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If you want to make EUR100k/year go on upwork and charge EUR65/hour, take 4 weeks holiday and allow a 40% margin for non-billable hours. You can make that hourl
by dools 5y ago
If you want to make EUR100k/year go on upwork and charge EUR65/hour, take 4 weeks holiday and allow a 40% margin for non-billable hours. You can make that hourly rate doing any number of things that require no CS knowledge.
- rightbyte 5y agoYe sure ... Upwork, Elance etc are a wasteland of pennywise and mistrusting clients.
- nfriedly 5y agoYeah, there are a lot of cheepskates on those sites, but they're not all that way. Also, I got a clients second contact at least once after a much cheaper dev completely botched the job. (To be fair, this was all years ago, I haven't done any freelancing recently. But I can't imagine it's changed that much.)
- kragen 5y agoWhat are the downsides of upwork?
- WithinReason 5y agoNot getting any work, I'm guessing
- dools 5y agoThey charge high fees, because they’re a labour hire company
- k8sToGo 5y agoDoes anyone even hire you if you are that expensive?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jokab 5y agothe standard answer would be, yes but you must have a respectable reputation, as the parent commenter has I assume. it just bugs me to read these comments that makes it sound so easy to earn that much in upwork or similar platforms without context or disclaimers
- Nextgrid 5y agoUpwork is flooded with low-quality freelancers just spamming very low-hourly-rate proposals on everything, and the clients typically lack the expertise to vet candidates appropriately. The ranking system is gamed to death and is meaningless - all those low-quality spammers are highly rated, so having reputation helps very little. The spammers driving the rates down also mean that even if you do manage to get a higher-paying gig, the client may have significantly higher expectations than what's reasonable (as they were fed a distorted view of the market). It's pretty much impossible to live on in Western Europe or the US.
- k8sToGo 5y agoThanks. That is what I thought.
- Beltalowda 5y agoIt's been years since I went down this route, but after a while I had a list of clients that were pretty good to work for. For example, one client had a custom CMS/Webshop that was on its ass. It was a data corruption in their MongoDB (of course...) the code didn't really deal well with. They had contacted two people before who looked at it and said it was "unrecoverable" and nothing could be done. I solved it in an hour, and their business was back up and running. This wasn't act of genius on my part or anything: most people here probably would have been able to do it, it's just that the previous people were the software equivalent of quacks. Needless to say, I earned a lot of points and trust with that, and did more work for them on various things, at reasonable rates. But you do have to dig through a huge pile of crap to get these kind of things. Overall, it's not really worth it. Plus the cut UpWork takes is not in proportion to the value they deliver IMHO, so I ended up giving up on freelance work (I'm not the kind of person that's good at "hustling" in the tradition freelance sense).