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LinkedIn is building a gig marketplace

chovybizzass 6y ago
excellent. fiverr is nothing but trash and upwork only has tops 25/hour jobs in usa. need a legit gig site.
- gexla 6y ago
  Just because you haven't found a way to make money on Fiverr, that doesn't mean people haven't found ways to make Fiverr a valuable platform for their business. The same is true of Upwork. I guess you're being sarcastic, because obviously many people do make more than $25 / hour through the platform. There are good arguments against using Upwork, though these arguments are more for beginners who haven't yet found their footing as a business offering services.
- bredren 6y ago
  Upwork can pay really well. You just have to find the right gig. That said I loath upwork, the company has squeezed contractors for every possible drop, added subscriptions and all kinds of bullshit around communications. I am no fan of LinkedIn, but would be happy to see Upwork have its lunch eaten.
- vmception 6y ago
  LinkedIn isn’t going to better Anyway, I have good experience with Fiverr. Definitely has alot of amateurish people building a portfolio quickly though.
- ohazi 6y ago
  I am 100% confident that whatever LinkedIn manages to come up with here will also be trash.
- oblio 6y ago
  > upwork only has tops 25/hour jobs in usa Honest question, but for IT stuff, why would it have stuff over $25/hour? It's going to be remote work, anyway, so there will be someone, somewhere, in a country with a lower cost of living, that will work for that money or even less. It's only normal that Americans won't be able to compete, over time :-)
  - codesuela 6y ago
    not really, in my experience on Upwork for 25$/hour you can't really find someone who is a competent engineer and also speaks solid english (no matter the country).
  - kube-system 6y ago
    Yet, Americans still compete at the high end of contracting work. Sometimes it's not the code itself that ultimately matters, it's the solution as a whole.
  - ulucs 6y ago
    short answer: signaling has enough power to stop freelancers from competing on price until zero
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Well you have to compete on skill, niche and reputation. High skill workers in poor countries still can make $$$ online if they have the appropriate skills and especially if somewhat specialized. Doubly so if they have a strong reputation for doing a good job.
- josephjrobison 6y ago
  Fiverr - best turnaround times and least hassle, you can see all the gigs, pricing, and expertise up front. But have to do hard filtering. Upwork - Biggest range. Can get a lot of crap, but the volume means a few diamonds. Better for open ended or larger engagements than Fiverr. Individual freelancers - great if you find the right one that delivers. The downside, is without the middleman platform, there's more risk to the buyer of them disappearing or delivering late with now. BUT once you find indie freelancer they are gold. Agencies - more expensive, but if the owner is in growth mode, they may end up being cheap for what they deliver. If already established, you get a risk-free transaction but more cost. Go to an agency if you have a big problem you want solved and handed off. Manage collective of freelancers - if you're a killer project manager that can assemble and manage, go for it. Fiverr has a new Fiverr Business that seems to add a layer on this to help manage. Haven't tried. TopTal - trying for the first time. Uncertain if worth it. They are good at sales, the floor seems much higher than Upwork. But if you're really good at filtering and interviewing, then you maybe should find your own as TopTal overcharges for the quality you get. Perhaps, still TBD.
  - algo_trader 6y ago
    > Fiverr - best turnaround times and least hassle, you can see all the gigs, pricing, and expertise up front. But have to do hard filtering. I certainly get a "fast and simple" vibe from the app. But what is the experience in practice? Do you get (semi)functional work or just a 3rd country bot trying to upsale u ? I agree you need to in a "good PM" mode for these services
    - josephjrobison 6y ago
      Fiverr is excellent for very tight well defined projects. There must be something that Fiverr is doing to incentivize the freelancers to deliver quickly. They are very fast. I have yet to work on a complex project. What I would do would be to take tiny starting points of the complex project and test it with a few of them.
- bawolff 6y ago
  I used upwork when i was between jobs and wanted some side work before i found something more permanent. I managed to get a ~$100/hr gig. Although honestly it still didn't seem worth it in the end. Freelancing sucks.
ArtTimeInvestor 6y ago
It will be interesting to see a third public company building a work marketplace. Upwork and Fiverr are already a godsend when you build a startup. But they still leave a lot to be desired. From a buyers perspective, Upwork feels more solid than Fiverr. In terms of freelancers and system functionality. One thing that is annoying on both platforms is that they send you an invoice after every gig. The first one that will offer to send you one combined invoice per month will win my trust in a big way. In my opinion, the weakness of both, Upwork and Fiverr is that they focus too much on the demand side. It is really hard to find real experts. For example developers, who are writing clean code and refactor their stuff before they deliver. You usually get something that works but is a bunch of chaos under the hood. I think it is telling, that Fiverr's affiliate program only pays when you bring them buyers. They should find a way to pay for talent as well. Speaking of affiliate programs: I think it is a mistake on Upwork's side to not have an affiliate program at all. Look at the biggest market place in the world: Amazon. Search for any product name on Google and you basically get a search results page full of links to pages that promote Amazon. Affiliates bring in qualified visitors so much cheaper then advertisements.
- praptak 6y ago
  Being a commodity sucks. If you are an expert you have better options than putting yourself for sale as commodity.
  - antupis 6y ago
    yeah it is business model problem because those mystical 10x programmers are not commodities and Fiverr and Upwork are tuned for commodity business like logo design etc.
    - Frost1x 6y ago
      If you've ever tried logo design, I'd argue it's not really a commodity either. I've attempted it multiple times and it's non-trivial to create a good quality logo for a business. A lot of experience and creativity come to play in those tiny little ubiquitous graphics, not just the technical execution skill (anyone here can probably slop together a vector graphic logo in a pinch). None the less, graphic designers lost this corner of the market and were out leveraged and forced to work in an environment that wants to treat good logo design as a commodity. Personally, I see the logo contract work example as a cautionary tale of how to not let businesses push software into the same world. Any profession driven by a lot of underlying passion (software development falls here) is vulnerable to such exploitation leveraging the passion aspect. The gaming industry is a great example of this. Highly complex, highly technical, yet there are many slaving hours away in burnout conditions at rates below what their skills could obtain but their passion holds them in place. Fortunately I think most developers worth their salt are intelligent enough to recognize this sort of exploitation and simply shift away from these situations and realize the costs they've paid not to undermine other developers in the process. I'm not sure if that will maintain forever though. There will always be demand for talented and experienced developers but the market may be able to do 80% of what they can achieve at a fraction of the cost and simply push the remaining 20% cost as a lack of quality onto the consumer--it wouldn't be the first time.
konschubert 6y ago
Well, LinkedIn also has stories.
Ayesh 6y ago
I used to be a freelancer, finding work mainly on Upwork, and I loathe them now. What started as a 10% commission was upped to 20%, and they tried to do various tricks on both clients and freelancers to a point that I stopped doing freelance work altogether. It was a great platform, and I don't think a 10% clear cut wasn't enough for them for an organic growth. Another thing I loathe is LinkedIn. I'm sure many people find their next job through LinkedIn, but it baffles me why LinkedIn would even exist today, being an social network, communication platform, a portfolio, and all of them in a very awkward position, and not being very good at any of them. Now they want to be a freelancer market place too?
- wsc981 6y ago
  I work through Arc.dev [0] and I like them. From what I understand Arc asks no commission, so I am not sure how they actually make money. You set your own rates and that's what clients pay. Perhaps clients pay a one-time fee upon finding a suitable contractor? There doesn't seem to be a race to the bottom on Arc.dev with regards to rates. There's a vetting process, but not as difficult as TopTal imo. You can get an idea on the rates of freelancers on Arc by reading the following: https://arc.dev/remote-developer-salary https://arc.dev/remote-developer-salary --- [0]: https://arc.dev https://arc.dev
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    Arc takes ~15-30%, they just take it from the client's side instead of the freelancer; but your rate isn't the one the client is paying. I do like them a lot though and have gotten clients through them (and codementor; though that last one is, too, getting polluted with very-low-level coders just randomly accepting jobs they do not have the skills for; having used it as a client recently, I've been less impressed)
- mcenedella 6y ago
  How specifically, do the commission fees work on a per contract basis?
  - 6y ago
cute_boi 6y ago
I remember most people working on fiverr and upwork just to find better client. Later they will talk on private channels to avoid paying fiverr 20%. Fiverr is not good anyway they take 20% from workers (as well as some amount from sellers) creating a illusion that they only take 20%. I guess more competition on gig marketplace would be nice.
asperous 6y ago
There are actually quite a few of these sites: https://github.com/engineerapart/TheRemoteFreelancer https://github.com/engineerapart/TheRemoteFreelancer There is a new chart of how the ranking of these sites have shifted over time: https://public.tableau.com/profile/andrew.chase#!/vizhome/theremotefreelancer/AlexaRankOverTime https://public.tableau.com/profile/andrew.chase#!/vizhome/th...
gajus 6y ago
We are building one too https://www.producthunt.com/posts/contra-3 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/contra-3
- amir734jj 6y ago
  Awesome. Looks nice. You should share/post it as "Show HN"
deleted 6y ago
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Lammy 6y ago
* Microsoft are building a gig marketplace under their LinkedIn brand, taking on UpWork and Fiverr
- spoonjim 6y ago
  This is a decision that the Microsoft CEO gets briefed on, and can veto, but largely an independent subsidiary doing something like this doesn’t come from the mother ship.
  - cheschire 6y ago
    I hope you're that forgiving by default to all leaders who's organizations / countries make controversial decisions, and aren't just being a Microsoft apologist.
    - XenophileJKO 6y ago
      LinkedIn largely is independent. Especially on smaller product decisions like this. We already had something like this for years as a limited release product. It was called "ProFinder".
    - spoonjim 6y ago
      Why an apologist? I don’t even think this is a decision that Microsoft or LinkedIn needs to apologize for. Is this already a scandal somehow?
  - Lammy 6y ago
    > independent subsidiary I hope you will forgive me if I refuse to believe in such a thing having worked at large companies (non-Microsoft, tbf)
    - spoonjim 6y ago
      With a lot of large independent subsidiaries, the main company CEO’s decision is firing and hiring the subsidiary CEO and not a whole lot more. The parent company’s management often doesn’t have the bandwidth to get deeply involved so will just veto major decisions.
mcenedella 6y ago
I’ve been on Upwork as a buyer for years. It’s tremendous for getting great talent on a short term basis. Top rate I’ve paid I think is some close to or just over $100/hour, so it’s definitely not just for low-end stuff. I’ve learned (the hard way) about being very, very clear with deliverables and expectations. Based on the average response I get on Upwork, it would seem the median buyer is much more susceptible to contractors blowing smoke. So one has to be careful. But overall, as several hundred thousand dollars client over the years, it’s been a godsend.
- bawolff 6y ago
  > $100/hour, so it’s definitely not just for low-end stuff. Maybe not low-end, but that's still probably the lower end of mid-end.
  - gppk 6y ago
    On a global marketplace? $100/hour is a ridiculously good rate for a large % of workers. Maybe not in SF or Tech Hubs but for a graphics designer in India, or Eastern Europe?
    - bawolff 6y ago
      High-end, by definition, is not a large percentage of workers. High end is the workers on the high end of the compensation scale. Those type of people arent going to be on a site like upwork, but they make a hell of a lot more than $100/hr.
      - young_unixer 6y ago
        They are the high end in the global market. Only in very rich countries $100/hr could be considered "normal" or not high-end.
      - newswasboring 6y ago
        You are conflating price and quality. If there are two top level people equally good one will undercut the other. And if one lives in Bangalore and the other in SF the first will undercut massively. SF living expenses are an exception on a global market place.
deleted 6y ago
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CryptoPunk 6y ago
Hopefully cryptocurrency payments is an option. ZK-Rollups now enable Visa scale throughput for payments on Ethereum so crypto is primed for widespread usage. Linkedin could stick with USDC, which is an FDIC insured USD-backed ERC20 token, to avoid the volatility associated with crypto-assets, while providing a more seamless globally accessible alternative to the legacy banking/payments system. EDIT: privacy is still a big issue though. Linkedin's payment graph would be published to the blockchain with no obfuscation, which would undoubtedly create significant liabilities. Privacy is data and computationally intensive, so ZK-Rollup throughput capacity would decline from 3,000 tps to 300 tps with confidentiality added.
- KDJohnBrown 6y ago
  Normally I would scoff at this, but having had to physically chase down customers before over bounced checks, I could really get behind something unreturnable like cryptocurrency.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    Of course, people on the receiving end of a payment love un-reversible payments. The same is not so true for people who are sending said payment and expecting that work gets done.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      If only someone would make a gig marketplace website that could act as an escrow, collecting money upfront and distributing once the work is done.
      - KDJohnBrown 6y ago
        Trust is difficult. How do you programmatically define “done” so that the customer cannot screw you?
  - mytailorisrich 6y ago
    Good luck reversing a bank transfer.
seanwilson 6y ago
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’s easy to bill your time using the Upwork desktop app. ... > When you have logging turned on, the app takes random screen captures six times per hour—once per 10-minute billing segment. Anything visible on your screen will display in your Work Diary, but you have the option, in Settings, to choose whether the screen captures your entire desktop or only the active screen. Are people aware UpWork encourages monitoring freelancers like this? I would never work for a platform that promotes this or want to subject someone to being monitored like this. Can you really not ask the client questions before submitting a proposal either? Is all this just taking advantage of freelancers who don't know how to market themselves, or am I missing something? For all the freelance projects I've found myself, some detailed discussion was required beforehand to check what the client really needs, and I aim for terms that don't lead to being micromanaged (like fixed price projects based on results not time) so I can't see the appeal.
- tmikaeld 6y ago
  Used to be optional, so the client could require this or not. Yeah, if you take a job on Upwork, you'll never be able to do work with that freelancer off-site ever. It seems they actually enforce this too, I've read of many that's been either banned on suspicion.
  - tluyben2 6y ago
    > Yeah, if you take a job on Upwork, you'll never be able to do work with that freelancer off-site ever. Why? That happens often a lot. There is not too much that can be done against it I think. I like the ease of hiring people and not having to do paperwork, so I see little reason, but I do know companies which do it a lot and have not been banned.
  - Hard_Space 6y ago
    Not so. My biggest long-term client started with me on Upwork. We did three projects and then moved away to dealing directly. Upwork may have tightened its T&Cs since then, so that a kind of 'Eye of Sauron' clause applies, though I'm not sure it would stand a legal wrangle.
hemant19 6y ago
Upwork is a pain.
KDJohnBrown 6y ago
It will be garbage, just another spam avenue. I’ve received over 3,500 “InMail”s and connection requests in my last year of unemployment. Maybe 6 of them were worth accepting. The rest were just incompetent headhunters, mostly from one of four or five spammers in India (esolutionsinc is the most prolific). I don’t see how anything LinkedIn can do will be anything but trash.
kumarvvr 6y ago
I dont know about the US, but in India, a lot of private companies do not allow freelancing during off time. The value of Upwork is that it is separated from the real world, as in you could form a company and use that front to earn money. That will be hard to do in LinkedIn. Who wants to advertise or showcase their freelance work to their colleagues and family?
- kube-system 6y ago
  It varies in the US. Both in company policy, in what is protected by law per state, and in how people feel about it. I know some people who openly moonlight, and some who keep it quiet because their employers frown upon it.
- jacksonkmarley 6y ago
  Do you mean you can work anonymously or pseudonymously? Because as far as I'm aware you have to use a real name backed by govt. ID and an accurate and verified profile picture to have your account enabled.
altairmn 6y ago
LinkedIn has a clear advantage here over the other freelancer marketplaces (Fiverr, and Upwork) especially in the unsaturated specialized knowledge sub-fields of technology. Although this feature will be gamified, in the first year at least, the freelancers (assuming they are existing LinkedIn Users) available on the platform will have: 1. Somewhat reliable employment history 2. Similarly reliable educational credentials 3. Code contribution metrics available via a Github integration 4. Reviews provided by authentic customers who also have LinkedIn accounts A simple verification process here will ensure that the reviews are authentic, thereby ensuring trust in the ratings of each freelancer.
- notahacker 6y ago
  LinkedIn's network is a massive advantage for the sort of gigs the other sites don't offer. Want to find an mid level executive with expertise in X in the field of Y to spend a few hours solving a problem? They're almost certainly not on Fiverr or Upwork, but almost certainly have a LinkedIn profile, and some of them will have them time and the inclination to do a bit of consulting work if LinkedIn presents the opportunity to them.
cheph 6y ago
How is LinkedIn still online after hosting racist content disparaging people for their skin color and telling them to be less white? https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/course-urging-workers-be-less-white-pulled-linkedin-learning-platform-coca-cola/ https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/course-urging-workers-be-less-whi...
e_commerce 6y ago
Linkedin is a sewer
amelius 6y ago
Developers become the new Uber drivers.
- joelbluminator 6y ago
  I'm a bit skeptical. Development work usually lasts months to do anything meaningful, it's pretty hard to call them "gigs". Building a website of reasonable complexity (not some Wix template) is not like designing a logo, which can be done in under an hour.
- pbalau 6y ago
  15 - 20 years ago there were RentACoder, oDesk and others. Doing contract work on some online platform was a thing way before Uber was even in basic idea phase. Fivver and the likes are just the current iteration.
- atleta 6y ago
  Not really. First of all, most Uber drivers don't have an alternative option. At least not to be able to work in their job, e.g. as taxi drivers. This is a huge difference, since developers are in huge demand. Then there are some of us, who actually like working with clients. So instead of sitting in a large (or sometimes small) company and doing what you are being told to do, you can discuss it with a client, sometimes convince them to take another route, etc. So for some of us the point is that it's a more versatile role. (And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with wanting to work in a larger company or not wanting to talk to clients directly. It's just different.)
ecmascript 6y ago
LinkedIn is really a disgusting place imo. The only people who are active on LinkedIn is people that sells bullshit and recruiters who spam everyone. I have no trust in linkedin and I am sure this new feature will be as low quality as usual, on par with the low quality stuff on fiverr and upwork.
- DebtDeflation 6y ago
  Even worse, many large companies now monitor employee LinkedIn activity as a measure of "market eminence" and "thought leadership" for performance reviews and promotions. Like everything else, it gets distilled down to a single metric like activity count. Which is why you see so many people sharing the same articles with a comment like "Really good perspective Joe, could not agree more". Do that a few times per week and you are demonstrating serious thought leadership to your management, as opposed to doing something like creating and publishing original content.
StreamBright 6y ago
Upwork is horrendous. Slow, search is broken and there are no incentives for contractors to do well. The quality of people widely varies and has no correlation to the feedback scores.
galaxyLogic 6y ago
I think the problem with monitoring workers' screens is you are trying to ensure that they are "working". Instead the client should have managers who are trying to figure out WHAT the workers are working on. To understand whether useful work is being done you need to understand the structure of the application, and then understand what kind of progress is made in terms of that. Manage the development of the product, not workers' time.
techbrofounder 6y ago
LinkedIn would be better served to buy Upwork, than compete.
ElectricMind 6y ago
How about for God's sake do what you suppose to do ONE thing in first place- a place to find a job - that is it.! But no "smart visionary" leadership think "follow facebook" turn it into doomscroll . Have you seen what kind of shit people post there? And how come girl with pretty picture has zillion connections - okay ignore I asked last question. What was I thinking !!
barrenko 6y ago
T'will be a colossal failure, but I welcome any steps that will bring LinkedIn to it's end.
mouzogu 6y ago
5-10 years a lot of development work will be considered blue-collar work started with all the bootcamps, learn to code stuff, plus gameification of hiring process, covid-remote work and an increase in automation and ml tech i can see it as a plausible future
- grumple 6y ago
  I see this take a lot. It couldn’t be more wrong. Firstly, let’s talk definitions: > A white collar worker is a person who performs professional, desk, managerial, or administrative work. > A blue-collar worker is a working class person who performs manual labor. But I know what you’re trying to say - that we’ll suddenly find ourselves as the contemptible lower class of workers. Just FYI though: many manual laborers make quite a bit of money and are unionized. Many make over 100k which is good living outside of the bay. But as to why you’re wrong: There’s still an enormous demand for devs - far more than the supply. The minute that changes, people will stop going to bootcamps and pursue other fields. And even bootcamps don’t help much: someone has to then take on that junior for a few years to make them useful, and nobody wants to do that. Not just anybody can be a dev. I used to tell people learn to code, but the truth is the average person could never handle even the simplest dev tasks. Even people with CS degrees seem to struggle for their first year (some struggle for their entire careers). ML isn’t quite snake oil, but it’s sold like it. It does some things well but it’s falling short and in need of a breakthrough. Not to mention our work is very important to these companies. Small mistakes can kill the company. Good work can make 100x+ our cost. And the better devs are several times more valuable than the mediocre ones. If developers were under real threat of being commodified, you’d see unionization happen so fast. There’s a reason companies move from outsourcing to insourcing - if the cheaper devs were working out, it wouldn’t make any sense.
  - mouzogu 6y ago
    Good points. I think we are slowly becoming commodified or at least there will be greater stratification between different types of developer with much higher salaries on one and and much lower on the other.
k__ 6y ago
Will it be like Upwork/Fiverr or like Toptal/Arc?
TargetedVictimm 6y ago
The crypto anarchists have been trying to kill me for 3 years now. They have been gangstalking me and trying to drive me to suicide. F Elon Musk F Barry Silbert NEMESIS
andy_ppp 6y ago
LinkedIn is horrendous - they could actually make it somewhat better by having two views "Colleagues" and "Recruiters" and never the two shall be in the same view. It would make opening LinkedIn at least not wildly stressful!
joelbluminator 6y ago
I wonder if this is big enough for Fiverr stock to take a hit. We'll see.
acd 6y ago
Gig economy = no job security. No job security harder to get a mortage. I guess the word comes from music gigs. Looking at smaller bands I would say that is not making stable income. I guess it could mean easier to find jobs for self employeed but that the compensation might get lower.
ldap1001 6y ago
So, Microsoft tracks developer "productivity" and submissiveness via GitHub and now drives down salaries via LinkedIn. The new developer career: Work yourself to exhaustion in "open" source to get noticed. If you succeed, welcome to the underpaid gig economy at LinkedIn. As a bonus, get tracked all the time by GitHub, VSCode, vcpkg, LinkedIn and the new Microsoft in general.
- frockington1 6y ago
  I'm not familiar with Microsofts practices, how are they driving down salaries via LinkedIn?
  - jraby3 6y ago
    I immediately thought the same thing. In my experience LinkedIn gives employees more options and drives salary up.
atleta 6y ago
They've been developing it for 1.5 years and still no results, no visible MVP? I guess that's how it looks like when a startup matures and loses it's core values. I still remember hearing Reid Hoffman at a conference (well, the online stream) in 2013. It was just a few weeks after my first startup flopped and my ex-co-founder was blaming it on not building a better quality product, for which I was to be held responsible as the CTO. So then I hear Reid Hoffman of Linkedin talking at this conference about saying that "if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product then you were releasing it way too late". Seems like they have forgotten it as an organization.
- adamcstephens 6y ago
  They were bought by Microsoft. There is no quick innovation in a large corporation.
  - adolph 6y ago
    Github sees to be staying reasonably nimble (maybe an exception that proves the rule. . . ).
- rossdavidh 6y ago
  ...especially given that they bought an already functional product (aimed at the legal profession).
mattowen_uk 6y ago
For IT dev work, how on earth are people in UK/US/Europe/OZ/NZ going to compete with low-cost devs based in India and Africa ? I see this problem in quote offers on Fiverr, and I have no idea how people in the 'western world' can compete.
- simonbarker87 6y ago
  Native same language communication skills and same time zone are a big deal for some companies/people. Similar to why there are a variety of options for most services.
- brtkdotse 6y ago
  Have you ever actually tried using the low-cost option on Fiverr? They results are, quite frankly, un-usable. The good ones know their worth and charge accordingly. Simillary, I worked for a Swedish-based multinational that nearshored some of their dev-work to Poland. Well guess what, so did Hertz and Deutche Bank and Ryan Air and a bunch of other multinationals and suddenly the 50% cheaper dev work was down to 10% cheaper. People won't settle for peanuts just because they're living in a low-COL area, they'll want to get paid what they're worth as well.
- jtdev 6y ago
  I’ve worked with many offshore devs over the last decade and really do have a great deal of respect for these folks. That said, in my experience you get maybe 1/10th of the useful output from cheap offshore devs as compared to mid-level U.S. and Canada based devs.
thedogeye 6y ago
I hope they offer my friend a unicycling gig since I recommended him for this skill. He has no idea how to unicycle.
skeeter2020 6y ago
If this follows the lead of their acquihire and is a marketplace for upscale freelancers it could be a neat one to watch. The referenced competition has a very different price curve and tends to be a race to the bottom, while linkedin (despite their best efforts) is (at least for now) a network of real people, like facebook 10+ years ago. Their profile is the resume from which you would qualify and hire, and it's already one of the best ways to find a permanent candidate so it makes sense to push into different work arrangements.
- zikzak 6y ago
  The same person that can make a living on low balling web programming contracts on other sites can make a LinkedIn profile and do it there, too. What I have found interesting while doing some recent interviews for full time, remote developers is people are basing salary expectations on the top labor markets, not the ones they reside in. If you are operating out of a marginal marketplace and have gone remote because of the pandemic, this can take you by surprise if you think "now I can hire people anywhere". My second point contradicts my first point, to the extent they overlap. Really, though, if one believes in marketplaces setting a price and some person is willing and capable of doing my job for 1/3 the cost, who am I to complain? There are many factors that play into being willing to accept the downsides of working with a team in an opposite time zone but to the extent that people are willing to deal with this, I say go for it. That's the world we have built and must now live in.
- varispeed 6y ago
  It makes me wonder why authorities have not caught up with those sites that essentially operate like Uber, except that you don't drive a car but do software development. I think it is worth raising awareness so that people get paid minimum wage and get all benefits associated with being an employee and pay correct taxes.
deleted 6y ago
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23B1 6y ago
What'd be sweet is if Linkedin worked on linkedin sucking less. I have better luck hiring in HN threads.
varispeed 6y ago
It is only a matter of time that members of such services will be declared as employees and will have to be paid minimum wage and get other perks (and also have the correct tax collected at source). Otherwise how this case is different from Uber? Just because someone is not sitting in the car for hours it doesn't mean the suffering is any different.
- mritchie712 6y ago
  the freelancers will likely "set their rate" on LinkedIn. Uber drivers can not set a rate. Being unable to negotiate rate is one of the primary reasons Uber is being considered an employer.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    As an employee you can also set your rate and it is always up to employer to take it or leave it. There is no difference between "freelancing" and employment with that regard. I think this will be a clear case of evading employment laws at least in my country. The give away is having to use the tracker which means that employer is exerting direct control over the worker and also you don't have control over what to make (e.g. you have to work to specification set by the client). I think they didn't catch on that because nobody has reported this, but after Uber there is a clear precedent set.
GiftCard2021 6y ago
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DC1350 6y ago
In the future your boss will assign work by auctioning JIRA tickets off to the team with a price ceiling set by freelancers on the LinkedIn marketplace. Payment will be through a bounty system. Salary is such an outdated payment structure
- biohax2015 6y ago
  That sounds awful.
  - loceng 6y ago
    Why?
    - codewithcheese 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- the_snooze 6y ago
  That's a great incentive structure to build unmaintainable systems.
- rank0 6y ago
  I can't tell if this is a joke or not. Sounds like an easy way to develop horrible documentation-free, semi-functional systems. The future is gonna be filled with disinterested one time contractors and employers who fraudulently refuse bounty payout.
- vincentmarle 6y ago
  You may be joking, but this is already how my team has been operating for the past 6 months. Theoretically it sounds great, because you can scale up or down your engineering needs just like you scale anything on the cloud. Have 100 Github issues to fix this week? Scale up to 20 freelance devs for a week and get it done. Practically, it doesn't work. We're going to go back to hiring full-time engineers again.
paulie_a 6y ago
Will it be as terrible as their job listing service they already have?
peter303 6y ago
I dislike the games LinkedIn plays with hiding your phone number and email address. Then you need some level of linking and/or paid subscription to communicate with someone.
offtop5 6y ago
I've only used Fiver, and only as a client. Absolutely amazing, for my passion video game project I've been more interested in the journey of getting my artwork made, and working on the video game then finishing it. Once I get all the custom models done, I might go ahead and shoot a trailer video but it's already been a blast. One thing I would advise entrepreneurial people to do would it be to just hire people who know what they're doing for some stuff. For example if you want to build a website but you don't know how to design a ux, hop on Fiverr pay $200 for some UX mock-ups and go from there.
steve76 6y ago
Take bailouts. Don't hire anyone. Make them pay you to work for you. And I thought I was tough. Have fun when your kid turns into a junkie and bricks you on the street.
tgiba 6y ago
Given how LinkedIn quality of network plummeted over past ~5 years I don't think they will have great success in throwing marketplace into the mix.
mark-r 6y ago
I go to Linkedin to find a job, not a gig. I don't know if it's possible to do a good job with both, it seems like opposing goals.
RedditKon 6y ago
This article is very poorly researched. UpCounsel isn't shut down - it got acquired by a PE shop and the marketplace is still fully operational.

excellent. fiverr is nothing but trash and upwork only has tops 25/hour jobs in usa. need a legit gig site.

gexla 6y ago
Just because you haven't found a way to make money on Fiverr, that doesn't mean people haven't found ways to make Fiverr a valuable platform for their business. The same is true of Upwork. I guess you're being sarcastic, because obviously many people do make more than $25 / hour through the platform. There are good arguments against using Upwork, though these arguments are more for beginners who haven't yet found their footing as a business offering services.
bredren 6y ago
Upwork can pay really well. You just have to find the right gig. That said I loath upwork, the company has squeezed contractors for every possible drop, added subscriptions and all kinds of bullshit around communications. I am no fan of LinkedIn, but would be happy to see Upwork have its lunch eaten.
vmception 6y ago
LinkedIn isn’t going to better Anyway, I have good experience with Fiverr. Definitely has alot of amateurish people building a portfolio quickly though.
ohazi 6y ago
I am 100% confident that whatever LinkedIn manages to come up with here will also be trash.
oblio 6y ago
> upwork only has tops 25/hour jobs in usa Honest question, but for IT stuff, why would it have stuff over $25/hour? It's going to be remote work, anyway, so there will be someone, somewhere, in a country with a lower cost of living, that will work for that money or even less. It's only normal that Americans won't be able to compete, over time :-)
- codesuela 6y ago
  not really, in my experience on Upwork for 25$/hour you can't really find someone who is a competent engineer and also speaks solid english (no matter the country).
- kube-system 6y ago
  Yet, Americans still compete at the high end of contracting work. Sometimes it's not the code itself that ultimately matters, it's the solution as a whole.
- ulucs 6y ago
  short answer: signaling has enough power to stop freelancers from competing on price until zero
- bawolff 6y ago
  Well you have to compete on skill, niche and reputation. High skill workers in poor countries still can make $$$ online if they have the appropriate skills and especially if somewhat specialized. Doubly so if they have a strong reputation for doing a good job.
josephjrobison 6y ago
Fiverr - best turnaround times and least hassle, you can see all the gigs, pricing, and expertise up front. But have to do hard filtering. Upwork - Biggest range. Can get a lot of crap, but the volume means a few diamonds. Better for open ended or larger engagements than Fiverr. Individual freelancers - great if you find the right one that delivers. The downside, is without the middleman platform, there's more risk to the buyer of them disappearing or delivering late with now. BUT once you find indie freelancer they are gold. Agencies - more expensive, but if the owner is in growth mode, they may end up being cheap for what they deliver. If already established, you get a risk-free transaction but more cost. Go to an agency if you have a big problem you want solved and handed off. Manage collective of freelancers - if you're a killer project manager that can assemble and manage, go for it. Fiverr has a new Fiverr Business that seems to add a layer on this to help manage. Haven't tried. TopTal - trying for the first time. Uncertain if worth it. They are good at sales, the floor seems much higher than Upwork. But if you're really good at filtering and interviewing, then you maybe should find your own as TopTal overcharges for the quality you get. Perhaps, still TBD.
- algo_trader 6y ago
  > Fiverr - best turnaround times and least hassle, you can see all the gigs, pricing, and expertise up front. But have to do hard filtering. I certainly get a "fast and simple" vibe from the app. But what is the experience in practice? Do you get (semi)functional work or just a 3rd country bot trying to upsale u ? I agree you need to in a "good PM" mode for these services
  - josephjrobison 6y ago
    Fiverr is excellent for very tight well defined projects. There must be something that Fiverr is doing to incentivize the freelancers to deliver quickly. They are very fast. I have yet to work on a complex project. What I would do would be to take tiny starting points of the complex project and test it with a few of them.
bawolff 6y ago
I used upwork when i was between jobs and wanted some side work before i found something more permanent. I managed to get a ~$100/hr gig. Although honestly it still didn't seem worth it in the end. Freelancing sucks.

It will be interesting to see a third public company building a work marketplace. Upwork and Fiverr are already a godsend when you build a startup. But they still leave a lot to be desired. From a buyers perspective, Upwork feels more solid than Fiverr. In terms of freelancers and system functionality. One thing that is annoying on both platforms is that they send you an invoice after every gig. The first one that will offer to send you one combined invoice per month will win my trust in a big way. In my opinion, the weakness of both, Upwork and Fiverr is that they focus too much on the demand side. It is really hard to find real experts. For example developers, who are writing clean code and refactor their stuff before they deliver. You usually get something that works but is a bunch of chaos under the hood. I think it is telling, that Fiverr's affiliate program only pays when you bring them buyers. They should find a way to pay for talent as well. Speaking of affiliate programs: I think it is a mistake on Upwork's side to not have an affiliate program at all. Look at the biggest market place in the world: Amazon. Search for any product name on Google and you basically get a search results page full of links to pages that promote Amazon. Affiliates bring in qualified visitors so much cheaper then advertisements.

praptak 6y ago
Being a commodity sucks. If you are an expert you have better options than putting yourself for sale as commodity.
- antupis 6y ago
  yeah it is business model problem because those mystical 10x programmers are not commodities and Fiverr and Upwork are tuned for commodity business like logo design etc.
  - Frost1x 6y ago
    If you've ever tried logo design, I'd argue it's not really a commodity either. I've attempted it multiple times and it's non-trivial to create a good quality logo for a business. A lot of experience and creativity come to play in those tiny little ubiquitous graphics, not just the technical execution skill (anyone here can probably slop together a vector graphic logo in a pinch). None the less, graphic designers lost this corner of the market and were out leveraged and forced to work in an environment that wants to treat good logo design as a commodity. Personally, I see the logo contract work example as a cautionary tale of how to not let businesses push software into the same world. Any profession driven by a lot of underlying passion (software development falls here) is vulnerable to such exploitation leveraging the passion aspect. The gaming industry is a great example of this. Highly complex, highly technical, yet there are many slaving hours away in burnout conditions at rates below what their skills could obtain but their passion holds them in place. Fortunately I think most developers worth their salt are intelligent enough to recognize this sort of exploitation and simply shift away from these situations and realize the costs they've paid not to undermine other developers in the process. I'm not sure if that will maintain forever though. There will always be demand for talented and experienced developers but the market may be able to do 80% of what they can achieve at a fraction of the cost and simply push the remaining 20% cost as a lack of quality onto the consumer--it wouldn't be the first time.

konschubert 6y ago

Well, LinkedIn also has stories.

Ayesh 6y ago

I used to be a freelancer, finding work mainly on Upwork, and I loathe them now. What started as a 10% commission was upped to 20%, and they tried to do various tricks on both clients and freelancers to a point that I stopped doing freelance work altogether. It was a great platform, and I don't think a 10% clear cut wasn't enough for them for an organic growth. Another thing I loathe is LinkedIn. I'm sure many people find their next job through LinkedIn, but it baffles me why LinkedIn would even exist today, being an social network, communication platform, a portfolio, and all of them in a very awkward position, and not being very good at any of them. Now they want to be a freelancer market place too?

wsc981 6y ago
I work through Arc.dev [0] and I like them. From what I understand Arc asks no commission, so I am not sure how they actually make money. You set your own rates and that's what clients pay. Perhaps clients pay a one-time fee upon finding a suitable contractor? There doesn't seem to be a race to the bottom on Arc.dev with regards to rates. There's a vetting process, but not as difficult as TopTal imo. You can get an idea on the rates of freelancers on Arc by reading the following: https://arc.dev/remote-developer-salary https://arc.dev/remote-developer-salary --- [0]: https://arc.dev https://arc.dev
- scrollaway 6y ago
  Arc takes ~15-30%, they just take it from the client's side instead of the freelancer; but your rate isn't the one the client is paying. I do like them a lot though and have gotten clients through them (and codementor; though that last one is, too, getting polluted with very-low-level coders just randomly accepting jobs they do not have the skills for; having used it as a client recently, I've been less impressed)
mcenedella 6y ago
How specifically, do the commission fees work on a per contract basis?
- 6y ago

cute_boi 6y ago

I remember most people working on fiverr and upwork just to find better client. Later they will talk on private channels to avoid paying fiverr 20%. Fiverr is not good anyway they take 20% from workers (as well as some amount from sellers) creating a illusion that they only take 20%. I guess more competition on gig marketplace would be nice.

asperous 6y ago

There are actually quite a few of these sites: https://github.com/engineerapart/TheRemoteFreelancer https://github.com/engineerapart/TheRemoteFreelancer There is a new chart of how the ranking of these sites have shifted over time: https://public.tableau.com/profile/andrew.chase#!/vizhome/theremotefreelancer/AlexaRankOverTime https://public.tableau.com/profile/andrew.chase#!/vizhome/th...

gajus 6y ago

We are building one too https://www.producthunt.com/posts/contra-3 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/contra-3

amir734jj 6y ago
Awesome. Looks nice. You should share/post it as "Show HN"

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Lammy 6y ago

* Microsoft are building a gig marketplace under their LinkedIn brand, taking on UpWork and Fiverr

spoonjim 6y ago
This is a decision that the Microsoft CEO gets briefed on, and can veto, but largely an independent subsidiary doing something like this doesn’t come from the mother ship.
- cheschire 6y ago
  I hope you're that forgiving by default to all leaders who's organizations / countries make controversial decisions, and aren't just being a Microsoft apologist.
  - XenophileJKO 6y ago
    LinkedIn largely is independent. Especially on smaller product decisions like this. We already had something like this for years as a limited release product. It was called "ProFinder".
  - spoonjim 6y ago
    Why an apologist? I don’t even think this is a decision that Microsoft or LinkedIn needs to apologize for. Is this already a scandal somehow?
- Lammy 6y ago
  > independent subsidiary I hope you will forgive me if I refuse to believe in such a thing having worked at large companies (non-Microsoft, tbf)
  - spoonjim 6y ago
    With a lot of large independent subsidiaries, the main company CEO’s decision is firing and hiring the subsidiary CEO and not a whole lot more. The parent company’s management often doesn’t have the bandwidth to get deeply involved so will just veto major decisions.

mcenedella 6y ago

I’ve been on Upwork as a buyer for years. It’s tremendous for getting great talent on a short term basis. Top rate I’ve paid I think is some close to or just over $100/hour, so it’s definitely not just for low-end stuff. I’ve learned (the hard way) about being very, very clear with deliverables and expectations. Based on the average response I get on Upwork, it would seem the median buyer is much more susceptible to contractors blowing smoke. So one has to be careful. But overall, as several hundred thousand dollars client over the years, it’s been a godsend.

bawolff 6y ago
> $100/hour, so it’s definitely not just for low-end stuff. Maybe not low-end, but that's still probably the lower end of mid-end.
- gppk 6y ago
  On a global marketplace? $100/hour is a ridiculously good rate for a large % of workers. Maybe not in SF or Tech Hubs but for a graphics designer in India, or Eastern Europe?
  - bawolff 6y ago
    High-end, by definition, is not a large percentage of workers. High end is the workers on the high end of the compensation scale. Those type of people arent going to be on a site like upwork, but they make a hell of a lot more than $100/hr.
    - young_unixer 6y ago
      They are the high end in the global market. Only in very rich countries $100/hr could be considered "normal" or not high-end.
    - newswasboring 6y ago
      You are conflating price and quality. If there are two top level people equally good one will undercut the other. And if one lives in Bangalore and the other in SF the first will undercut massively. SF living expenses are an exception on a global market place.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

CryptoPunk 6y ago

Hopefully cryptocurrency payments is an option. ZK-Rollups now enable Visa scale throughput for payments on Ethereum so crypto is primed for widespread usage. Linkedin could stick with USDC, which is an FDIC insured USD-backed ERC20 token, to avoid the volatility associated with crypto-assets, while providing a more seamless globally accessible alternative to the legacy banking/payments system. EDIT: privacy is still a big issue though. Linkedin's payment graph would be published to the blockchain with no obfuscation, which would undoubtedly create significant liabilities. Privacy is data and computationally intensive, so ZK-Rollup throughput capacity would decline from 3,000 tps to 300 tps with confidentiality added.

KDJohnBrown 6y ago
Normally I would scoff at this, but having had to physically chase down customers before over bounced checks, I could really get behind something unreturnable like cryptocurrency.
- kube-system 6y ago
  Of course, people on the receiving end of a payment love un-reversible payments. The same is not so true for people who are sending said payment and expecting that work gets done.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    If only someone would make a gig marketplace website that could act as an escrow, collecting money upfront and distributing once the work is done.
    - KDJohnBrown 6y ago
      Trust is difficult. How do you programmatically define “done” so that the customer cannot screw you?
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  Good luck reversing a bank transfer.

seanwilson 6y ago

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’s easy to bill your time using the Upwork desktop app. ... > When you have logging turned on, the app takes random screen captures six times per hour—once per 10-minute billing segment. Anything visible on your screen will display in your Work Diary, but you have the option, in Settings, to choose whether the screen captures your entire desktop or only the active screen. Are people aware UpWork encourages monitoring freelancers like this? I would never work for a platform that promotes this or want to subject someone to being monitored like this. Can you really not ask the client questions before submitting a proposal either? Is all this just taking advantage of freelancers who don't know how to market themselves, or am I missing something? For all the freelance projects I've found myself, some detailed discussion was required beforehand to check what the client really needs, and I aim for terms that don't lead to being micromanaged (like fixed price projects based on results not time) so I can't see the appeal.

tmikaeld 6y ago
Used to be optional, so the client could require this or not. Yeah, if you take a job on Upwork, you'll never be able to do work with that freelancer off-site ever. It seems they actually enforce this too, I've read of many that's been either banned on suspicion.
- tluyben2 6y ago
  > Yeah, if you take a job on Upwork, you'll never be able to do work with that freelancer off-site ever. Why? That happens often a lot. There is not too much that can be done against it I think. I like the ease of hiring people and not having to do paperwork, so I see little reason, but I do know companies which do it a lot and have not been banned.
- Hard_Space 6y ago
  Not so. My biggest long-term client started with me on Upwork. We did three projects and then moved away to dealing directly. Upwork may have tightened its T&Cs since then, so that a kind of 'Eye of Sauron' clause applies, though I'm not sure it would stand a legal wrangle.

hemant19 6y ago

Upwork is a pain.

KDJohnBrown 6y ago

It will be garbage, just another spam avenue. I’ve received over 3,500 “InMail”s and connection requests in my last year of unemployment. Maybe 6 of them were worth accepting. The rest were just incompetent headhunters, mostly from one of four or five spammers in India (esolutionsinc is the most prolific). I don’t see how anything LinkedIn can do will be anything but trash.

kumarvvr 6y ago

I dont know about the US, but in India, a lot of private companies do not allow freelancing during off time. The value of Upwork is that it is separated from the real world, as in you could form a company and use that front to earn money. That will be hard to do in LinkedIn. Who wants to advertise or showcase their freelance work to their colleagues and family?

kube-system 6y ago
It varies in the US. Both in company policy, in what is protected by law per state, and in how people feel about it. I know some people who openly moonlight, and some who keep it quiet because their employers frown upon it.
jacksonkmarley 6y ago
Do you mean you can work anonymously or pseudonymously? Because as far as I'm aware you have to use a real name backed by govt. ID and an accurate and verified profile picture to have your account enabled.

altairmn 6y ago

LinkedIn has a clear advantage here over the other freelancer marketplaces (Fiverr, and Upwork) especially in the unsaturated specialized knowledge sub-fields of technology. Although this feature will be gamified, in the first year at least, the freelancers (assuming they are existing LinkedIn Users) available on the platform will have: 1. Somewhat reliable employment history 2. Similarly reliable educational credentials 3. Code contribution metrics available via a Github integration 4. Reviews provided by authentic customers who also have LinkedIn accounts A simple verification process here will ensure that the reviews are authentic, thereby ensuring trust in the ratings of each freelancer.

notahacker 6y ago
LinkedIn's network is a massive advantage for the sort of gigs the other sites don't offer. Want to find an mid level executive with expertise in X in the field of Y to spend a few hours solving a problem? They're almost certainly not on Fiverr or Upwork, but almost certainly have a LinkedIn profile, and some of them will have them time and the inclination to do a bit of consulting work if LinkedIn presents the opportunity to them.

cheph 6y ago

How is LinkedIn still online after hosting racist content disparaging people for their skin color and telling them to be less white? https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/course-urging-workers-be-less-white-pulled-linkedin-learning-platform-coca-cola/ https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/course-urging-workers-be-less-whi...

e_commerce 6y ago

Linkedin is a sewer

amelius 6y ago

Developers become the new Uber drivers.

joelbluminator 6y ago
I'm a bit skeptical. Development work usually lasts months to do anything meaningful, it's pretty hard to call them "gigs". Building a website of reasonable complexity (not some Wix template) is not like designing a logo, which can be done in under an hour.
pbalau 6y ago
15 - 20 years ago there were RentACoder, oDesk and others. Doing contract work on some online platform was a thing way before Uber was even in basic idea phase. Fivver and the likes are just the current iteration.
atleta 6y ago
Not really. First of all, most Uber drivers don't have an alternative option. At least not to be able to work in their job, e.g. as taxi drivers. This is a huge difference, since developers are in huge demand. Then there are some of us, who actually like working with clients. So instead of sitting in a large (or sometimes small) company and doing what you are being told to do, you can discuss it with a client, sometimes convince them to take another route, etc. So for some of us the point is that it's a more versatile role. (And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with wanting to work in a larger company or not wanting to talk to clients directly. It's just different.)

ecmascript 6y ago

LinkedIn is really a disgusting place imo. The only people who are active on LinkedIn is people that sells bullshit and recruiters who spam everyone. I have no trust in linkedin and I am sure this new feature will be as low quality as usual, on par with the low quality stuff on fiverr and upwork.

DebtDeflation 6y ago
Even worse, many large companies now monitor employee LinkedIn activity as a measure of "market eminence" and "thought leadership" for performance reviews and promotions. Like everything else, it gets distilled down to a single metric like activity count. Which is why you see so many people sharing the same articles with a comment like "Really good perspective Joe, could not agree more". Do that a few times per week and you are demonstrating serious thought leadership to your management, as opposed to doing something like creating and publishing original content.

StreamBright 6y ago

Upwork is horrendous. Slow, search is broken and there are no incentives for contractors to do well. The quality of people widely varies and has no correlation to the feedback scores.

galaxyLogic 6y ago

I think the problem with monitoring workers' screens is you are trying to ensure that they are "working". Instead the client should have managers who are trying to figure out WHAT the workers are working on. To understand whether useful work is being done you need to understand the structure of the application, and then understand what kind of progress is made in terms of that. Manage the development of the product, not workers' time.

techbrofounder 6y ago

LinkedIn would be better served to buy Upwork, than compete.

ElectricMind 6y ago

How about for God's sake do what you suppose to do ONE thing in first place- a place to find a job - that is it.! But no "smart visionary" leadership think "follow facebook" turn it into doomscroll . Have you seen what kind of shit people post there? And how come girl with pretty picture has zillion connections - okay ignore I asked last question. What was I thinking !!

barrenko 6y ago

T'will be a colossal failure, but I welcome any steps that will bring LinkedIn to it's end.

mouzogu 6y ago

5-10 years a lot of development work will be considered blue-collar work started with all the bootcamps, learn to code stuff, plus gameification of hiring process, covid-remote work and an increase in automation and ml tech i can see it as a plausible future

grumple 6y ago
I see this take a lot. It couldn’t be more wrong. Firstly, let’s talk definitions: > A white collar worker is a person who performs professional, desk, managerial, or administrative work. > A blue-collar worker is a working class person who performs manual labor. But I know what you’re trying to say - that we’ll suddenly find ourselves as the contemptible lower class of workers. Just FYI though: many manual laborers make quite a bit of money and are unionized. Many make over 100k which is good living outside of the bay. But as to why you’re wrong: There’s still an enormous demand for devs - far more than the supply. The minute that changes, people will stop going to bootcamps and pursue other fields. And even bootcamps don’t help much: someone has to then take on that junior for a few years to make them useful, and nobody wants to do that. Not just anybody can be a dev. I used to tell people learn to code, but the truth is the average person could never handle even the simplest dev tasks. Even people with CS degrees seem to struggle for their first year (some struggle for their entire careers). ML isn’t quite snake oil, but it’s sold like it. It does some things well but it’s falling short and in need of a breakthrough. Not to mention our work is very important to these companies. Small mistakes can kill the company. Good work can make 100x+ our cost. And the better devs are several times more valuable than the mediocre ones. If developers were under real threat of being commodified, you’d see unionization happen so fast. There’s a reason companies move from outsourcing to insourcing - if the cheaper devs were working out, it wouldn’t make any sense.
- mouzogu 6y ago
  Good points. I think we are slowly becoming commodified or at least there will be greater stratification between different types of developer with much higher salaries on one and and much lower on the other.

k__ 6y ago

Will it be like Upwork/Fiverr or like Toptal/Arc?

TargetedVictimm 6y ago

The crypto anarchists have been trying to kill me for 3 years now. They have been gangstalking me and trying to drive me to suicide. F Elon Musk F Barry Silbert NEMESIS

andy_ppp 6y ago

LinkedIn is horrendous - they could actually make it somewhat better by having two views "Colleagues" and "Recruiters" and never the two shall be in the same view. It would make opening LinkedIn at least not wildly stressful!

joelbluminator 6y ago

I wonder if this is big enough for Fiverr stock to take a hit. We'll see.

acd 6y ago

Gig economy = no job security. No job security harder to get a mortage. I guess the word comes from music gigs. Looking at smaller bands I would say that is not making stable income. I guess it could mean easier to find jobs for self employeed but that the compensation might get lower.

ldap1001 6y ago

So, Microsoft tracks developer "productivity" and submissiveness via GitHub and now drives down salaries via LinkedIn. The new developer career: Work yourself to exhaustion in "open" source to get noticed. If you succeed, welcome to the underpaid gig economy at LinkedIn. As a bonus, get tracked all the time by GitHub, VSCode, vcpkg, LinkedIn and the new Microsoft in general.

frockington1 6y ago
I'm not familiar with Microsofts practices, how are they driving down salaries via LinkedIn?
- jraby3 6y ago
  I immediately thought the same thing. In my experience LinkedIn gives employees more options and drives salary up.

atleta 6y ago

They've been developing it for 1.5 years and still no results, no visible MVP? I guess that's how it looks like when a startup matures and loses it's core values. I still remember hearing Reid Hoffman at a conference (well, the online stream) in 2013. It was just a few weeks after my first startup flopped and my ex-co-founder was blaming it on not building a better quality product, for which I was to be held responsible as the CTO. So then I hear Reid Hoffman of Linkedin talking at this conference about saying that "if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product then you were releasing it way too late". Seems like they have forgotten it as an organization.

adamcstephens 6y ago
They were bought by Microsoft. There is no quick innovation in a large corporation.
- adolph 6y ago
  Github sees to be staying reasonably nimble (maybe an exception that proves the rule. . . ).
rossdavidh 6y ago
...especially given that they bought an already functional product (aimed at the legal profession).

mattowen_uk 6y ago

For IT dev work, how on earth are people in UK/US/Europe/OZ/NZ going to compete with low-cost devs based in India and Africa ? I see this problem in quote offers on Fiverr, and I have no idea how people in the 'western world' can compete.

simonbarker87 6y ago
Native same language communication skills and same time zone are a big deal for some companies/people. Similar to why there are a variety of options for most services.
brtkdotse 6y ago
Have you ever actually tried using the low-cost option on Fiverr? They results are, quite frankly, un-usable. The good ones know their worth and charge accordingly. Simillary, I worked for a Swedish-based multinational that nearshored some of their dev-work to Poland. Well guess what, so did Hertz and Deutche Bank and Ryan Air and a bunch of other multinationals and suddenly the 50% cheaper dev work was down to 10% cheaper. People won't settle for peanuts just because they're living in a low-COL area, they'll want to get paid what they're worth as well.
jtdev 6y ago
I’ve worked with many offshore devs over the last decade and really do have a great deal of respect for these folks. That said, in my experience you get maybe 1/10th of the useful output from cheap offshore devs as compared to mid-level U.S. and Canada based devs.

thedogeye 6y ago

I hope they offer my friend a unicycling gig since I recommended him for this skill. He has no idea how to unicycle.

skeeter2020 6y ago

If this follows the lead of their acquihire and is a marketplace for upscale freelancers it could be a neat one to watch. The referenced competition has a very different price curve and tends to be a race to the bottom, while linkedin (despite their best efforts) is (at least for now) a network of real people, like facebook 10+ years ago. Their profile is the resume from which you would qualify and hire, and it's already one of the best ways to find a permanent candidate so it makes sense to push into different work arrangements.

zikzak 6y ago
The same person that can make a living on low balling web programming contracts on other sites can make a LinkedIn profile and do it there, too. What I have found interesting while doing some recent interviews for full time, remote developers is people are basing salary expectations on the top labor markets, not the ones they reside in. If you are operating out of a marginal marketplace and have gone remote because of the pandemic, this can take you by surprise if you think "now I can hire people anywhere". My second point contradicts my first point, to the extent they overlap. Really, though, if one believes in marketplaces setting a price and some person is willing and capable of doing my job for 1/3 the cost, who am I to complain? There are many factors that play into being willing to accept the downsides of working with a team in an opposite time zone but to the extent that people are willing to deal with this, I say go for it. That's the world we have built and must now live in.
varispeed 6y ago
It makes me wonder why authorities have not caught up with those sites that essentially operate like Uber, except that you don't drive a car but do software development. I think it is worth raising awareness so that people get paid minimum wage and get all benefits associated with being an employee and pay correct taxes.

deleted 6y ago

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23B1 6y ago

What'd be sweet is if Linkedin worked on linkedin sucking less. I have better luck hiring in HN threads.

varispeed 6y ago

It is only a matter of time that members of such services will be declared as employees and will have to be paid minimum wage and get other perks (and also have the correct tax collected at source). Otherwise how this case is different from Uber? Just because someone is not sitting in the car for hours it doesn't mean the suffering is any different.

mritchie712 6y ago
the freelancers will likely "set their rate" on LinkedIn. Uber drivers can not set a rate. Being unable to negotiate rate is one of the primary reasons Uber is being considered an employer.
- varispeed 6y ago
  As an employee you can also set your rate and it is always up to employer to take it or leave it. There is no difference between "freelancing" and employment with that regard. I think this will be a clear case of evading employment laws at least in my country. The give away is having to use the tracker which means that employer is exerting direct control over the worker and also you don't have control over what to make (e.g. you have to work to specification set by the client). I think they didn't catch on that because nobody has reported this, but after Uber there is a clear precedent set.

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DC1350 6y ago

In the future your boss will assign work by auctioning JIRA tickets off to the team with a price ceiling set by freelancers on the LinkedIn marketplace. Payment will be through a bounty system. Salary is such an outdated payment structure

biohax2015 6y ago
That sounds awful.
- loceng 6y ago
  Why?
  - codewithcheese 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
the_snooze 6y ago
That's a great incentive structure to build unmaintainable systems.
rank0 6y ago
I can't tell if this is a joke or not. Sounds like an easy way to develop horrible documentation-free, semi-functional systems. The future is gonna be filled with disinterested one time contractors and employers who fraudulently refuse bounty payout.
vincentmarle 6y ago
You may be joking, but this is already how my team has been operating for the past 6 months. Theoretically it sounds great, because you can scale up or down your engineering needs just like you scale anything on the cloud. Have 100 Github issues to fix this week? Scale up to 20 freelance devs for a week and get it done. Practically, it doesn't work. We're going to go back to hiring full-time engineers again.

paulie_a 6y ago

Will it be as terrible as their job listing service they already have?

peter303 6y ago

I dislike the games LinkedIn plays with hiding your phone number and email address. Then you need some level of linking and/or paid subscription to communicate with someone.

offtop5 6y ago

I've only used Fiver, and only as a client. Absolutely amazing, for my passion video game project I've been more interested in the journey of getting my artwork made, and working on the video game then finishing it. Once I get all the custom models done, I might go ahead and shoot a trailer video but it's already been a blast. One thing I would advise entrepreneurial people to do would it be to just hire people who know what they're doing for some stuff. For example if you want to build a website but you don't know how to design a ux, hop on Fiverr pay $200 for some UX mock-ups and go from there.

steve76 6y ago

Take bailouts. Don't hire anyone. Make them pay you to work for you. And I thought I was tough. Have fun when your kid turns into a junkie and bricks you on the street.

tgiba 6y ago

Given how LinkedIn quality of network plummeted over past ~5 years I don't think they will have great success in throwing marketplace into the mix.

mark-r 6y ago

I go to Linkedin to find a job, not a gig. I don't know if it's possible to do a good job with both, it seems like opposing goals.

RedditKon 6y ago

This article is very poorly researched. UpCounsel isn't shut down - it got acquired by a PE shop and the marketplace is still fully operational.