer1 11y ago
  I clicked through the the article, verified that the title was the same as HN, read the early line "Couple days ago some R.D. from United States contacted me. She wanted to do website scrape.". I stopped reading. Clickbait, ignorant of real freelance work, thinks being contacted about a pathetic scraping job means freelance is worthless? Give me a break. Become a real developer who can find real clients worth the effort, and freelance is 100% viable. How the hell is this getting any traction? Puh-please.
  - tagfolder 11y ago
    Hi real developer. Please give me advice how to become real python developer. I just started to learn python from scratch, I've developed my first django website ( http://review.food-singapore.com/ http://review.food-singapore.com/ ). I have developed many scripts/scrapers (but seems that's just pathetic) And now when I'm trying to apply any full time python job, almost all require link to github/some project which I don't have. How to get any real python position?
    - eru 11y ago
      I'm not developer1, but I'm happy to give you some pointers. My email address is in my profile. Why not put your scripts and scrapers on github?
SixSigma 11y ago
I tried my hand on vworker.com I got a great reputation (top 100) but when I added up I had made about $2 an hour overall, competing head to head with third worlders is not easy.
Udo 11y ago
I've been working as a freelancer for a bit more than a year now and let me offer a counter perspective. This article is a report from the absolute bottom. Part of the problem is the clientele: data scraping jobs are the shadiest, worst-paid jobs you can take on as a programmer. Also, offering the client to pay what they think is fair is a monumentally bad idea. The bigger problem is the perception of value. I regularly get requests for doing insane amounts of work (usually it involves cloning a multi-million dollar site or app) for less than I charge for a single day. There are "idea people" out there, who think the goal to success is paying someone 300 bucks to implement a clone of the Android app store. It's a real example by the way. I mainly get my work through the Who Is Hiring thread on HN, and although the overall client quality has been high, it's unavoidable that over half of all requests are absolute bogus. I suspect I'm not the only one having this experience. Now, these inquiries can be effortlessly ignored (I usually do answer them back with or without a short statement why I'm not taking the job) - however, if you're just scraping by, these "gigs" can totally demoralize you. To an average person, programming is not a valuable thing, and they do not view it as skilled labour. This has been the case for as long as I can remember. After high school, twenty years ago, a friend and I got into freelancing. A lot of inquiries were pretty much the same as they are now. My friend used to say we should rebrand ourselves as the Web Sherpas, named after the local people who often get hired for grating or dangerous work on behalf of tourists yet receive little compensation for it. To the freelancer just starting out I say: don't get suckered into these kinds of debates, be friendly but firm in rejecting malicious "job offers". Holding out until the right client comes along can be tough, and you're going to need a financial buffer to do this. But it's definitely the only way to go. People taking $15/hour data scraping jobs are part of the problem because they help distort the value perception of our profession (plus they help making the internet a worse place). Don't be that person.
- WhitneyLand 11y ago
  It looks like most of the jobs on HN are full time gigs. Are you pinging them to ask about freelance work?
  - mrfusion 11y ago
Uptrenda 11y ago
Upwork is basically where businesses and entrepreneurs go to outsource work to people living in countries with a lower cost of living. It's a place that's excellent for startups who know how to extract maximum value from foreign workers (I've seen people making upwards of 10,000+% profit from doing this which is honestly crazy) but terrible for the workers themselves. Well ... at least in some instances. As far as I can tell: most of the jobs on offer at Upwork can be done by complete amateurs but that isn't necessarily the quality you can expect. They have some pretty amazing virtual assistants and not everyone there does mediocre work. Just don't expect to earn a Western wage there without substantial effort (there are US companies who hire in staff as needed but these jobs are like drops of water in the desert.)
- brzd 11y ago
  Can you tell us more about these startups?
singingfish 11y ago
back in the day when I was doing scraping competing with mailhouse rates, I would guess how much the mailhouse would cost and quote half. Worked well for all concerned.
gizi 11y ago
I used to do jobs at elance.com and peopleperhour.com but I have not accepted a single invitation in almost 3 years. I keep receiving them, sometimes 10 times in a single week. Prospective clients from these sites nowadays get 10 seconds to convince me that they are not wallowing in bullshit, and up till now they have all failed the test. So, there's nothing wrong with these sites, but you will indeed be better off if you save your time for more interesting people.
armabiz 11y ago
This is just one of those examples where experienced freelancer will see flag "avoid!" for such kind of clients. The truth is that places like odesk/up work/anything is just big market. There are clients willing to hire low-rate developers and micro-manage them, but at the same time there are clients who want to hire top talents from the marketplace to deal with complex tasks and get really top solutions. Somehow I could find really interesting work in high-load startups with 4M visits/m, OpenSource or even Y-combinator startups with good culture. To be clear, during ~10 years of experience I was at both sides of barricades: hiring developers/designers/marketeers and being software developer/freelancer myself. So it's just experience grew into skill when you had all that shit like non-paying/rude/time wasting clients and feel how to avoid that.
stefantalpalaru 11y ago
> Even my profile states $15 per hour Don't do that. I started with $40/h, raised it to $50/h and still consider it low. I also avoid fixed price projects and I'd rather wait for good jobs rather than work for peanuts. There's enough open source work to keep me active when the freelancing market is in a lull.
negamax 11y ago
I am Indian and taken back by your comment about Indians/Filipinos. I worked as a freelancer on oDesk; fulltime; around five years ago for more than a year. It was great. I was charging far higher than $15/hr Probably you should bid for better jobs than scraping websites. I assure you, you be undercutting many Indians/Filipinos by your rate..
vbezhenar 11y ago
I have similar experience. I tried to bid to some projects there, but it's just seems to impossible. Every project got 50-100 bids and my bid is just lost. And, as I'm not going to work for free ($20/hr currently), probably my price and lack of reputation makes it impossible to win any project. I like the idea of this site, but everyone undercuts so much. I live in a poor country, but even there I can make more on a full-time job. It seems for me that freelancing is really hard. Much harder than work on local site.
sqldba 11y ago
I'm not familiar with upwork but I've been surprised looking at other freelancing sites and seeing the range of salaries. It went from $15/hr - $40/hr - $100/hr. But what surprised me was the mix of people in each range; including Microsoft MVPs in the middle and idiots at both other ends. For reference; $40/hr is about a low-end full-time salary and $120-$150 is what would get you someone hopefully decent from an agency. So pretty much everyone was undercutting what I think was a reasonable amount to request for contract work.
altern8 11y ago
I've been working as a freelancer for about 10 years, getting clients from word-of-mouth, making about 2-4 times what people make here working 4-6 hours/day. It all depends if you can sell yourself.
- Beltiras 11y ago
  He's not opposing freelance work, he's opposing using odesk/upwork to get contracts.
Beltiras 11y ago
The client side of the equation may be bad but the profile building side is excellent.
spectrum1234 11y ago
Who is upvoting this garbage. Come on hacker news!
patio11 11y ago
If you can write a scraper which performs against any real world data, your new rate is $100 per hour [+]. Your first month you spend 140 hours of pounding the virtual pavement looking for clients outside of the markets for lemons that are the freelancing sites. You spend 20 hours on delivery. Now you have the same $2k that you'd have if you killed yourself working on PayPeanutsGetMonkeys.com and you have the nascent beginnings of an actual freelancing business -- a pipeline, people who are interested in working with you but might not have a project at the moment, a happy client who you can do additional work for and solicit for introductions to peers, etc. Three months later you're at 70% utilization and you start working up your rates. And yes, this works from the Philippines almost exactly as well as it works from Gifu. There a mere one hour off each other and there is no social advantage that the Japanese engineering community gives you that you cannot trivially duplicate from any cafe in southeast Asia with reliable Internet. [ + ] Journeyman rates for programming work, trivially paid by a variety of businesses across the first world capable of hiring professionals. This is far under the going rate for people whose primary skill is writing concisely threatening letters, for example.
- odonnellryan 11y ago
  UpWork has really worked out great for me. Sure there are people who want you to either work for free (require some code up front or as a test), or want you to work for low wages (usually it is around a tenth of what I'd normally charge) but these aren't problems: just politely inform them that you cannot do the work. No big deal! I've gotten good connections on UpWork that have brought in real value for us.
- 7Figures2Commas 11y ago
  If you can write a scraper which performs against any real world data, chances are you're not in the business of selling yourself by the hour. The type of scraping projects you see on the freelancing sites typically require minimal skill and can be completed with off-the-shelf tools, many of which are open source. Folks doing these kinds of projects are not realistically going to build a book of business filled with clients paying $100/hour. You can find decent freelancers in the United States charging less who are capable of doing more sophisticated work.
Buzdyk_Gregory 11y ago
Some guy doesn't have marketing/coding skills and complains about it instead of thinking constructively. What all the fuss is about?
Buzdyk_Gregory 11y ago
Some guy doesn't have marketing/coding skills and complains about it instead of thinking constructively. What all the fuss is about?
ahallock 11y ago
The author gives one bad example and extrapolates that to all of freelance. I've found plenty of well-paying gigs on these sites. As with most things in life, it takes hard work and lots of failure to get there. It's really that simple. The author shouldn't have pursued that job from the beginning. Recognize a loser and move on.
br_smartass 11y ago
I've worked remotely for some time(I'm from Brazil) and gave it up, it's not worth it. I burned out on one of the jobs. The sad truth is that the "remote worker dream"(for ppl not in the 1st World) is a lie, most good companies won't risk putting relevant work for remote workers to do and if they do it'll be because they're clueless or because they need REALLY CHEAP work. It's a suckers game, even if you win, you're losing. I'm now working locally and I started making more than I did with the precious dollars at the first post-remote job and I also made friends, got more challenged, learned and growed more and basically my life became much more satisfying and with much more positive possibilities. My life improved immensely in everything, sane hours, respectful relations, less anxiety.. The effects really are innumerable. In lame remote working there is a very clear power assymmetry going on, you're there because dollars are worth more than your currency and you'll accept subpar work and subpar pay because maybe it will pay off in the currency arbitrage, the employer knows that, trusts in your naive belief that there's gonna be quality work to do as you saw at the blogs, HN and 37signals-like stuff and he has and endless supply of willing(but maybe not capable) people, the hour-pay will always be at the lowest possible. Both sides of it have multiple reasons to not trust each other and will try to take the most value out of the transaction, and even when there's good faith on both ends there are still way too many pitfalls(e.g.: cultural stuff, deep prejudices) and the chance of success will remain low, then the good ones leave and the crap stays, it's toxic. If you're a good developer I think it's a waste of your life to be in this game, I'd only take it for "youre-gonna-retire-early/take-6-month-vacations" money(plus sane hours, weekends, holydays, relevant work, no micromanaging and other basic dignity stuff), absent that, I recommend exploring your local possibilities, even if it means learning to live with your country standards(or, middle class standard, since you're an IT worker), give up the illusion.
lectrick 11y ago
I'm glad that Upwork is allowing first world folks to pay second and third world folks to earn great income (for them) at doing remote IT work, but I don't see Upwork as a way for unfairly-economically-isolated first-worlders to earn a living.
jdalton 11y ago
(Context: I'm a top rated freelancer on UpWork that's been using the platform for a year) Ivan, one of the main reasons you're encountering those types of clients is that your hourly rate is competitive with other freelancers in other parts of the world that will do the same job for $3/hr. Here's my advise for you: 1) Increase your rate to around $50/hr. Trust me there are plenty of clients that are willing to pay higher rates. 2) Don't bid on every project that comes along. Only focus on projects that you really want to be a part of. 3) If you don't have a portfolio then build some demo sites where you can showcase your work. Given that you like building scrapers you should be a simple web service that does exactly that. 4) Only take hourly jobs OR fixed rate jobs where the client provides a clear, documented scope document that you both can agree to. 5) Don't be afraid to say no. The biggest issue with freelancers in other parts of the world is that they say yes to every single thing....don't be that guy. Clients will respect you more for it. 6) Don't hand the source code over until you have been paid. 7) Stand your ground anytime a client challenges your rate. You're a professional and not a cheap commodity.

125 points by tagfolder 11y ago

The trick is to avoid looking for work on platforms like oDesk (now Upwork) where the world is underbidding you. It’s a positioning and deal flow issue. Ideally you want clients to refer you on to other clients. And maybe you should call yourself a contractor, agency, solo developer—something like that—instead of a “freelancer.” So it’s possible to do well if you quit your job and work as a freelancer, but you need to spend time handling the business side of things: marketing (e.g. social media presence, open source contributions, writing articles, attending events) and sales (getting referrals, closing leads, etc.)

tagfolder 11y ago
You're right.
ahallock 11y ago
Are you speaking from experience? I've found plenty of great gigs on these freelancing sites. You just have to dig a bit and know what the "crap" jobs are, so you can avoid them altogether. The world is not underbidding you. Most times, you negotiate directly with the client and the bids are just a formality.
- firasd 11y ago
  Fair point; although I’ve done a fair amount of work as an external developer I haven’t actually tried to get work on those sites.

chejazi 11y ago

Is there much of a difference between freelancing and software contracting? I've met a handful people who are part of a company (read: agency) of 1-5 and making really good money ($60/hr+). But they're also in the Bay Area.

alrs 11y ago
$60/hr is not particularly good money in the Bay Area.
- zuck9 11y ago
  Source? What is ideal for Bay Area? Most startups I see have salaries around ~$80k (~$32/hr for 48hr week or ~$40/hr for 40hr week)
  - iopq 11y ago
    You realize that the $80,000 includes completely free health care (otherwise $300 a month minimum, if not more if they offer a good plan) with no employee contribution, free dental ($20 a month?), $300 towards vision a year, minimal life insurance maybe, free meals at the office, etc. Not to mention that you get sick pay, holiday pay, retirement account contributions, etc. Including the benefits it easily adds up to $100,000 a year of benefits or more depending on how good the benefits are Besides, if it's not a start-up you're easily making $130,000+ if you have a lot of experience
    - wlievens 11y ago
      Are there any payroll taxes on top of that salary number? Where I live (Belgium) there's a 33% (probably being lowered to 25% soon) social security tax paid by the employer.
      - tsotha 11y ago
        In the US your employer pays around 15% of your salary as tax. If you're not working for someone else that's an extra 15.3% you have to pay - it's called "self employment tax".
        zrail 11y ago
        It's not an extra 15%. The total amount of Social Security and Medicare taxes is 15.4%, with the employer paying half and the employee paying the other half. When you're self-employed, you pay both halves. And the employer half is always deductible on your federal income tax, which reduces the sting a little.

humble_dev 11y ago

So people should not become freelancers, based on your single bad experience, make sense. I was expecting some data backing up your statement or at least proper story. tl;dr - This guy is freelancer and few days ago he was contacted by stupid client who thought he will work almost for free.

tagfolder 11y ago
I was just telling about my experience working on odesk (read biggest freelance website). This is not first case of stupid client and I'm not first day there. What kind of backup? Link to my profile? Ok will update post now.
- zerr 11y ago
  Sergey, one advice - please do NOT work for $15/hr. All it takes to charge $XXX/hr (or $8X-$9X/hr ) is just to ask for it. Seriously. And keep away from odesk/upwork/etc.. race to the bottom sites. Search and contact prospective clients yourself - as if you'd looking for standard job. No middle-man is needed here.
  - tagfolder 11y ago
    Thanks for the advice. Actually I already started to search full time job. Enough odesk freelancing for me. :)

drinchev 11y ago

This is all wrong. Click-bait title. Some thoughts by a discouraged person in a globalised world and a general conclusion that doesn't make any sense if you read the article. Maybe the OP shouldn't look for projects in oDesk-type websites. I don't do that and I'm really happy working as a freelancer. For anyone wondering how to find freelance projects. You should go and look for local clients, networking, contact companies that look for developers and try to persuade them that they can count on you too, etc. It's a really, really, really big sea of possibilities nowadays for developers.

crdoconnor 11y ago
>Maybe the OP shouldn't look for projects in oDesk-type websites. Yeah, definitely not. Bottom feeders all the way.
- ahallock 11y ago
  Not true at all. High-profile startups do post jobs there. You can find good clients--it just takes some digging, negotiation, and patience.
_yosefk 11y ago
The page's actual title is "...become Upwork freelancer", which is fairly specific and not click-baity IMO. (It looks like the HN title is the same now, changed from just "become a freelancer.")
- tagfolder 11y ago
  yes, just updated title, because my post about upwork experience, not freelance in general, as many people pointed in comments.
anonmeow 11y ago
>It's a really, really, really big sea of possibilities nowadays for developers. If you are in the silicon valley or at least in some 1st world country - sure, you have a lot of possibilities and ridiculously high pay. The sad truth is that exactly same skillset can be valued 10x less or 10x more depending on your location.

erbdex 11y ago

What was that "Indian/Fillipino guy/girl" part about. Do you thing we don't code? Or is incompetence a function of race in your mind? :(

Asbostos 11y ago
That person was doing manual copy and paste. So yes, they didn't code.
tagfolder 11y ago
you missed part "without any programming skills". I know there are good coders from those countries, I was talking about those who underbidding and work for $1 per hour doing manual/low quality work
norbytess2 11y ago
I rather you paste the entire phrase. On a first glance, it captures right away my attention. But yeah dude he said "for some" so I just skip that and continue reading.
tajen 11y ago
I have solidarity with your point of view. However, I'm French and I once lived in Australia for 3 years. And I can tell you that their programmers know what they're doing, better, on a massive scale, than the French IT sector. They know when to align behind the boss (which is surprising for a French guy) but still know how to stir internal debate, they have understandings of marketing and economics, they master several languages each, they output software faster with better quality. We get paid twice more in Australia than France, and the job requirement was twice higher. It's not even personal skills, it's sometimes how we act in teams. We need to be humble, fellow Indian/Fillipino guy/girl. Yet they hired me, because as Agile as they are, they don't know anything about CMMi-based corporations ;)
sandGorgon 11y ago
SandGorgon's Law of Outsourcing Analogies [1] - "As an online discussion about PROGRAMMING grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving outsourcing or Indians approaches 1, if Godwin’s law has not already been satisfied" http://www.lambdacurry.com/2010/07/sandgorgons-law-of-outsourcing-analogies/ http://www.lambdacurry.com/2010/07/sandgorgons-law-of-outsou...

Asbostos 11y ago

Freelancing in IT is kind of a fantastic global phenomenon really. It allows foreigners like this guy to work "in" another country without being blocked by the artificial market distortion of immigration restrictions. Perhaps there are plenty of freelancers willing to make a web scraper for $15. In that case, this guy's got to find what advantages he has over them so he can compete. Just because American employees get paid more doesn't mean everybody else doing the same type of work also deserves to be paid more if the market decides not to. American employees have a special value of being on site in person which is a service Russians and Filipinos can't provide.

troels 11y ago

I understand your frustration, but you dug that hole for your self. If you want $15/h, tell the client that. Or give a quote. When you just leave it to them, of course they will low ball you.

6d0debc071 11y ago

People are going to try their luck in negotiations. That's what they do. "Would $15 be fair to you for this category?" Counter-offer with something that you think reflects the value you're going to provide. Will she take it? Maybe yes, maybe no - you get idiots in every line of work. If she doesn't take it, and you're dealing honestly, it's her loss. At the end of the day though, you did let her open. That's kinda on you.

hdra 11y ago
I'm a bit confused on that part though, the offer says $15/hour, why did the author write as if the the offer was $3/hour? Isn't that the pay for manual data entry?
- 6d0debc071 11y ago
  The price that she quoted him was $15. It's not clear that that was $15 an hour, or whether it was $15 for the entire job (regardless of how long it might take.) Considering that the writer questioned whether she thought it would only take him one hour to complete the task, that would be the way that I would be inclined to interpret the way it was taken (if not necessarily the way it was meant): Five hours work at three dollars an hour.

d--b 11y ago

this is a post about Upwork, change the title back...

norbytess2 11y ago

The hell, the title of the blog does not even relates to the story he had. And that story, is just part of many stories of freelancing as ups and downs. Why would you ask your Client about the rate if your not ready to hear low ballers deal. Its a competition of doing the job, but that doesn't mean you have to low your price to get the deal. You may do the task for about an hour only but they have to know that you spend hundred of hours to get that done right away.

mimo84 11y ago

I used to get contracts through oDesk/UpWork as well ( https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~015eaccf9967b4f9f4 https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~015eaccf9967b4f9f4 ) However the quality of the jobs I can apply for are a continuously going backwards, even if the quality I am able to deliver is really high compared to many other freelancer on the platform. This is why I almost do not use UpWork to do my freelancing anymore.

unusximmortalis 11y ago

Well, like one of my friends is saying "friendly speaking" I think he took the right decision :)

zer0defex 11y ago

"I studied CS.." You asked someone who obviously has no clue what it takes to actually DO the work to value your work. Hence the response you got was someone thinking... "damn.. how hard is it to write a crawler, I can think that through in my head, step by step, easy as pie." You learned a great lesson - value must be shown and substantiated, clearly and succinctly. People outside of your head have no idea the effort it took you to understand and do what you do. You're putting the onus on them to recognize the effort when it's YOUR responsibility to convey and stand by exactly that. As you deal with more senior and exec management, you'll come to find that playing dumb is quite often a finely honed skill that preys upon situations exactly like this... which left unchecked, is setting yourself up for a sudden realization down the road you're killing yourself to deliver on a silly deadline at well below your normal rate. Step back and breathe this lesson in, it's so much more to your benefit than simply defaulting to indignance.

kyriakos 11y ago

Quit my job 2 years ago and went freelance. I earn just a bit more than before but I have way less stress and quality of life improved. All my clients are contacts I gathered over the years, never had to look for a client online. My advice is, before you quit make sure you are networked enough to pull it off on your own. Maybe it's a good idea to plan spending the last couple of months at your regular job arranging your first freelance gig before quitting.

rnprince 11y ago
It's awesome to hear that you're doing well doing freelance work. Do you have any tips for how to find clients, especially the first ones when you can't get them through existing ones?

lenomad 11y ago

It takes some effort to find jobs where clients are willing to pay a premium for quality. I've used Upwork before - if you are experienced enough, you can easily filter the client by a combination of amount spent, average hourly rate paid, prior feedback by contractors, feedback given to contractors and their estimate price (or expertise) for the project. Apply/respond only if the client matches your filter. But as others have mentioned here, it is cut-throat competition - you have to be patient and very choosy.

csomar 11y ago

The next part is to set the price for the job. Usually I would say: Ok, data scrape will cost you $75. That's still ridiculously low by any measure. I wouldn't take you seriously at that price point. Because, here is why: I was charging that much 5 or 6 years ago. How about $7,500 for manual data scraping? On a related note. A friend of mine asked the other day if I can develop for him a GPS/Google maps solution that would take 6 months to develop for a serious Full-Stack developer. He works on a multi-billion dollar company but he wants the solution for himself to show off his productivity to his bosses. He wants it on a "$50" budget. I'm guessing you have fallen at the same scenario where the lady is paying it from her pocket instead of big corp bank account.

developer1 11y ago
I clicked through the the article, verified that the title was the same as HN, read the early line "Couple days ago some R.D. from United States contacted me. She wanted to do website scrape.". I stopped reading. Clickbait, ignorant of real freelance work, thinks being contacted about a pathetic scraping job means freelance is worthless? Give me a break. Become a real developer who can find real clients worth the effort, and freelance is 100% viable. How the hell is this getting any traction? Puh-please.
- tagfolder 11y ago
  Hi real developer. Please give me advice how to become real python developer. I just started to learn python from scratch, I've developed my first django website ( http://review.food-singapore.com/ http://review.food-singapore.com/ ). I have developed many scripts/scrapers (but seems that's just pathetic) And now when I'm trying to apply any full time python job, almost all require link to github/some project which I don't have. How to get any real python position?
  - eru 11y ago
    I'm not developer1, but I'm happy to give you some pointers. My email address is in my profile. Why not put your scripts and scrapers on github?

SixSigma 11y ago

I tried my hand on vworker.com I got a great reputation (top 100) but when I added up I had made about $2 an hour overall, competing head to head with third worlders is not easy.

Udo 11y ago

I've been working as a freelancer for a bit more than a year now and let me offer a counter perspective. This article is a report from the absolute bottom. Part of the problem is the clientele: data scraping jobs are the shadiest, worst-paid jobs you can take on as a programmer. Also, offering the client to pay what they think is fair is a monumentally bad idea. The bigger problem is the perception of value. I regularly get requests for doing insane amounts of work (usually it involves cloning a multi-million dollar site or app) for less than I charge for a single day. There are "idea people" out there, who think the goal to success is paying someone 300 bucks to implement a clone of the Android app store. It's a real example by the way. I mainly get my work through the Who Is Hiring thread on HN, and although the overall client quality has been high, it's unavoidable that over half of all requests are absolute bogus. I suspect I'm not the only one having this experience. Now, these inquiries can be effortlessly ignored (I usually do answer them back with or without a short statement why I'm not taking the job) - however, if you're just scraping by, these "gigs" can totally demoralize you. To an average person, programming is not a valuable thing, and they do not view it as skilled labour. This has been the case for as long as I can remember. After high school, twenty years ago, a friend and I got into freelancing. A lot of inquiries were pretty much the same as they are now. My friend used to say we should rebrand ourselves as the Web Sherpas, named after the local people who often get hired for grating or dangerous work on behalf of tourists yet receive little compensation for it. To the freelancer just starting out I say: don't get suckered into these kinds of debates, be friendly but firm in rejecting malicious "job offers". Holding out until the right client comes along can be tough, and you're going to need a financial buffer to do this. But it's definitely the only way to go. People taking $15/hour data scraping jobs are part of the problem because they help distort the value perception of our profession (plus they help making the internet a worse place). Don't be that person.

WhitneyLand 11y ago
It looks like most of the jobs on HN are full time gigs. Are you pinging them to ask about freelance work?
- mrfusion 11y ago

Uptrenda 11y ago

Upwork is basically where businesses and entrepreneurs go to outsource work to people living in countries with a lower cost of living. It's a place that's excellent for startups who know how to extract maximum value from foreign workers (I've seen people making upwards of 10,000+% profit from doing this which is honestly crazy) but terrible for the workers themselves. Well ... at least in some instances. As far as I can tell: most of the jobs on offer at Upwork can be done by complete amateurs but that isn't necessarily the quality you can expect. They have some pretty amazing virtual assistants and not everyone there does mediocre work. Just don't expect to earn a Western wage there without substantial effort (there are US companies who hire in staff as needed but these jobs are like drops of water in the desert.)

brzd 11y ago
Can you tell us more about these startups?

singingfish 11y ago

back in the day when I was doing scraping competing with mailhouse rates, I would guess how much the mailhouse would cost and quote half. Worked well for all concerned.

gizi 11y ago

I used to do jobs at elance.com and peopleperhour.com but I have not accepted a single invitation in almost 3 years. I keep receiving them, sometimes 10 times in a single week. Prospective clients from these sites nowadays get 10 seconds to convince me that they are not wallowing in bullshit, and up till now they have all failed the test. So, there's nothing wrong with these sites, but you will indeed be better off if you save your time for more interesting people.

armabiz 11y ago

This is just one of those examples where experienced freelancer will see flag "avoid!" for such kind of clients. The truth is that places like odesk/up work/anything is just big market. There are clients willing to hire low-rate developers and micro-manage them, but at the same time there are clients who want to hire top talents from the marketplace to deal with complex tasks and get really top solutions. Somehow I could find really interesting work in high-load startups with 4M visits/m, OpenSource or even Y-combinator startups with good culture. To be clear, during ~10 years of experience I was at both sides of barricades: hiring developers/designers/marketeers and being software developer/freelancer myself. So it's just experience grew into skill when you had all that shit like non-paying/rude/time wasting clients and feel how to avoid that.

stefantalpalaru 11y ago

> Even my profile states $15 per hour Don't do that. I started with $40/h, raised it to $50/h and still consider it low. I also avoid fixed price projects and I'd rather wait for good jobs rather than work for peanuts. There's enough open source work to keep me active when the freelancing market is in a lull.

negamax 11y ago

I am Indian and taken back by your comment about Indians/Filipinos. I worked as a freelancer on oDesk; fulltime; around five years ago for more than a year. It was great. I was charging far higher than $15/hr Probably you should bid for better jobs than scraping websites. I assure you, you be undercutting many Indians/Filipinos by your rate..

vbezhenar 11y ago

I have similar experience. I tried to bid to some projects there, but it's just seems to impossible. Every project got 50-100 bids and my bid is just lost. And, as I'm not going to work for free ($20/hr currently), probably my price and lack of reputation makes it impossible to win any project. I like the idea of this site, but everyone undercuts so much. I live in a poor country, but even there I can make more on a full-time job. It seems for me that freelancing is really hard. Much harder than work on local site.

sqldba 11y ago

I'm not familiar with upwork but I've been surprised looking at other freelancing sites and seeing the range of salaries. It went from $15/hr - $40/hr - $100/hr. But what surprised me was the mix of people in each range; including Microsoft MVPs in the middle and idiots at both other ends. For reference; $40/hr is about a low-end full-time salary and $120-$150 is what would get you someone hopefully decent from an agency. So pretty much everyone was undercutting what I think was a reasonable amount to request for contract work.

altern8 11y ago

I've been working as a freelancer for about 10 years, getting clients from word-of-mouth, making about 2-4 times what people make here working 4-6 hours/day. It all depends if you can sell yourself.

Beltiras 11y ago
He's not opposing freelance work, he's opposing using odesk/upwork to get contracts.

Beltiras 11y ago

The client side of the equation may be bad but the profile building side is excellent.

spectrum1234 11y ago

Who is upvoting this garbage. Come on hacker news!

patio11 11y ago

If you can write a scraper which performs against any real world data, your new rate is $100 per hour [+]. Your first month you spend 140 hours of pounding the virtual pavement looking for clients outside of the markets for lemons that are the freelancing sites. You spend 20 hours on delivery. Now you have the same $2k that you'd have if you killed yourself working on PayPeanutsGetMonkeys.com and you have the nascent beginnings of an actual freelancing business -- a pipeline, people who are interested in working with you but might not have a project at the moment, a happy client who you can do additional work for and solicit for introductions to peers, etc. Three months later you're at 70% utilization and you start working up your rates. And yes, this works from the Philippines almost exactly as well as it works from Gifu. There a mere one hour off each other and there is no social advantage that the Japanese engineering community gives you that you cannot trivially duplicate from any cafe in southeast Asia with reliable Internet. [ + ] Journeyman rates for programming work, trivially paid by a variety of businesses across the first world capable of hiring professionals. This is far under the going rate for people whose primary skill is writing concisely threatening letters, for example.

odonnellryan 11y ago
UpWork has really worked out great for me. Sure there are people who want you to either work for free (require some code up front or as a test), or want you to work for low wages (usually it is around a tenth of what I'd normally charge) but these aren't problems: just politely inform them that you cannot do the work. No big deal! I've gotten good connections on UpWork that have brought in real value for us.
7Figures2Commas 11y ago
If you can write a scraper which performs against any real world data, chances are you're not in the business of selling yourself by the hour. The type of scraping projects you see on the freelancing sites typically require minimal skill and can be completed with off-the-shelf tools, many of which are open source. Folks doing these kinds of projects are not realistically going to build a book of business filled with clients paying $100/hour. You can find decent freelancers in the United States charging less who are capable of doing more sophisticated work.

Buzdyk_Gregory 11y ago

Some guy doesn't have marketing/coding skills and complains about it instead of thinking constructively. What all the fuss is about?

Buzdyk_Gregory 11y ago

Some guy doesn't have marketing/coding skills and complains about it instead of thinking constructively. What all the fuss is about?

ahallock 11y ago

The author gives one bad example and extrapolates that to all of freelance. I've found plenty of well-paying gigs on these sites. As with most things in life, it takes hard work and lots of failure to get there. It's really that simple. The author shouldn't have pursued that job from the beginning. Recognize a loser and move on.

br_smartass 11y ago

I've worked remotely for some time(I'm from Brazil) and gave it up, it's not worth it. I burned out on one of the jobs. The sad truth is that the "remote worker dream"(for ppl not in the 1st World) is a lie, most good companies won't risk putting relevant work for remote workers to do and if they do it'll be because they're clueless or because they need REALLY CHEAP work. It's a suckers game, even if you win, you're losing. I'm now working locally and I started making more than I did with the precious dollars at the first post-remote job and I also made friends, got more challenged, learned and growed more and basically my life became much more satisfying and with much more positive possibilities. My life improved immensely in everything, sane hours, respectful relations, less anxiety.. The effects really are innumerable. In lame remote working there is a very clear power assymmetry going on, you're there because dollars are worth more than your currency and you'll accept subpar work and subpar pay because maybe it will pay off in the currency arbitrage, the employer knows that, trusts in your naive belief that there's gonna be quality work to do as you saw at the blogs, HN and 37signals-like stuff and he has and endless supply of willing(but maybe not capable) people, the hour-pay will always be at the lowest possible. Both sides of it have multiple reasons to not trust each other and will try to take the most value out of the transaction, and even when there's good faith on both ends there are still way too many pitfalls(e.g.: cultural stuff, deep prejudices) and the chance of success will remain low, then the good ones leave and the crap stays, it's toxic. If you're a good developer I think it's a waste of your life to be in this game, I'd only take it for "youre-gonna-retire-early/take-6-month-vacations" money(plus sane hours, weekends, holydays, relevant work, no micromanaging and other basic dignity stuff), absent that, I recommend exploring your local possibilities, even if it means learning to live with your country standards(or, middle class standard, since you're an IT worker), give up the illusion.

lectrick 11y ago

I'm glad that Upwork is allowing first world folks to pay second and third world folks to earn great income (for them) at doing remote IT work, but I don't see Upwork as a way for unfairly-economically-isolated first-worlders to earn a living.

jdalton 11y ago

(Context: I'm a top rated freelancer on UpWork that's been using the platform for a year) Ivan, one of the main reasons you're encountering those types of clients is that your hourly rate is competitive with other freelancers in other parts of the world that will do the same job for $3/hr. Here's my advise for you: 1) Increase your rate to around $50/hr. Trust me there are plenty of clients that are willing to pay higher rates. 2) Don't bid on every project that comes along. Only focus on projects that you really want to be a part of. 3) If you don't have a portfolio then build some demo sites where you can showcase your work. Given that you like building scrapers you should be a simple web service that does exactly that. 4) Only take hourly jobs OR fixed rate jobs where the client provides a clear, documented scope document that you both can agree to. 5) Don't be afraid to say no. The biggest issue with freelancers in other parts of the world is that they say yes to every single thing....don't be that guy. Clients will respect you more for it. 6) Don't hand the source code over until you have been paid. 7) Stand your ground anytime a client challenges your rate. You're a professional and not a cheap commodity.