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How to not get scammed hiring remote freelancers on Upwork

• anovikov 7y ago
  Well... i don't have ANY social media accounts, and there is absolutely nothing interesting on my github (about 30 repos which i built working for just 1 client of mine, out of 100+, 1-6 years ago). Am i a fake? I am top #1 Upwork developer in EU by revenue though.
  • ape4 7y ago
    You're too good to be true ;)
  • mindcrime 7y ago
    I'm sure what you say is true, but here's the thing... you know what that makes you? An exception. And as a first pass heuristic, "don't bet on exceptions" is a pretty reasonable guideline.
    • anovikov 7y ago
      Trick is, i never found out how to go beyond Upwork. I never, ever made a good deal with anyone outside of it. It gets me super concerned because i'm locked into one platform, but have no idea what to do.
      • jefflinwood 7y ago
        Not to jump on the original point of this article, but I would suggest creating a personal blog, professional LinkedIn profile, and a technical focused Twitter account. The reason you can't make a deal outside Upwork is that all of your information that would cause someone to trust you is on Upwork, and only clients using that platform will see it.
  • Lagogarda 7y ago
    You probably followed the Ultimate Guide to Fake it on Upwork (and elsewhere on internet) http://nenadseo.com/fake-it-till-you-make-it-guide/ http://nenadseo.com/fake-it-till-you-make-it-guide/
• superwayne 7y ago
  > I’ve been told over Skype that an applicant who lived in Downtown Vancouver couldn’t meet up for a coffee because they didn’t leave their house. They lived in Guangzhou. No wonder when people get paid based on their location and not based on their output/value. This is what bothers me quite a lot about Gitlab as well.
  • learc83 7y ago
    There are legitimate reasons for hiring someone who you can occasionally meet with. There are also legitimate reasons to hire someone in your own country. Or at least in a country with a reasonable facsimile of the rule of law and fair access to courts by foreigners.
    • superwayne 7y ago
      Of course, there are very legitimate reasons/incentives to hire someone from your own jurisdiction. I'm just not a fan of cheap offshoring.
  • tschellenbach 7y ago
    just basic supply and demand combined with the fact that people working in the same timezone and office are still more productive than remote. big startup opportunity if you can actually solve those issues with remote work. slack, notion, and google doc helped a bit, but its not perfect.
• learc83 7y ago
  How about maybe stop trying to find the cheapest people you can?
  • V-2 7y ago
    Much easier in a world where consumers stop trying to find the cheapest product they can.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • xhruso00 7y ago
      It’s competition and consumers gets scammed as well. Packaging&Brand increase the price. If a consumer want quality he has to do some research as well.
  • calimac 7y ago
    This is not about finding cheap labor. It is more so about the cheap labor competing to look more desirable than the competing cheap labor.
  • collyw 7y ago
    I have worked on agency produced apps made in Stockholm, and they were pretty crap as well. The agency charged about 3 times my salary equivalent. Paying a lot doesn't necessarily get you better work.
    • learc83 7y ago
      Of course it doesn't, but hiring people in a country with a functioning court system that follows the rule of law decreases your chance of being scammed. And at the very least offers a possible remedy if you are scammed. Beyond being scammed, your chance of finding a great developer by looking for the cheapest developer is very low.
      • collyw 7y ago
• jmull 7y ago
  > It’s 2019. If you’re hiring someone who works on the internet, you will be able to find them on the internet. This guy seems pretty clueless. I’m not sure I’d be trying to absorb his wisdom.
  • stanski 7y ago
    Right. Why on earth would I want a twitter account?
    • magic_beans 7y ago
      Is it so outlandish to have a professional LinkedIn account?
      • lwhalen 7y ago
        Yes.
  • acheron9383 7y ago
    I mean, if you are going to market yourself on the internet in order to be hired for remote work, it is in your interest to at least maintain a professional internet persona. Github, linkedin, personal website... If you are hiring remote workers you are very much duck typing when looking for potential scammers.
• dep_b 7y ago
  Well the location-based bullshit really has to go. I can charge more for remote work when I move to a higher wage country, while moving to a less ideal location in terms of timezones. It's to no benefit to the customer yet they'll gladly pay more. People always pretend life is oh-so cheap in for example Latin America while a lot of things including basics like soap and dried pasta can be more expensive in the supermarkets. And don't even get me started on electronics. Of course you'll get people that pretend to be from a more expensive time zone for remote work. It's the same work after all.
  • mobilefriendly 7y ago
    The customer benefits from work being done in a location with the rule of law and independent courts.
    • dep_b 7y ago
      Oh sure perhaps for unknown developers but often it’s the same customer I already worked with for quite a while.
• mrwebmaster 7y ago
  From a job seeker point of view, there are also lots of job posters that are scams or that want to receive free or almost free work. Some are just trying to steal applicant’s money or identity, but I’ve also seen legitimate companies asking for long test tasks and disappear afterwards and employees from high profile organizations trying to outsource part of their work but paying $6/hour. Upwork is broken, but this also happens on angel.co and probably on other digital job markets. Interestingly, most of the advice given in the article for not getting scammed is also true for job seekers.
  • toolslive 7y ago
    Q:"So if the job is writing test scripts in Perl, why do you require Haskell ?" A:"We've found we get better resumes that way."
  • raincom 7y ago
    Wow, even employees from high profile orgs are outsourcing their work!
• servercobra 7y ago
  I constantly, like multiple times a week, get connection requests on LinkedIn that all lead to the same conversation of "hey! let me use your name and profile on Toptal/Upwork, I'll do all the work, and you can keep 15-30%". I'm not surprised by any of this.
• BjoernKW 7y ago
  The key is to not hire fungible resources based on a set of TLAs but actual people instead. Unfortunately, the software industry by and large still seems to insist on continuing this backward model rooted in scientific management because it creates a semblance of an industrialised process that can easily be scaled by throwing more resources with the same TLAs at the problem (see "The Mythical Man-Month"). If people are treated as a commodity it's no wonder they start acting like one. There certainly are largely commoditised areas of software development. However, especially for those it shouldn't matter where the person doing the job is located or in fact which person it is that does the job. All that matters is results. Only settle an invoice once the agreed upon results have been delivered.
  • daveslash 7y ago
    What does TLA stand for? Also: Mythical Man-Month -- great book. I recommend it to anyone, especially programmers and project managers. Not too technical. Fairly light read. Good content.
    • BjoernKW 7y ago
      Three-letter acronym. Those technical acronyms CVs tend to be rife with (admittedly they come in non-three-letter varieties, too), e.g.: XML, CSS, PHP
      • vangelis 7y ago
        But can you imagine explaining that PHP: Hypertext Processor stands for PHP: Hypertext Processor?
        • BjoernKW 7y ago
          Piece of cake: It’s a recursive acronym.
        • dredmorbius 7y ago
          Personal Home Page.
• scandox 7y ago
  Some of these encounters can be genuinely painful. People avoiding video chat is the most obvious sign often. Then you get on a call with someone and they are as terse as they possibly can be so that their accent will be "masked". On one occasion I was talking to a TTS. Ultimately for everything we do, communication is the number one requirement. We have to be able to communicate fluently in a high level of detail and have what we say not just understood, but even anticipated and interpreted. So no matter how good someone is in some other aspect, it's a non-starter if I can't have a chat with them - and I think vice-versa too ... how can they enjoy the work and do a reasonable job if I can't really explain to them what I want easily? I don't know if I'll ever use Upwork for programmers again. Most of my experiences have been bad, even when I was quite willing to pay premium rates.* * Big motivation for many using Upwork is bypassing conventional corporate finance and the way they pay (or fail to pay) freelancers.
  • BigJ1211 7y ago
    I don't do freelance work myself, but based on how software development is done in most software companies I've worked for. Do you not have open tickets that need to be done by freelancers? Or are you simply looking for freelancers to do entire projects on their own? Most of the software development I do is done based on open tickets that people can pick up and comment on if things are unclear. The same goes for when we hire a freelancer, we have open tickets that can be picked up and completed, once completed they submit a merge request and we go on from that. That is not to say you can't have a (video)chat, but it shouldn't really be needed for the actual development part of the job. We only have a call/meetup if we expect to be working with them for a longer period of time, or when we haven't worked with them before. If you were looking to do a videochat with me when you have only a few hours of work for me I don't think I would be open to that either.
    • scandox 7y ago
      Most of the work we want done is project based. Like "Build this API for us and afterwards we'll take it in-house". Mostly I hire for several weeks or even months of work. So yes interviews will occur. As for tickets...well I don't know how someone can just drop into a complex system and resolve bugs or add features, without understanding how the wider system works. We don't have work of that nature really.
• xhruso00 7y ago
  The problem is that he has to constantly look for someone new. Why? Not paying decent salary or short term contracts.
• subhro 7y ago
  There are quite a few things I disagree with in the post. > Every developer has a Github profile. If their profile is new, yet they say they’ve been coding for 10 years — you may want to gut check. There might be developers that just does not want to commit to public projects. It is possible that the developer is bound by NDAs that they can't share customer work. I know I fall in this category. > It’s 2019. If you’re hiring someone who works on the internet, you will be able to find them on the internet. Again, incorrect. I intentionally make effort to remain as much of an online ghost as I can. If you search for me on Google then you WILL find a profile, but that is a profile I am forced to maintain and may or may not be the person that the profile describes. > Often it means they didn’t do the work, and will disappear once the money is sent. Possible, but it might also be that the people are running on razor thin margins and have bills to pay. The whole idea of selection of contractors on Upwork and similar websites is mainly finding the cheapest guy. If someone in India is beating others in price, it means that there is really not a lot of runway to let an invoice sit for weeks. The guy has to buy bread you see....
  • ilikehurdles 7y ago
    This article just feels like a ploy to promote the author's alternative CV product. It's 2019 and many adults in the room have turned their backs on social media. Not having a profile somewhere is hardly a characteristic of a luddite nowadays.
  • aljungberg 7y ago
    I’ve been told by many many candidates that all work they ever did was under an NDA and so they have no Github profile and not even any code samples. Somehow they never did a single shareable thing in their lives - not at school, not a hobby project, not at work. Potential employers use all the signals available to make decisions and this is an important one. Many of the other applicants will have solid material. It may not at all be your fault, and yet also be a serious disadvantage.
    • subhro 7y ago
      Ever worked for Federal Govt?
• tschellenbach 7y ago
  yup, I got scammed on upwork for 10k. super hard to know the difference between a developer that got a little stuck, vs someone that is scamming. upwork seems to do their best to enable these people as well by hiding reviews. this guy in particular would do a lot of small projects to cover up the negative reviews on bigger ones. the other feature which encourages this is the upworks feature of automatically paying invoices without any checks on the work being done. the best way to avoid getting scammed is not to use upworks. its almost like they designed their product to encourage scams.
• toddsiegel 7y ago
  On a related note, this is not about getting scammed, but more about getting the work you need completed. I have had very poor results using people who have a full-time job and are trying out freelancing as a side gig. They rarely seem to be able complete the work on time, and of the quality you desire. It's never due to a lack of technical skill. It's in part because they seem to lack time and energy to do the work after grinding it out all day at full time job. But more importantly, they seem to lack the time-management, and communication skills to manage the work. An experienced freelancer can juggle multiple projects, but someone coming from a single-focus, full-time job often cannot. I think this is why a lot of people dabble in freelancing, fail and go back to full-time work. Edit: This is more a general note, and not about Upwork specifically, but the same definitely applies.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• jitendrac 7y ago
  I think similar article should be promoted, where we can identify job posters who are scams. In past I have used Upwork[when it was odesk]. Not much positive experience. For them client aka job poster is everything. They could kick you out mid project/task without any reason, they can deny your milestone work, appeal will most probably get their side, if you got to have more than two-three bad subsequent clients and got kicked out mid project. you can got yourself banned In short its pro job-poster site.