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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 sti

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.
    - praptak 6y ago
      I'd say that shifting away from these situations is fine, but it's a crappy way of dealing with exploitation. Quote RMS: "All in all, I think it is a mistake to defend people's rights with one hand tied behind our backs, using nothing except the individual option to say no to a deal. We should use democracy to organize and together impose limits on what the rich can do to the rest of us. That's what democracy was invented for!"
      - Frost1x 6y ago
        Agree with RMS on this point, but I think that battle is nearly lost. Opting out ("cancel culture") seems to be the only powerful choice left for your average citizen in the shambles of democracy we have left. It could just be the orchestration problem that a large population can't self organize well enough to create a healthy democracy whereas a smaller ruling class is at a scale it can orchestrate and holds the upper hand. We currently have a system that not only enables exploitation of people but celebrates it. If you can get someone to do something for you for nothing, you're rewarded and regarded as brilliant. Exploitation (essentially optimization) is fine when it's applied to a mechanical technique or process to gain efficiency (general technological growth), but not so fine when it's exploiting people and their lives to reach these growths. We seem to have lost the technological growth rate options that satisfy the appetites of the most greed driven (where US capitalism has historically been fantastic and deserves celebration, back when labor rights were strong and the industrial revolution was steaming ahead with no end in sight for technological growth) and moved on to exploiting people to eek out these never-ending appetites for growth (where US capitalism, I believe, has more recently begun to fail).
0xB31B1B 6y ago
None of the platforms will ever send you a single invoice for a group of contractors for legal reasons. Each contractor needs to invoice you directly due to US employment law. Other arrangements are possible if you pay an agency instead of an individual, but upwork isn’t and agency, they are a marketplace.
- ArtTimeInvestor 6y ago
  This does not hold true for Fiverr. On Fiverr, the identity of the seller is completely concealed from the buyer. Usually the seller does not even tell you their full name, let alone send you an invoice. This is actually a big plus of Fiverr. You only get invoices from one company in Israel (Fiverr) instead of invoices from all around the world. It just sucks that they send you an invoice after every gig. They should have an option to send you one each month. Payment could still be after each gig. Just the invoices should be combined.
- skeeter2020 6y ago
  this doesn't make sense. THe freelancer is not invoicing you directly; the payment contract is explicitly 2-sided. There's no reason they could not send you a single line-item invoice other than they want to extract their cut but not be viewed as the middleman.
bawolff 6y ago
> For example developers, who are writing clean code and refactor their stuff before they deliver If you want that you probably shouldn't be outsourcing to freelancers in general. People aren't going to make clean code if they know they are never going to see it again and arent being paid for how clean it is.
- dgellow 6y ago
  That's a bold statement. I personally do care. I do contracting work and care about the code I write. And companies I work with seem to appreciate.
- hnarn 6y ago
  > arent being paid for how clean it is To be fair, a lot of full-time developers in big companies also do not get paid for how clean the code is, because no one cares. I'd probably lean more towards personal character deciding this than just looking at people behaving only and always as incentives tell them to in any situation. Some people take pride in their code and some don't.
  - robjan 6y ago
    The difference is if you are an employee you are more likely to need to make changes to your own messy code so there is an incentive to keep it clean
    - hnarn 6y ago
      All I'm saying is that I don't think it's as simple as "you either have incentive or you don't", because if it was, then developers writing bad code that they themselves had to go back to wouldn't exist, but they clearly do. I'm one of them and I talk to a lot of them daily. To say that "of course this freelance code is garbage, they're paid peanuts" is naive, because it implies that: a) Well paid engineers always write beautiful code, and the more they get paid the more beautiful it becomes, which obviously isn't true. b) Badly paid engineers don't care about code quality if they don't get paid for it, which isn't true because open source is a thing. Reducing everything to economical incentives is, in my opinion, not very useful.
fergie 6y ago
> the weakness of both, Upwork and Fiverr is that they focus too much on the demand side. Yes, they only attract marginalised developers. Any "good" developer will be working full time in a well paid job. In the unlikely event that they want to choose to be a contractor, they probably have the capacity to set up their own gigs. The whole business model of Upwork and Fiverr is predicated on some sort of unhealthy combination of wishful thinking, technical illiteracy, neo-liberalism and mild racism. For this sort of thing to work in a satisfactory way, we have to look at the other, more established professions- law, medicine, accountancy, architecture, etc. For a guarantee of quality and supply of well-qualified software engineers, they have to be organised as a profession with guilds, partnerships and some sort of gatekeeping.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  Neo-liberalism I’ll give you, but I’m having a hard time finding the mild racism. As a buyer in fiverr, I know the country the contractor is in and I think that’s it. It’s been a few months since I bought a logo there. I suppose I could think “I don’t like people from country X, so I won’t offer any work to someone from there”, but if I thought that way, it seems my preferences are easier to enforce in other contexts than in these gig platforms.
  - tluyben2 6y ago
    Not sure what your parent meant, but I know plenty of companies who hire on Upwork and Fiverr a lot and immediately filter out people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh because of prior experience with (extremely) bad quality.
skeeter2020 6y ago
I agree this could be a space to watch. With global trends there is definitely demand for quality freelancers that are cheaper than my local network. Linkedin is very well positioned to serve both sides of this market.
varispeed 6y ago
Do you know why those companies like Fiverr didn't get the same treatment as Uber? In the end it is a pretty much the same business model.
- tyingq 6y ago
  If you mean the California law, I think the big difference is that under AB5, workers can only be independent contractors if the work they do is "outside the usual course of a company's business". There's no way driving for Uber can ever meet that criteria. Fiverr, on the other hand, often meets that definition. The US federal rules are more subjective, but more generally about "control". Not as stark a difference as the AB5 example, but it does feel like Fiverr workers have more control over things like "picking their tools", "exactly how to do the work", etc.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    In the UK this type of work would get caught by IR35, which I understand would be similar to AB5. As an employee you can also pick your own tools or figure out how to do the work by yourself - these are not determining factors at least here where I live. What tips it over the IR35 is having to log your hours and work to the specification given by the "client". This is no different than normal employment except you and the "client" don't pay the right tax and you don't get any employment rights. Probably nobody has seriously took a bite into it, but after Uber precedent this may change.
    - tyingq 6y ago
      "As an employee you can also pick your own tools or figure out how to do the work by yourself" That hasn't really been my experience doing software development as an employee. They mandate lots of things like methodology (scrum, scaled agile, etc), tools like their standard IDE, coding standards, style guides, mandatory use of JIRA or similar, SCM standards, which languages are allowed, and so on. I'm aware some places might be highly flexible, but I assume that's less common.

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.
  - praptak 6y ago
    I'd say that shifting away from these situations is fine, but it's a crappy way of dealing with exploitation. Quote RMS: "All in all, I think it is a mistake to defend people's rights with one hand tied behind our backs, using nothing except the individual option to say no to a deal. We should use democracy to organize and together impose limits on what the rich can do to the rest of us. That's what democracy was invented for!"
    - Frost1x 6y ago
      Agree with RMS on this point, but I think that battle is nearly lost. Opting out ("cancel culture") seems to be the only powerful choice left for your average citizen in the shambles of democracy we have left. It could just be the orchestration problem that a large population can't self organize well enough to create a healthy democracy whereas a smaller ruling class is at a scale it can orchestrate and holds the upper hand. We currently have a system that not only enables exploitation of people but celebrates it. If you can get someone to do something for you for nothing, you're rewarded and regarded as brilliant. Exploitation (essentially optimization) is fine when it's applied to a mechanical technique or process to gain efficiency (general technological growth), but not so fine when it's exploiting people and their lives to reach these growths. We seem to have lost the technological growth rate options that satisfy the appetites of the most greed driven (where US capitalism has historically been fantastic and deserves celebration, back when labor rights were strong and the industrial revolution was steaming ahead with no end in sight for technological growth) and moved on to exploiting people to eek out these never-ending appetites for growth (where US capitalism, I believe, has more recently begun to fail).

0xB31B1B 6y ago

None of the platforms will ever send you a single invoice for a group of contractors for legal reasons. Each contractor needs to invoice you directly due to US employment law. Other arrangements are possible if you pay an agency instead of an individual, but upwork isn’t and agency, they are a marketplace.

ArtTimeInvestor 6y ago
This does not hold true for Fiverr. On Fiverr, the identity of the seller is completely concealed from the buyer. Usually the seller does not even tell you their full name, let alone send you an invoice. This is actually a big plus of Fiverr. You only get invoices from one company in Israel (Fiverr) instead of invoices from all around the world. It just sucks that they send you an invoice after every gig. They should have an option to send you one each month. Payment could still be after each gig. Just the invoices should be combined.
skeeter2020 6y ago
this doesn't make sense. THe freelancer is not invoicing you directly; the payment contract is explicitly 2-sided. There's no reason they could not send you a single line-item invoice other than they want to extract their cut but not be viewed as the middleman.

bawolff 6y ago

> For example developers, who are writing clean code and refactor their stuff before they deliver If you want that you probably shouldn't be outsourcing to freelancers in general. People aren't going to make clean code if they know they are never going to see it again and arent being paid for how clean it is.

dgellow 6y ago
That's a bold statement. I personally do care. I do contracting work and care about the code I write. And companies I work with seem to appreciate.
hnarn 6y ago
> arent being paid for how clean it is To be fair, a lot of full-time developers in big companies also do not get paid for how clean the code is, because no one cares. I'd probably lean more towards personal character deciding this than just looking at people behaving only and always as incentives tell them to in any situation. Some people take pride in their code and some don't.
- robjan 6y ago
  The difference is if you are an employee you are more likely to need to make changes to your own messy code so there is an incentive to keep it clean
  - hnarn 6y ago
    All I'm saying is that I don't think it's as simple as "you either have incentive or you don't", because if it was, then developers writing bad code that they themselves had to go back to wouldn't exist, but they clearly do. I'm one of them and I talk to a lot of them daily. To say that "of course this freelance code is garbage, they're paid peanuts" is naive, because it implies that: a) Well paid engineers always write beautiful code, and the more they get paid the more beautiful it becomes, which obviously isn't true. b) Badly paid engineers don't care about code quality if they don't get paid for it, which isn't true because open source is a thing. Reducing everything to economical incentives is, in my opinion, not very useful.

fergie 6y ago

> the weakness of both, Upwork and Fiverr is that they focus too much on the demand side. Yes, they only attract marginalised developers. Any "good" developer will be working full time in a well paid job. In the unlikely event that they want to choose to be a contractor, they probably have the capacity to set up their own gigs. The whole business model of Upwork and Fiverr is predicated on some sort of unhealthy combination of wishful thinking, technical illiteracy, neo-liberalism and mild racism. For this sort of thing to work in a satisfactory way, we have to look at the other, more established professions- law, medicine, accountancy, architecture, etc. For a guarantee of quality and supply of well-qualified software engineers, they have to be organised as a profession with guilds, partnerships and some sort of gatekeeping.

sokoloff 6y ago
Neo-liberalism I’ll give you, but I’m having a hard time finding the mild racism. As a buyer in fiverr, I know the country the contractor is in and I think that’s it. It’s been a few months since I bought a logo there. I suppose I could think “I don’t like people from country X, so I won’t offer any work to someone from there”, but if I thought that way, it seems my preferences are easier to enforce in other contexts than in these gig platforms.
- tluyben2 6y ago
  Not sure what your parent meant, but I know plenty of companies who hire on Upwork and Fiverr a lot and immediately filter out people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh because of prior experience with (extremely) bad quality.

skeeter2020 6y ago

I agree this could be a space to watch. With global trends there is definitely demand for quality freelancers that are cheaper than my local network. Linkedin is very well positioned to serve both sides of this market.

varispeed 6y ago

Do you know why those companies like Fiverr didn't get the same treatment as Uber? In the end it is a pretty much the same business model.

tyingq 6y ago
If you mean the California law, I think the big difference is that under AB5, workers can only be independent contractors if the work they do is "outside the usual course of a company's business". There's no way driving for Uber can ever meet that criteria. Fiverr, on the other hand, often meets that definition. The US federal rules are more subjective, but more generally about "control". Not as stark a difference as the AB5 example, but it does feel like Fiverr workers have more control over things like "picking their tools", "exactly how to do the work", etc.
- varispeed 6y ago
  In the UK this type of work would get caught by IR35, which I understand would be similar to AB5. As an employee you can also pick your own tools or figure out how to do the work by yourself - these are not determining factors at least here where I live. What tips it over the IR35 is having to log your hours and work to the specification given by the "client". This is no different than normal employment except you and the "client" don't pay the right tax and you don't get any employment rights. Probably nobody has seriously took a bite into it, but after Uber precedent this may change.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    "As an employee you can also pick your own tools or figure out how to do the work by yourself" That hasn't really been my experience doing software development as an employee. They mandate lots of things like methodology (scrum, scaled agile, etc), tools like their standard IDE, coding standards, style guides, mandatory use of JIRA or similar, SCM standards, which languages are allowed, and so on. I'm aware some places might be highly flexible, but I assume that's less common.