13 ms·

Data scientists shouldn't use Upwork

240 points by data4lyfe 7y ago

buboard 7y ago
Site down, we 'll never know why ...
- taurath 7y ago
  Maybe the site was built by Upwork? ;) —-just a joke, I have nothing against them
  - Beltiras 7y ago
    After reading the article, you will.
bigpoppa 7y ago
The answer is clearly because you may end up with a broken website perpetually in a 500 error state.
phaemon 7y ago
Archive link: http://archive.is/Is2Uk http://archive.is/Is2Uk The title is "Why data scientists should never use Upwork"
chii 7y ago
what would be a way to start contracting if you have no existing network, no existing clients to get references?
- atlasunshrugged 7y ago
  I actually do think Upwork is a good way to start but you could 1) Build a network - go to product meetups (assuming you're a dev) 2) Contact agencies near you and see if they have contract projects you can hop on 3) Use other sites - Toptal, Freelancer, Remote, Gigster, etc.
- rurp 7y ago
  I found work through Upwork when I was starting out as a dev and actually had a pretty good experience. Just like on the hiring side, there are a lot of bad clients you need to filter through but there are plenty of reasonable people looking to hire on the site. It did make me nervous having so much of my income tied to Upwork and there were a few things that seemed like minor red flags, but I didn't have any awful experiences with them. Someone with a few years of experience probably has better avenues to look at for work but it could be a good option if you're looking to get experience and build out a freelance network.
data4lyfe 7y ago
Here's the post on medium. https://medium.com/@jayfeng/why-no-one-should-never-use-upwork-a2da9c42769b https://medium.com/@jayfeng/why-no-one-should-never-use-upwo...
jgillich 7y ago
Archive link: https://archive.is/Is2Uk https://archive.is/Is2Uk
premieroncall 7y ago
There's also an older post about the same topic: https://hackernoon.com/why-you-should-never-use-upwork-ever-5c62848bdf46 https://hackernoon.com/why-you-should-never-use-upwork-ever-...
burlesona 7y ago
As a buyer I had a few good experiences finding contractors on Upwork. If “no one should ever use it,” does anyone have a good suggestion for a better place to find good freelance coders for small projects?
- sixstringtheory 7y ago
  HN has its own dedicated monthly listing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20325924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20325924 Also reach out to your network... I belong to several slack nodes that have channels just for contracts and leads are dropped in there pretty regularly.
- christianmm 7y ago
  Absolutely do not use freelancer.com either. They charged my CC $54 when I closed my account. Shady site.
- repomies68 7y ago
  I think you can find good freelancers everywhere... And also bad ones. Whether upwork is good or not depends on your viewpoint. I think it is just a marketplace like everything else. I personally believe bigger value lies in longer relationships, therefore places like upwork should be just a place to get started.
- atiff 7y ago
  I have used Turtle for 2 projects and had an exceptional experience with both. Very well vetted devs, excellent platform and framework for managing them, and human customer service at (currently underpriced IMO) $55/hr. The two apps I’ve used Turtle for: - React site for my business - Ongoing Node integration work at about 10/hr per week. https://www.turtle.ai https://www.turtle.ai
  - vlokshin 7y ago
    Thanks for mentioning Turtle! Really appreciate it. (1) Great talent, (2) great customers, and (3) an easy to follow process (platform) are critical for making freelancing work. UpWork typically misses at least 2/3.
surajs 7y ago
Elance was so much better
- burmer 7y ago
  Looks like upwork ate them AND oDesk
lucasgonze 7y ago
You can't be precious on Upwork. And there's a strong GIGO factor. What you have to do is churn a bunch of jobs/contractors until you get the one that really pays off. Don't let the hassles get to you, just keep turning the crank.
jp8585 7y ago
Long term upwork Data Scientist here. It seems he had a bad experience, that could have happened on any other place / platform. There are always horror stories about how platforms deal with conflicts (think PayPal, Stripe, Uber...) Out of >30 contracts I had, only 1 resulted in a dispute, and it was decided in my favor. I do agree the whole monitoring thing is absurd and I generally don't take jobs from clients that demand hours to be logged through the monitoring app. If you want to see how the jungle looks like, please have a go at freelancer.com.
- usaphp 7y ago
  > I generally don't take jobs from clients that demand hours to be logged through the monitoring app Isn’t like 9/10 jobs there require you to use the monitoring?
  - jp8585 7y ago
    Not at all. Maybe for low paying jobs.
- kradroy 7y ago
  The monitoring app is a hoop I guess. I would hate it too because it's a form of control over the work. I once had a client who, at the negotiation of the contract, wanted me to work from an "office" (an in-laws quarters) for a specific set of hours each week. His desire for that was because he wanted to make sure he was getting his money's worth; that if I said I was charging him for 10 hours, I was spending 10 hours on the task. I told him that, along with other stipulations, would qualify me as an employee. He and his fiance/business partner insisted it didn't. That was troubling because his fiance was a lawyer. I declined to take the project.
- asdfman123 7y ago
  I'm working on a matchmaker service for a certain niche industry that will be completely free. Hopefully it will catch on. Down with Upwork.
datenhorst 7y ago
Upwork rules require you to have their desktop app installed and let yourself be filmed for the duration of the task? Holy s
- msadowski 7y ago
  UpWork doesn't do filming using your camera, only takes a picture every ~10 minutes. Also the picture taking is optional and can be disabled by client (Throughout 1 year working on UpWork I never had a project which required of me the camera bit). The screenshot taking is required for payment protection.
  - module0000 7y ago
    > UpWork doesn't do filming using your camera, only takes a picture every ~10 minutes. And how can I, the person being filmed, verify that?
    - fwip 7y ago
      Probably notice that your webcam light comes on only once every ten minutes, or that your network traffic is consistent with one picture every ten minutes. Isn't this site for nerds?
    - msadowski 7y ago
      You can see the work log online that contains all the screenshots and most probably camera shots too (never had to use it so I'm not 100% sure). I think the way to know that your camera is on is to look at the little LED next to your camera and hoping UpWork didn't find a way around it.
    - pkaye 7y ago
      Get a camera where the activity LED turns on when camera is active.
caiocaiocaio 7y ago
I freelanced on Upwork for a bit. It was all the worst aspects of having an abusive boss (the platform itself), and all of the worst aspects of freelancing (unpredictability, getting ripped off by shifty clients). "Creepiest shit ever" is a pretty accurate description of Upwork. If Upwork's attitudes and policies were described to me in the 90s, I would have said it was lame, unrealistic science fiction with an over-the-top villain. If anyone wants to do freelance work, I'd recommend marketing yourself directly to local businesses, print some business cards, schmooze. It's about as much work and stress as using Upwork, and you don't have a misanthropic middleman taking their cut.
- jammygit 7y ago
  Any tips for freelancers who are recent engineering grads? I have some portfolio items, but I still can’t claim more than 1 year experience
  - krn 7y ago
    > Any tips for freelancers who are recent engineering grads? If you have a relevant degree, why not to apply for a remote job position instead? That would help to build your CV, and allow to switch to contracting later on.
    - komali2 7y ago
      Stack overflow jobs board thing is the best place imo to find remote Dev positions. Harder for new grads. Angel list might be a place to find remote AND newbie friendly jobs.
      - polyperchon 7y ago
        Second AngelList for this purpose, though keep in mind the salary trade off to work remote for a new grad is likely gonna be considerable.
  - vkou 7y ago
    Spend a year working for a consulting company, to learn the ropes. If I were a business looking to have a freelancer build something for me, 'a fresh grad, with less than a year work experience, who has never done this sort of thing before' is not who I'd hire. I have 9 years experience, and if I were to to go into freelancing (The kind where you solve problems for businesses, as opposed to the kind where you're a 9-5 1099 contractor), the first thing I would do is to take a job at a consulting firm, and spend my time there learning. Figure out what works, and what really, really doesn't. That job is probably going to suck, but you'll have a much better idea of what to do, what your customers really hate about working with big firms, and your resume will look much better, when you can put down "I did the thing I want you to hire me for, in a consulting firm, for 18 months, I know how this works, and I can do it better."
rhema 7y ago
>Their rules state that you must have the Upwork Desktop App on you computer which installs some sort of video malware onto your laptop AND have your webcam visible and on at all times so that the customer success agent can audit that you looked like you were working through the webcam while staring at a screen. How is that not the creepiest shit ever? Compare this to the Upwork App's description https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/211064098-Log-Time-with-the-Desktop-App https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/211064098-Log-T... . It seems pretty reasonable. By default, it snaps a picture every 10 minutes. If you do not want to upload a snapshot, it removes the 10 minutes from your recorded hours. It captures info about how often you used keystrokes and clicked, but not what you typed or clicked. The benefit of using the app is instant approval and payment. On my reading, it looks like the author failed to take a 10 minute survey in 3 days, losing his work hours. That seems like a pretty reasonable ask that he failed on.
- hiccuphippo 7y ago
  Yeah no. No kind of spyware is reasonable.
- vangelis 7y ago
  You should never trade privacy for "security". This is some Commie bullshit.
msadowski 7y ago
I've been using UpWork for over a year now and never had a dispute so far. The author is right in saying that UpWork only guarantees payment when time tracking using their app. Where he is mistaken though is where he says that the app requires camera to be on at all times. There is such an option but personally I'd never go for a project like this. And yes, the app will take the screenshot of the stuff you are working on. I don't get why author's customer would launch a dispute over not completing a 10 minute survey. Given that it was an hourly project I bet there were issues with communication and perhaps the author should have double checked with the client before closing the job. UpWork is far from being flawless but for me it has been working quite ok.
- gloggy 7y ago
  Yeah, I've been working on Upwork for about 1.5 years now and it has been such a vast improvement over other freelancing sites - both in terms of the size and scope of the projects and in terms of the types of clients available. Not one of my hourly clients has ever insisted that I use the monitoring app; yet I do it anyway because then I don't underbill and the payments are guaranteed. In my mind, the screenshot every 10 minutes is no more invasive than sitting next to a colleague in an office and if you want to do something private, simply pause the timer and do it on your own time. Upwork is a pretty great site if you're a freelancer.
- AJ007 7y ago
  I’ve spent a sizable amount of money hiring people on upwork and never have disputed a payment. If something isn’t being done correctly, the contract gets terminated and that individual never gets any more work from me. Early on it was very difficult to spot potential problems before the contract began. With experience it became much easier. It is an imperfect system in an environment rife with problems from both employers and works attempting to cheat their way through. Now they are a public company now and have an incentive to squeeze fees from all ends. For that reason, I rarely hire new workers from upwork any more. Workers or clients who get screwed on the first job will never come back and they will tell everyone else not to use it. In the long run that will add up.
- agentdrtran 7y ago
pdkl95 7y ago
> the dataset contained ... demographic attributes like race ... to predict actual work performance Regardless of the original intent, that's a request to launder a protected class into an opaque "work performance" metric. Also, while they are not on the unfortunately short list of protected classes, using demographics like age is probably going to create similar discrimination problems. If you want to know about job performance, use data that is at least theoretically related to someone's performance. While machine learning is going to find some sort opf signal in whatever pile of data you feed it, that doesn't mean it actually predicts something complicated like job performance. When you feed it a bunch of general demographics, it's going to find one of the signals that we know are present throughout existing demographic: the institutional discrimination and similar problems of the past.
- ergothus 7y ago
  Excellent point! Isn't age a protected class though? At least in the US, discrimination over 40 is covered by the EEOC.
  - roflc0ptic 7y ago
    I'm hazy on the details, but it's not a protected class in the same way that e.g. race is. In alleging racial discrimination (in certain legal venues), statistical evidence of racial discrimination is admissible, however statistical evidence of age discrimination is not. E.g. if there are layoffs, and every grey head disappears, that's not grounds to allege discrimination. You'd have to have someone on record saying "we're firing all of the old fucks because they remind me of the inescapability of my own mortality" to litigate. Someone with a better grasp on the particulars here please chime in :)
  - gumby 7y ago
    They are protected against certain kinds of discrimination, but no human discriminated against them. It was simply a dispassionate algorithm and an algorithm can't display malice! Grrr... or that's what they, and probably the courts, would say. The OP calling it "discrimination laundering" had it right.
kristerv 7y ago
tl;dr OP accidentally left a survey unfinished for the client, this a dispute was made. OP completed survey, client was okay to pay, but OP hadn't logged hours with always-on webcam thus money was refunded to client.
- garyb2 7y ago
  Seems to me the client got the work for nearly free (gaming the system time only) - I see nothing in the article about UPWork requiring the client return work product as consequence of payment refusal.
asfarley 7y ago
This is very typical for Upwork. I have entirely stopped using their platform.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rahimiali 7y ago
I'm surprised that the complaint is about getting paid, rather than pointing out that Upwork facilitated an illegal and immoral system to be built. You don't get to use "demographic information" like "race" or "age" or probably many of the columns the post mentions to make hiring decisions. For the sake of the jobs industry, the author should change their post to say this.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- human20190310 7y ago
  Ethics aside, you'd think a company concerned about simply covering its ass would explicitly remove demographic information from the analysis, to avoid the possibility of it influencing the categorizations.
- TrackerFF 7y ago
  I feel there's such a huge potential for serious sampling bias in data like that, I wouldn't be comfortable to train classifiers on it. Any company with dubious ethics could easily manipulate the data (collection) to match their intentions.
  - daveFNbuck 7y ago
    Things like job performance usually have a subjective component, so the training data will already have human bias built in without any intentional manipulation.
Schnitz 7y ago
The gig economy sucks.... surprise!
vlokshin 7y ago
Upwork is ruining it for gig economy / freelancing / outsourcing. They create a race to the bottom and prioritize the client over fairness. Fiverr isn't much better. It's hard for any "we focus on everything" platform to get the specific needs of each vertical (customer + talent side) right. It's why TaskRabbit (focus on everything) never reached the scale of Uber/Lyft (press a button, get a ride). I'm not deep in the Data Science world, but hopefully there's a platform focused on vetting customers + freelancers and providing a platform for working together easily, fairly, transparently (without the creepiness). Platforms should also decide what kind of work is fine to outsource. Long-term/strategic work the company has to live with for many years (i.e. a core prediction model or fundamental backend arch) shouldn't be outsourced. People who will see the benefits of their work in 5+ years should be the ones working on stuff that'll benefit the company in 5+ years. I appreciate the mention of Turtle (https://www.turtle.dev/ https://www.turtle.dev/) in this thread already (I'm one of the founders). For freelancers, Turtle: - Makes sure customers are vetted (just as freelancers are). - Pays for all hours billed (even if customers don't pay). Freelancers are trusted to enter all hours manually. No creepy screenshots. - Provides an easy-to-use platform for task management, chat, video, payments. We're specifically focused on React, React Native, iOS, and Android dev now. Front-end/mobile is easier to compartmentalize. I'm not sure if that's possible for many forms of data science. Part-time work is an important part of our economy and will become more important as the world further globalizes (ex: "Remote" now being a hot topic) -- but the infrastructure is seriously lacking. UpWork is a sloppy solution attempt. I encourage freelancers, customers, and platforms to be honest about what should and shouldn't be outsourced, to make sure there's quality on both sides (great freelancers and shit customers fail), and to make sure there's an easy process to follow (great freelancers, customers, with shit process still fail).
- fourstar 7y ago
  Aside from 3/4 of your post being a gigantic ad about your own platform (which if you ever reached the scale of Upwork, I guarantee you’d run into the same issues you mention), how is it really a race to the bottom? You give the price you’re willing to work for, and the buyer agrees to the terms. Just like any other marketplace. I guess Fiverr is a race to the bottom, but that’s because their name and original mission statement (any work for $5) incentives that behavior. I’ve used Upwork and had good success, but also there have been bad actors. It’s up to the person hiring to do research before they hire, and cut ties by firing if they don’t work out, like pretty much any other workplace. Maybe the vetting process could be better, but Upwork is the best contract to hire marketplace for a variety of work, IMO.
jammygit 7y ago
> Their rules state that you must have the Upwork Desktop App on you computer which installs some sort of video malware onto your laptop AND have your webcam visible and on at all times so that the customer success agent can audit that you looked like you were working through the webcam while staring at a screen. How is that not the creepiest shit ever? Gross
vzaliva 7y ago
this article has nothing to do with "data scientists". It is just a runt by some guy who used Upwork for the first time, did not follow their (admittedly stupid) rules and got into payment dispute.
danj 7y ago
I’ve probably hired about $150,000 of contracts through up work and never once have we required the monitoring app to be used. However, we have a bit of a different approach, we will “pay” you through upwork for the first month, but if we are satisfied with your work after a month we pay you directly through PayPal or wire transfer and then we cancel the contract on upwork. Out of all of the contractors we have hired (20-30) I can only think of one who wanted complete payment through upwork. I know how bad upwork is and when we hired we genuinely always set out to get the contractors we worked with off using it so they can keep more money.
- social_quotient 7y ago
  Might not want to post that here if you intend on keeping that account - https://www.upwork.com/legal#noncircumvention https://www.upwork.com/legal#noncircumvention
  - sixstringtheory 7y ago
    There’s an opt-out clause, but I don’t know enough about talent acquisition costs to know whether it’s a good deal. My assumption is that recruiting agencies and internal processes are super expensive, so Upwork might be a cheaper option even with the opt-out fee.
  - danj 7y ago
    We have such a solid team now and we have lots of other channels for hiring people now but thank you!
    - social_quotient 7y ago
      Care to share a channel or exchange some knowledge? We buy about 50k hours a year off of upwork, would love to learn how others are doing it. John @ curtisdigital . com
      - greendestiny_re 7y ago
bitwize 7y ago
This is standard industry practice. I remember hearing about one of Upwork's constituent companies, oDesk, doing the same thing 13 years ago. You had to run their time logger program, which would periodically screenshot your desktop and take a webcam photo to ensure you were working.
zzaacchh 7y ago
My company uses Upwork (as a services buyers) for hundreds of contracted hours per week, and have been for many years. We’ve never required any contractor to use screen recording for hourly work — that is optional — and have never heard of anyone using a webcam. We’ve also never disputed a single hour of work that a contractor has billed, nor have we heard any of the dozens of contractors we’ve hired mention this as an issue. I think you might be extrapolating from a single bad data point (never a good idea, especially for a data scientist) and reaching an incorrect conclusion about the Upwork ecosystem.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  While I appreciate your perspective, I can imagine there’s a lot of people hiring that have zero idea how developers & data scientists work and think screen recording is a brilliant idea and thus insist on it. I’ve seen a lot of really shit job postings on Upwork & similar freelancing platforms that confirm the person posting the job has no idea of what they’re doing.
  - zzaacchh 7y ago
    I imagine there could be employers who insist on this sort of thing screen monitoring (which sounds crazy to me) -- but the good thing about this marketplace is that contractors aren't forced into any particular contracts. If they don't like the terms with one buyer, they could "vote with their dollars" and work for another.
  - atlasunshrugged 7y ago
    Second this, I've been both a nontechnical and a somewhat less nontechnical buyer on Upwork. When I was more nontechnical before working for Gigster (freelance software dev marketplace), I would have said that screen recording is brilliant. After all, how could I trust someone who is doing work I don't understand? At least I can look at their screen and make sure they weren't on HN when they were billing me :) Somewhat less nontechnical me knows better now, but if I didn't have any idea how to hire still, there's a good chance I would be one of those bad buyers.
- 7y ago
Herrin 7y ago
> This was the first task I ever received and it flickered my curiosity. In the problem set, the dataset contained survey and demographic attributes like race, age, computer proficiency, immigration status….etc.. to predict actual work performance. > I completed the survey which was asking me workplace situational questions testing my unconscious biases and then quickly rejected the dispute. This sounds like the "consulting company" was someone running a scientific experiment to see who is willing to create racist/ageist/otherwise unethical models.
bencollier49 7y ago
So hidden in the article is the real reason that data scientists might not want to use Upwork: * They record your screen * Your screen contains data * GDPR.
Briel 7y ago
With Upwork, since they're an intermediary and marketplace and hirers are the ones who are paying and providing supply, it's in their interest to offer services that cater to them like time logging and charging connection fees, even if it's unfriendly for freelancers. Your best best is to take matters in your own hands, and proactively email people you know you can help with your services. This way, there's no intermediary controlling your relationship with your client and you don't have to play the waiting game either (waiting for referrals or networking to pay off, waiting for people to find your website, etc.) This may seem hard at first glance but let's the take the example of data science work. You can reach out to startups who recently raised a sizable investment round (sign they have the budget and bigger growth goals) and share a few interesting ways you can help them uncover user behavior patterns that would them hit their next milestones. Further reading: [1] https://artofemails.com/get-new-clients https://artofemails.com/get-new-clients [2] https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/best-guest-post-pitch-example https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/best-guest-post-pitch-exa...
cweagans 7y ago
_Nobody_ should use Upwork. You won't get paid what you're worth, and it's the worst of both worlds when you compare it with normal freelancing or working in a regular job.
wolco 7y ago
Anyone using upwork knows you need to have the software running when you have an hourly contract. Fix contracts are different and upworks judgements can be awful but for hourly as long as you have the software running you will be paid. Data scientist doesn't read agreement.
blueboo 7y ago
> The central computer notices just about everything. Keeps track of every key you hit on the keyboard, all day long, what time you hit it, down to the microsecond, whether it was the right key or the wrong key, how many mistakes you make and when you make them. You're only required to be at your workstation from eight to five, with a half-hour lunch break and two ten-minute coffee breaks, but if you stuck to that schedule it would definitely be noticed, which is why Y.T.'s mom is sliding into the first unoccupied workstation and signing on to her machine at quarter to seven. Half a dozen other people are already here, signed on to workstations closer to the entrance, but this isn't bad. She can look forward to a reasonably stable career if she can keep up this sort of performance. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson And now, from the convenience of your home...
eddieone 7y ago
A lot of people from India on there posting dumb jobs. Though, dumb jobs can come from anywhere. It takes hours of sifting to find real offers. Most people want you to solve climate change for $1k or build their amazing idea they haven't thought through. It's a dumpster fire but there are real offers on there. With data science, you have to stress that it is research. You can only give probabilities, there's a chance it never works as you suspected or you don't come to a conclusion.
aasasd 7y ago
Well, maybe a data scientist should do some research into a platform's terms before taking on a job there. And read up on a topic properly when writing a blog post.
ohazi 7y ago
s/Data scientists/people/
tschellenbach 7y ago
Nobody should use Upwork, it's filled with scam artists and Upwork doesn't actually adequately block the scammers.
cryptonector 7y ago
s/Data scientists shouldn't/No one should/ No?
agentofoblivion 7y ago
What does this have to do with Data Scientists? So you didn’t read up on how to log time, made unnecessary mistakes, and an inflexible collective of likely underpaid service reps didn’t care enough to go beyond the letter of the law. That’s hardly a scam. That’s you not knowing what you’re signing up for and then being upset when you didn’t get the outcome you wanted. Hardly deserves front page news.

240 points by data4lyfe 7y ago

buboard 7y ago

Site down, we 'll never know why ...

taurath 7y ago
Maybe the site was built by Upwork? ;) —-just a joke, I have nothing against them
- Beltiras 7y ago
  After reading the article, you will.

bigpoppa 7y ago

The answer is clearly because you may end up with a broken website perpetually in a 500 error state.

phaemon 7y ago

Archive link: http://archive.is/Is2Uk http://archive.is/Is2Uk The title is "Why data scientists should never use Upwork"

chii 7y ago

what would be a way to start contracting if you have no existing network, no existing clients to get references?

atlasunshrugged 7y ago
I actually do think Upwork is a good way to start but you could 1) Build a network - go to product meetups (assuming you're a dev) 2) Contact agencies near you and see if they have contract projects you can hop on 3) Use other sites - Toptal, Freelancer, Remote, Gigster, etc.
rurp 7y ago
I found work through Upwork when I was starting out as a dev and actually had a pretty good experience. Just like on the hiring side, there are a lot of bad clients you need to filter through but there are plenty of reasonable people looking to hire on the site. It did make me nervous having so much of my income tied to Upwork and there were a few things that seemed like minor red flags, but I didn't have any awful experiences with them. Someone with a few years of experience probably has better avenues to look at for work but it could be a good option if you're looking to get experience and build out a freelance network.

data4lyfe 7y ago

Here's the post on medium. https://medium.com/@jayfeng/why-no-one-should-never-use-upwork-a2da9c42769b https://medium.com/@jayfeng/why-no-one-should-never-use-upwo...

jgillich 7y ago

Archive link: https://archive.is/Is2Uk https://archive.is/Is2Uk

premieroncall 7y ago

There's also an older post about the same topic: https://hackernoon.com/why-you-should-never-use-upwork-ever-5c62848bdf46 https://hackernoon.com/why-you-should-never-use-upwork-ever-...

burlesona 7y ago

As a buyer I had a few good experiences finding contractors on Upwork. If “no one should ever use it,” does anyone have a good suggestion for a better place to find good freelance coders for small projects?

sixstringtheory 7y ago
HN has its own dedicated monthly listing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20325924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20325924 Also reach out to your network... I belong to several slack nodes that have channels just for contracts and leads are dropped in there pretty regularly.
christianmm 7y ago
Absolutely do not use freelancer.com either. They charged my CC $54 when I closed my account. Shady site.
repomies68 7y ago
I think you can find good freelancers everywhere... And also bad ones. Whether upwork is good or not depends on your viewpoint. I think it is just a marketplace like everything else. I personally believe bigger value lies in longer relationships, therefore places like upwork should be just a place to get started.
atiff 7y ago
I have used Turtle for 2 projects and had an exceptional experience with both. Very well vetted devs, excellent platform and framework for managing them, and human customer service at (currently underpriced IMO) $55/hr. The two apps I’ve used Turtle for: - React site for my business - Ongoing Node integration work at about 10/hr per week. https://www.turtle.ai https://www.turtle.ai
- vlokshin 7y ago
  Thanks for mentioning Turtle! Really appreciate it. (1) Great talent, (2) great customers, and (3) an easy to follow process (platform) are critical for making freelancing work. UpWork typically misses at least 2/3.

surajs 7y ago

Elance was so much better

burmer 7y ago
Looks like upwork ate them AND oDesk

lucasgonze 7y ago

You can't be precious on Upwork. And there's a strong GIGO factor. What you have to do is churn a bunch of jobs/contractors until you get the one that really pays off. Don't let the hassles get to you, just keep turning the crank.

jp8585 7y ago

Long term upwork Data Scientist here. It seems he had a bad experience, that could have happened on any other place / platform. There are always horror stories about how platforms deal with conflicts (think PayPal, Stripe, Uber...) Out of >30 contracts I had, only 1 resulted in a dispute, and it was decided in my favor. I do agree the whole monitoring thing is absurd and I generally don't take jobs from clients that demand hours to be logged through the monitoring app. If you want to see how the jungle looks like, please have a go at freelancer.com.

usaphp 7y ago
> I generally don't take jobs from clients that demand hours to be logged through the monitoring app Isn’t like 9/10 jobs there require you to use the monitoring?
- jp8585 7y ago
  Not at all. Maybe for low paying jobs.
kradroy 7y ago
The monitoring app is a hoop I guess. I would hate it too because it's a form of control over the work. I once had a client who, at the negotiation of the contract, wanted me to work from an "office" (an in-laws quarters) for a specific set of hours each week. His desire for that was because he wanted to make sure he was getting his money's worth; that if I said I was charging him for 10 hours, I was spending 10 hours on the task. I told him that, along with other stipulations, would qualify me as an employee. He and his fiance/business partner insisted it didn't. That was troubling because his fiance was a lawyer. I declined to take the project.
asdfman123 7y ago
I'm working on a matchmaker service for a certain niche industry that will be completely free. Hopefully it will catch on. Down with Upwork.

datenhorst 7y ago

Upwork rules require you to have their desktop app installed and let yourself be filmed for the duration of the task? Holy s

msadowski 7y ago
UpWork doesn't do filming using your camera, only takes a picture every ~10 minutes. Also the picture taking is optional and can be disabled by client (Throughout 1 year working on UpWork I never had a project which required of me the camera bit). The screenshot taking is required for payment protection.
- module0000 7y ago
  > UpWork doesn't do filming using your camera, only takes a picture every ~10 minutes. And how can I, the person being filmed, verify that?
  - fwip 7y ago
    Probably notice that your webcam light comes on only once every ten minutes, or that your network traffic is consistent with one picture every ten minutes. Isn't this site for nerds?
  - msadowski 7y ago
    You can see the work log online that contains all the screenshots and most probably camera shots too (never had to use it so I'm not 100% sure). I think the way to know that your camera is on is to look at the little LED next to your camera and hoping UpWork didn't find a way around it.
  - pkaye 7y ago
    Get a camera where the activity LED turns on when camera is active.

caiocaiocaio 7y ago

I freelanced on Upwork for a bit. It was all the worst aspects of having an abusive boss (the platform itself), and all of the worst aspects of freelancing (unpredictability, getting ripped off by shifty clients). "Creepiest shit ever" is a pretty accurate description of Upwork. If Upwork's attitudes and policies were described to me in the 90s, I would have said it was lame, unrealistic science fiction with an over-the-top villain. If anyone wants to do freelance work, I'd recommend marketing yourself directly to local businesses, print some business cards, schmooze. It's about as much work and stress as using Upwork, and you don't have a misanthropic middleman taking their cut.

jammygit 7y ago
Any tips for freelancers who are recent engineering grads? I have some portfolio items, but I still can’t claim more than 1 year experience
- krn 7y ago
  > Any tips for freelancers who are recent engineering grads? If you have a relevant degree, why not to apply for a remote job position instead? That would help to build your CV, and allow to switch to contracting later on.
  - komali2 7y ago
    Stack overflow jobs board thing is the best place imo to find remote Dev positions. Harder for new grads. Angel list might be a place to find remote AND newbie friendly jobs.
    - polyperchon 7y ago
      Second AngelList for this purpose, though keep in mind the salary trade off to work remote for a new grad is likely gonna be considerable.
- vkou 7y ago
  Spend a year working for a consulting company, to learn the ropes. If I were a business looking to have a freelancer build something for me, 'a fresh grad, with less than a year work experience, who has never done this sort of thing before' is not who I'd hire. I have 9 years experience, and if I were to to go into freelancing (The kind where you solve problems for businesses, as opposed to the kind where you're a 9-5 1099 contractor), the first thing I would do is to take a job at a consulting firm, and spend my time there learning. Figure out what works, and what really, really doesn't. That job is probably going to suck, but you'll have a much better idea of what to do, what your customers really hate about working with big firms, and your resume will look much better, when you can put down "I did the thing I want you to hire me for, in a consulting firm, for 18 months, I know how this works, and I can do it better."

rhema 7y ago

>Their rules state that you must have the Upwork Desktop App on you computer which installs some sort of video malware onto your laptop AND have your webcam visible and on at all times so that the customer success agent can audit that you looked like you were working through the webcam while staring at a screen. How is that not the creepiest shit ever? Compare this to the Upwork App's description https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/211064098-Log-Time-with-the-Desktop-App https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/211064098-Log-T... . It seems pretty reasonable. By default, it snaps a picture every 10 minutes. If you do not want to upload a snapshot, it removes the 10 minutes from your recorded hours. It captures info about how often you used keystrokes and clicked, but not what you typed or clicked. The benefit of using the app is instant approval and payment. On my reading, it looks like the author failed to take a 10 minute survey in 3 days, losing his work hours. That seems like a pretty reasonable ask that he failed on.

hiccuphippo 7y ago
Yeah no. No kind of spyware is reasonable.
vangelis 7y ago
You should never trade privacy for "security". This is some Commie bullshit.

msadowski 7y ago

I've been using UpWork for over a year now and never had a dispute so far. The author is right in saying that UpWork only guarantees payment when time tracking using their app. Where he is mistaken though is where he says that the app requires camera to be on at all times. There is such an option but personally I'd never go for a project like this. And yes, the app will take the screenshot of the stuff you are working on. I don't get why author's customer would launch a dispute over not completing a 10 minute survey. Given that it was an hourly project I bet there were issues with communication and perhaps the author should have double checked with the client before closing the job. UpWork is far from being flawless but for me it has been working quite ok.

gloggy 7y ago
Yeah, I've been working on Upwork for about 1.5 years now and it has been such a vast improvement over other freelancing sites - both in terms of the size and scope of the projects and in terms of the types of clients available. Not one of my hourly clients has ever insisted that I use the monitoring app; yet I do it anyway because then I don't underbill and the payments are guaranteed. In my mind, the screenshot every 10 minutes is no more invasive than sitting next to a colleague in an office and if you want to do something private, simply pause the timer and do it on your own time. Upwork is a pretty great site if you're a freelancer.
AJ007 7y ago
I’ve spent a sizable amount of money hiring people on upwork and never have disputed a payment. If something isn’t being done correctly, the contract gets terminated and that individual never gets any more work from me. Early on it was very difficult to spot potential problems before the contract began. With experience it became much easier. It is an imperfect system in an environment rife with problems from both employers and works attempting to cheat their way through. Now they are a public company now and have an incentive to squeeze fees from all ends. For that reason, I rarely hire new workers from upwork any more. Workers or clients who get screwed on the first job will never come back and they will tell everyone else not to use it. In the long run that will add up.
agentdrtran 7y ago

pdkl95 7y ago

> the dataset contained ... demographic attributes like race ... to predict actual work performance Regardless of the original intent, that's a request to launder a protected class into an opaque "work performance" metric. Also, while they are not on the unfortunately short list of protected classes, using demographics like age is probably going to create similar discrimination problems. If you want to know about job performance, use data that is at least theoretically related to someone's performance. While machine learning is going to find some sort opf signal in whatever pile of data you feed it, that doesn't mean it actually predicts something complicated like job performance. When you feed it a bunch of general demographics, it's going to find one of the signals that we know are present throughout existing demographic: the institutional discrimination and similar problems of the past.

ergothus 7y ago
Excellent point! Isn't age a protected class though? At least in the US, discrimination over 40 is covered by the EEOC.
- roflc0ptic 7y ago
  I'm hazy on the details, but it's not a protected class in the same way that e.g. race is. In alleging racial discrimination (in certain legal venues), statistical evidence of racial discrimination is admissible, however statistical evidence of age discrimination is not. E.g. if there are layoffs, and every grey head disappears, that's not grounds to allege discrimination. You'd have to have someone on record saying "we're firing all of the old fucks because they remind me of the inescapability of my own mortality" to litigate. Someone with a better grasp on the particulars here please chime in :)
- gumby 7y ago
  They are protected against certain kinds of discrimination, but no human discriminated against them. It was simply a dispassionate algorithm and an algorithm can't display malice! Grrr... or that's what they, and probably the courts, would say. The OP calling it "discrimination laundering" had it right.

kristerv 7y ago

tl;dr OP accidentally left a survey unfinished for the client, this a dispute was made. OP completed survey, client was okay to pay, but OP hadn't logged hours with always-on webcam thus money was refunded to client.

garyb2 7y ago
Seems to me the client got the work for nearly free (gaming the system time only) - I see nothing in the article about UPWork requiring the client return work product as consequence of payment refusal.

asfarley 7y ago

This is very typical for Upwork. I have entirely stopped using their platform.

deleted 7y ago

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rahimiali 7y ago

I'm surprised that the complaint is about getting paid, rather than pointing out that Upwork facilitated an illegal and immoral system to be built. You don't get to use "demographic information" like "race" or "age" or probably many of the columns the post mentions to make hiring decisions. For the sake of the jobs industry, the author should change their post to say this.

deleted 7y ago
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human20190310 7y ago
Ethics aside, you'd think a company concerned about simply covering its ass would explicitly remove demographic information from the analysis, to avoid the possibility of it influencing the categorizations.
TrackerFF 7y ago
I feel there's such a huge potential for serious sampling bias in data like that, I wouldn't be comfortable to train classifiers on it. Any company with dubious ethics could easily manipulate the data (collection) to match their intentions.
- daveFNbuck 7y ago
  Things like job performance usually have a subjective component, so the training data will already have human bias built in without any intentional manipulation.

Schnitz 7y ago

The gig economy sucks.... surprise!

vlokshin 7y ago

Upwork is ruining it for gig economy / freelancing / outsourcing. They create a race to the bottom and prioritize the client over fairness. Fiverr isn't much better. It's hard for any "we focus on everything" platform to get the specific needs of each vertical (customer + talent side) right. It's why TaskRabbit (focus on everything) never reached the scale of Uber/Lyft (press a button, get a ride). I'm not deep in the Data Science world, but hopefully there's a platform focused on vetting customers + freelancers and providing a platform for working together easily, fairly, transparently (without the creepiness). Platforms should also decide what kind of work is fine to outsource. Long-term/strategic work the company has to live with for many years (i.e. a core prediction model or fundamental backend arch) shouldn't be outsourced. People who will see the benefits of their work in 5+ years should be the ones working on stuff that'll benefit the company in 5+ years. I appreciate the mention of Turtle (https://www.turtle.dev/ https://www.turtle.dev/) in this thread already (I'm one of the founders). For freelancers, Turtle: - Makes sure customers are vetted (just as freelancers are). - Pays for all hours billed (even if customers don't pay). Freelancers are trusted to enter all hours manually. No creepy screenshots. - Provides an easy-to-use platform for task management, chat, video, payments. We're specifically focused on React, React Native, iOS, and Android dev now. Front-end/mobile is easier to compartmentalize. I'm not sure if that's possible for many forms of data science. Part-time work is an important part of our economy and will become more important as the world further globalizes (ex: "Remote" now being a hot topic) -- but the infrastructure is seriously lacking. UpWork is a sloppy solution attempt. I encourage freelancers, customers, and platforms to be honest about what should and shouldn't be outsourced, to make sure there's quality on both sides (great freelancers and shit customers fail), and to make sure there's an easy process to follow (great freelancers, customers, with shit process still fail).

fourstar 7y ago
Aside from 3/4 of your post being a gigantic ad about your own platform (which if you ever reached the scale of Upwork, I guarantee you’d run into the same issues you mention), how is it really a race to the bottom? You give the price you’re willing to work for, and the buyer agrees to the terms. Just like any other marketplace. I guess Fiverr is a race to the bottom, but that’s because their name and original mission statement (any work for $5) incentives that behavior. I’ve used Upwork and had good success, but also there have been bad actors. It’s up to the person hiring to do research before they hire, and cut ties by firing if they don’t work out, like pretty much any other workplace. Maybe the vetting process could be better, but Upwork is the best contract to hire marketplace for a variety of work, IMO.

jammygit 7y ago

vzaliva 7y ago

this article has nothing to do with "data scientists". It is just a runt by some guy who used Upwork for the first time, did not follow their (admittedly stupid) rules and got into payment dispute.

danj 7y ago

I’ve probably hired about $150,000 of contracts through up work and never once have we required the monitoring app to be used. However, we have a bit of a different approach, we will “pay” you through upwork for the first month, but if we are satisfied with your work after a month we pay you directly through PayPal or wire transfer and then we cancel the contract on upwork. Out of all of the contractors we have hired (20-30) I can only think of one who wanted complete payment through upwork. I know how bad upwork is and when we hired we genuinely always set out to get the contractors we worked with off using it so they can keep more money.

social_quotient 7y ago
Might not want to post that here if you intend on keeping that account - https://www.upwork.com/legal#noncircumvention https://www.upwork.com/legal#noncircumvention
- sixstringtheory 7y ago
  There’s an opt-out clause, but I don’t know enough about talent acquisition costs to know whether it’s a good deal. My assumption is that recruiting agencies and internal processes are super expensive, so Upwork might be a cheaper option even with the opt-out fee.
- danj 7y ago
  We have such a solid team now and we have lots of other channels for hiring people now but thank you!
  - social_quotient 7y ago
    Care to share a channel or exchange some knowledge? We buy about 50k hours a year off of upwork, would love to learn how others are doing it. John @ curtisdigital . com
    - greendestiny_re 7y ago

bitwize 7y ago

This is standard industry practice. I remember hearing about one of Upwork's constituent companies, oDesk, doing the same thing 13 years ago. You had to run their time logger program, which would periodically screenshot your desktop and take a webcam photo to ensure you were working.

zzaacchh 7y ago

My company uses Upwork (as a services buyers) for hundreds of contracted hours per week, and have been for many years. We’ve never required any contractor to use screen recording for hourly work — that is optional — and have never heard of anyone using a webcam. We’ve also never disputed a single hour of work that a contractor has billed, nor have we heard any of the dozens of contractors we’ve hired mention this as an issue. I think you might be extrapolating from a single bad data point (never a good idea, especially for a data scientist) and reaching an incorrect conclusion about the Upwork ecosystem.

Nextgrid 7y ago
While I appreciate your perspective, I can imagine there’s a lot of people hiring that have zero idea how developers & data scientists work and think screen recording is a brilliant idea and thus insist on it. I’ve seen a lot of really shit job postings on Upwork & similar freelancing platforms that confirm the person posting the job has no idea of what they’re doing.
- zzaacchh 7y ago
  I imagine there could be employers who insist on this sort of thing screen monitoring (which sounds crazy to me) -- but the good thing about this marketplace is that contractors aren't forced into any particular contracts. If they don't like the terms with one buyer, they could "vote with their dollars" and work for another.
- atlasunshrugged 7y ago
  Second this, I've been both a nontechnical and a somewhat less nontechnical buyer on Upwork. When I was more nontechnical before working for Gigster (freelance software dev marketplace), I would have said that screen recording is brilliant. After all, how could I trust someone who is doing work I don't understand? At least I can look at their screen and make sure they weren't on HN when they were billing me :) Somewhat less nontechnical me knows better now, but if I didn't have any idea how to hire still, there's a good chance I would be one of those bad buyers.
7y ago

Herrin 7y ago

> This was the first task I ever received and it flickered my curiosity. In the problem set, the dataset contained survey and demographic attributes like race, age, computer proficiency, immigration status….etc.. to predict actual work performance. > I completed the survey which was asking me workplace situational questions testing my unconscious biases and then quickly rejected the dispute. This sounds like the "consulting company" was someone running a scientific experiment to see who is willing to create racist/ageist/otherwise unethical models.

bencollier49 7y ago

So hidden in the article is the real reason that data scientists might not want to use Upwork: * They record your screen * Your screen contains data * GDPR.

Briel 7y ago

With Upwork, since they're an intermediary and marketplace and hirers are the ones who are paying and providing supply, it's in their interest to offer services that cater to them like time logging and charging connection fees, even if it's unfriendly for freelancers. Your best best is to take matters in your own hands, and proactively email people you know you can help with your services. This way, there's no intermediary controlling your relationship with your client and you don't have to play the waiting game either (waiting for referrals or networking to pay off, waiting for people to find your website, etc.) This may seem hard at first glance but let's the take the example of data science work. You can reach out to startups who recently raised a sizable investment round (sign they have the budget and bigger growth goals) and share a few interesting ways you can help them uncover user behavior patterns that would them hit their next milestones. Further reading: [1] https://artofemails.com/get-new-clients https://artofemails.com/get-new-clients [2] https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/best-guest-post-pitch-example https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/best-guest-post-pitch-exa...

cweagans 7y ago

_Nobody_ should use Upwork. You won't get paid what you're worth, and it's the worst of both worlds when you compare it with normal freelancing or working in a regular job.

wolco 7y ago

Anyone using upwork knows you need to have the software running when you have an hourly contract. Fix contracts are different and upworks judgements can be awful but for hourly as long as you have the software running you will be paid. Data scientist doesn't read agreement.

blueboo 7y ago

> The central computer notices just about everything. Keeps track of every key you hit on the keyboard, all day long, what time you hit it, down to the microsecond, whether it was the right key or the wrong key, how many mistakes you make and when you make them. You're only required to be at your workstation from eight to five, with a half-hour lunch break and two ten-minute coffee breaks, but if you stuck to that schedule it would definitely be noticed, which is why Y.T.'s mom is sliding into the first unoccupied workstation and signing on to her machine at quarter to seven. Half a dozen other people are already here, signed on to workstations closer to the entrance, but this isn't bad. She can look forward to a reasonably stable career if she can keep up this sort of performance. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson And now, from the convenience of your home...

eddieone 7y ago

A lot of people from India on there posting dumb jobs. Though, dumb jobs can come from anywhere. It takes hours of sifting to find real offers. Most people want you to solve climate change for $1k or build their amazing idea they haven't thought through. It's a dumpster fire but there are real offers on there. With data science, you have to stress that it is research. You can only give probabilities, there's a chance it never works as you suspected or you don't come to a conclusion.

aasasd 7y ago

Well, maybe a data scientist should do some research into a platform's terms before taking on a job there. And read up on a topic properly when writing a blog post.

ohazi 7y ago

s/Data scientists/people/

tschellenbach 7y ago

Nobody should use Upwork, it's filled with scam artists and Upwork doesn't actually adequately block the scammers.

cryptonector 7y ago

s/Data scientists shouldn't/No one should/ No?

agentofoblivion 7y ago

What does this have to do with Data Scientists? So you didn’t read up on how to log time, made unnecessary mistakes, and an inflexible collective of likely underpaid service reps didn’t care enough to go beyond the letter of the law. That’s hardly a scam. That’s you not knowing what you’re signing up for and then being upset when you didn’t get the outcome you wanted. Hardly deserves front page news.