It's a completely unsubstantiated ragebait post that's also been posted previously. The only thing a moderator should do with it is drop it into the Trench of Terrible Posts.
The next time you think about using a platform / marketplace for freelance work just repeat this to yourself:
"I should spend a large portion of my life to become an expert in my craft, and then I should agree to have my privacy stripped away from me while I race to the bottom and undercut my competition because I will actively place myself into situations where I have the highest competition to ensure I receive the lowest rates. Lastly, I will bust my butt and bend the world to satisfy clients who take advantage of me."
Then it starts to make total sense on what you should avoid them like the plague.
Really, just put in the leg work and build up your own network[0]. It's so worth it.
Seriously, this guy knows what he is talking about. Building that network is hard and not fun, and if you are introverted, it's really tough. So do it online in IRC, Slack, or on open source projects or forums!
90% of a freelancer's job is finding their clients. The 10% that's the work is actually easy since you usually know what you're doing, and everything that is required. Finding clients is scary and difficult and uncomfortable. But it's 90% of the job, dammit!
If you don't like that, likely you should find other ways of working.
And a good network helps you find the "good customers".
Picking good customers / learning how to and etc is such an important thing... for everyone. Individuals and businesses alike, regardless if you're a freelancer or not.
I have used e-lance and upwork to the tune of about $140,000 and in my last year of hiring on UpWork we plugged $36,000 through them. Generally they've been pretty good and usually fast and fair to act, though in all my time of using them I've only had 3 bad experiences, 2 of them were resolved quickly and well, the third was a shit show.
I think a lot of people get screwed on UpWork because someone posts a shitty outline of a job and then expects the world to be delivered for $5. I don't operate like that, we treat it like hiring normally - we thoroughly interview and the spec is very detailed.
The last contractor we hired was for firmware and an issue we had, we needed someone with Rockchip experience and someone who could work on it full time. We explained the problem and the spec of the job repeatedly to him and he agreed. We agreed a fee - a little higher than what we budgeted but honestly didn't care - we were getting this solved.
Anyway fast forward and he has done about 50% of what we agreed - we ask him when can we get the next 50% he said when we pay him more - we said, that's not what we agreed, it's in the contract (on the job spec) in the UpWork messages (again reemphasized) and we agreed over phone calls and emails and he signed. He said he didn't care he wanted more money before he would complete it. At this point the firmware he has done is essentially useless to us without the last 50% so I go to UpWork and explain everything - hoping they would give him a nudge - we had everything outlined on their system - their response - you need to pay him. I was baffled. So I opened a credit card dispute to get the money back.
UpWork's behaviour became down right embarassing. The disputed amount was in the range of about $1000 and they became so hilariously hostile, then angry, then sorry, then hostile, then derrogatory, and eventually demeaning (offering us $50 credit if we withdraw the dispute) we said no. They said they wouldclose our account - we said fine.
How stupid of a company do you have to be - not only that - we had about $30,000 more lined up for the next 6 months - now we just go through our network and other job boards. We will NEVER use them again.
Based on what I’ve seen over the years, I always had this guess that odesk/upwork was outsourcing their customer service through their own platform. That sort of thing can explain really bizarre behavior and responses which make more sense in the context of the other party not being an actual employee of the company.
> The last contractor we hired was for firmware and an issue we had, we needed someone with Rockchip experience and someone who could work on it full time.
"Full time" for $1000!
And it was an "issue with Rockchip", which sounds exactly like a problem that could be easily specified but impossible to predict how many hours it would take to fix.
GP seems like a rant from someone abusing a fixed price worker.
I do freelance embedded systems development. I do fixed bid work because I prefer it that way.
If I bid $2,000 to produce something, I either produce it for $2,000 or I say (hopefully within the first day) "sorry, I underbid this. I need to re-quote you, or you can have your down payment back." I've "eaten" quite a few underbids and only once returned a down payment and ended the job because the buyer kept increasing the scope.
OP's not "abusing a fixed price worker," he's holding them to what they agreed to do.
I did a lot of work on similar freelancing sites in the 2000s. While it is true that there is always more than one side to the story, there’s also a massive power imbalance with these services.
Most of the workers come from outside of the US, work for already ridiculously low fees, and they have no recourse if they do end up having their payments cancelled or their accounts frozen / locked.
You need a third party to prevent abuses, like you don't get paid. But the issue is that this third party does not want you to build a relation between developer and the employer because if you build trust then you don't need the third party.
This is how I started, I found some small projects, then me and the other person worked on other tasks, trust built and we then worked directly.
The union can act as a third party and provide a similar site. Where then the interests are more closely aligned and not affected by the profit motive. The purpose of such a union would be to get developers jobs at equitable rates for their living conditions and their home market.
Is there a legal way to create a union to represent people from different countries,that work as free lancers? I can see this attempts getting stuck in the laws that probably were not designed for such a scenario.
Some competition would help but the big ones buy the small competitors.
Not sure about actually having protected collective bargaining rights (i.e., in the US subject to the NLRA), but pooling resources to have staff attorneys, etc -- certainly possible. e.g., the IWW tries to do this, organizing "unorganizable" workforces (most recently, for freelance journalists https://freelancejournalistsunion.org/)
The only issue I see is that lawyers are expensive in US relative to how low most of the beginner developers get paid on freelancer.com (you could earn 2.5$/hour or less).
I’m not sure how you have any kind of collective bargaining when the talent pool represents hundreds of millions of potential workers. Many of those are people who will spend 12 hours a day working and commuting to earn a few hundred dollars a month.
The legal systems of the workers range everywhere from, the United States, to countries where you can get your head chopped off if someone thinks you might be gay. How does all of that get reconciled? It could turn in to something that goes in to trade agreements. Then you potentially have a situation where work is just getting subcontracted out instead of contracted directly.
If all of them collectively demanded higher wages, it would help a lot. If any of them demanded higher wages on their own, their income would drop to zero as everyone else happily eats their lunch.
Market forces will ensure that there's someone in a developing country who will do the work for less than a developed country's living wage. Usually when you have to fight the market, you do it with government, but that's tough since there's no global government setting a minimum wage. So I guess it's up to each country to adopt trade policies to restrict businesses in their jurisdiction from contracting with foreign workers. I don't think there's a good answer for how to solve this. American industrial and manufacturing workers have felt this pain for a long time.
Sure, but look at the flip side: it’s a way for people from tiny, remote countries to get access to an integrated market of software projects, and a payment platform.
The payment part in particular is lucrative for that population.
I'm strongly against tariffs, but when it comes to labor, I believe we should not allow companies to hire or contract out labor in countries which do not follow US labor laws. It's a race to the bottom otherwise, an unfair competition which hurts US workers and doesn't truly solve the problems faced by those in the other country.
For US businesses, US labor laws should be the minimum standard for hiring workers overseas.
The biggest companies will just form overseas business units and employ now "local" people in order to avoid these restrictions. Addressing this sort abuse while keeping the flow of capital reasonably free is a bit more of a challenge.
There are two assumptions here that I’d like to point out: that the US labor laws are the best worldwide, and that there is an inherent problem in other countries that would be solved if they just adhered to the US laws.
US historically had, and still has a large number of cases (either legal or just public discourse) of employers treating their employees unjustly, unfairly or with malice, despite all of the legal protection that US provides. There are always edge cases and loopholes. That said, I do believe that to an extent, the precedent based legal system of US trumps European style jurisprudence systems.
Secondly, there is no evidence that by and large the workers are treated better in the US, or that other counties are clearly inferior. International employee engagement is pretty close to the world average in most modern countries.
How is not allowing US companies to exploit workers in developing countries "colonialism"? If anything, exporting work to cheaper countries with less worker protections is the modern day version of colonialism.
As another commentator said, the US can have fewer worker protections than Europe and still more than developing countries. I assume that the OP meant that US labor laws would be a minimum standard chosen because that's what US companies would have to follow if they didn't outsource, not because it's objectively the best labor standard.
No one pays taxes and it is obvious. The infrastructure is horrendous to non-existent.
Meanwhile, I have to pay taxes and fees to support my community. From the school teachers to the street workers.
Companies here benefit from it to. Companies can feel free to move their headquarters to New Delhi if they don't want to do any business in the US. Contribute or GTFO.
Freelancer.com and similar are enabling companies to escape their social responsibilities. You can't blame them but.. there should be costs/fee or tariffs associated with outsourcing.
The OP is not claiming US labor laws are the best. The OP is saying that the US has decided that these are the laws it wants for itself and so if you want the output of your work to be sold in America, then these are the standards that should be maintained.
It’s similar to a Kosher or halal restaurant demanding that any meat that they purchase must adhere to the standards they have.
The foreign workers are free to provide their services to non-American companies, just like a non kosher butcher is free to sell their meat to a different restaurant. It’s just not the rules that the US meets.
And in fact, this is true if nearly everything you purchase. Ivory cannot be sold in the US. Blood diamonds cannot be so,d there. A whole host of products need to meet certain standards to be sold in the US. The OP is suggesting the same sort of laws apply to services that apply to goods.
Neither assumption you describe is necessarily present in the position you are responding to. The US could have below average labor protections and still legitimately be worried about outsourcing labor to countries with even lower labor protections.
This is precisely what globalization agreements don't just say "ok, no tarrifs guys". Those low tarrifs are tied to mandated regulations to out a floor on "races to the bottom".
Thus globalization is necessarily a trade off between economic performance and regulatory autonomy.
There are similar stories for Upwork (brand name after Odesk + Elance merger).
I was literally blackmailed by an Upwork contractor who refused to release the already paid-for source code unless I gave them a 5-star rating. I notified the platform and they didn't care - and the solution was for the platform to prevent my ability to leave a review at all, making the contractor happy.
That contractor/agency was still on the platform at least a year after it happened.
I've hired a lot of fiction writers over the years on upwork, used to spend a few hundred a month on getting stories written, I've tapered off a little bit, mainly because managing a team of writers was getting to be more work than it was worth for a never ending supply of mediocre fantasy and sci-fi. I even stopped updating the site I was publishing them all to[1].
All of the writers but 1 were amazing from the start. I had a single bad experience that eventually I made a good experience by just communicating with the writer, telling them I knew they were better than the quality they provided, and to just give it another go. That story eventually became one of my favorites[2].
I hired from all over the world to get different viewpoints, and my prompts were usually very open. It would be something like: An historic fiction set in your country's or region's capitol city during a war.
And I would have 5 openings for stories similar to that.
Exact same issue happened to me as well. It was a Chinese iOS developer. Did an OK job, was planning to give him good reviews anyways, until he gave the condition to leave a 5-star review or no code. Got in touch with his team leader and matter was resolved quickly. Ended up leaving a negative review.
Generally, had very positive experiences with Upwork and other platforms including Freelancer.com which I no longer use anymore.
And it seems they've found they need to keep the supplier happy as there's plenty of demand, especially if you have all of the "5 star" ratings - whether legitimately earned or deceptive because of practices of bad actors including the platforms lack of integrity themselves.
I don't remember how the system was designed at the time - they wouldn't have given me the code regardless until it was shown I gave a 5-star rating; it wouldn't matter what technical protocol was implemented if they don't care to follow it.
I tried Freelancer.com for hiring. After a quite search and failure to find someone to do the job, I decided to pull out. They refused and did hold around $500 of my money there. They also ended up locking the account. That was many years ago. Needless to say, I stopped using these websites for good either ways (hiring or being hired).
Disclosure: I worked for Freelancer.com seven or eight years ago back in Australia and know the founder.
This is a "new" post from an old and now deleted post [1] by the same author.
In the initial post [1] they state "I've been a member in this platform for over 5 years".
In the new post they state "I have worked on this platform for over 7".
The initial now deleted post [1] was posted two years ago.
Make of that what you will.
Edit: I was hoping HN would actually read the deleted post too and/or assume I didn't have a nefarious motive. It's from the same author, isn't a repost, the story has an entirely different fact pattern and the deletion of the previous story (with no reference to it when it was previously posted on HN at [2]) is at least odd at best. I merely wanted to raise the possibility that an unsourced post is potentially not the best thing with which to sharpen knives.
I literally just wanted to add this data point to the discussion, that's all =[
How about just stating what you think is wrong about the post rather than trying to be subtle and hinting at something nefarious while pointing out basic facts.
"Last year Abe said he was 15 years old, now he claims to be 16! Which is it Abe? Better keep your stories straight."
I think the thing is that if it's really the same review then the poster is effectively claiming that Freelancer.com closed his account and stole from him twice.
Why?
Well, he said so two years ago, after working with them for 5.
Then what? He opened a new account or got his old one resurrected? We have no idea.
What we do know is that now, 2 years later, he's posting the same story on Trustpilot but now claiming 7 years of working for them.
I'm not saying my interpretation is right but you have to admit that this does seem a bit fishy.
And what of that? I struggled to find work in software development in spite of claims of worker shortages. It's only due to my being stubborn and having a decent safety net that I could shrug off participating on freelancing sites. Not everyone can hold out for a better offer.
Thank you for your insight. I consider your comment somewhat cloak and dagger. You know the founder well?, Have him respond here. Please don't imply a poster is lying by selecting a single contradictory statement.
I'm downvoting you because this is an punching-down attempt at nitpicking somebody in an overwhelmingly imbalanced power dynamic. Even if it's not true, freelancer dot bleeping com does not need your cape-up. They can hue and cry about how unfair that is on their piles of middleman money, that's fine, but they do not need a rallied defense.
At best--at best--the founder you know can speak for himself.
I genuinely wanted to just add the additional context for the Hacker News community to discuss as it seemed relevant. If you believed the person this was a story from their past. If you are uncertain about the veracity of random posts on TrustPilot (as some commenters are) this was a data point too.
What was initially met with a dozen upvotes as people seemed to appreciate the context then shifted as comments were made about me as the OP and now the point balance is in the negative.
I wasn't intending to "rally a defense" and I was especially not intending a "punch down". I listed my disclosure at the top to ensure everyone knew any potential bias upfront rather than reading and then having to retroactively update their thinking.
I honestly think I'll keep any future knowledge to myself in situations even if I have additional context. I tried my best to remain neutral and upfront and it still faltered. "Make of it what you will" was a literal request and it seems HN decided that I was a shill / defender and reacted that way rather than using the data point or reflecting on it themselves.
Respectfully: there was no way you could have written that post to be "neutral". Regardless of your phrasing, it was going to be "don't believe this poor [in a literal sense] guy, do believe multinational enterprise freelancer dot com."
A "neutral" attempt to "add context" with regards to such a power dynamic is always always always going to be "don't listen to the weaker party." Always. Because such a thing always and, frankly, I expect was designed to delegitimize the claim.
Well I of course believe every bad thing I hear about one of these sites, although I did do an extra validation layer on SAML one time for 1000 dollars that took 4 hours work all in all so that was good, but I think the thing that is sort of off is that if you update to reflect the difference in time but still keep it in present tense some things, such as the been in the house for a week after losing the money, start to seem unbelievable.
Losing your primary source of income for the last seven years for an apparently bullshit reason doesn't strike you as adequate justification for extreme distress?
It was pointed out upthread that the first version said 5 years and then 7 years and asked people to draw conclusions from it. People were drawing the conclusion that the original poster had updated their posting to keep with the amount of time passed. I just pointed out that if that were the case then they did not just spend a week indoors after 7 years, they did that 2 years ago when they did the original posting.
Probably to clarify they matter they should have said - 2 years ago my life was nearly destroyed by Freelancer.com, et c. etc. but they did not, hence the whole thing seems a bit off, perhaps because they are not very good at constructing a narrative in English.
I had supposed this point very clear from what I posted before, but it appears not, this saddens me as it may mean I am not very good at constructing a narrative in English either.
Of course there are any number of ludicrous ideas one might entertain as to why the posting was updated in the manner it was - perhaps after losing their source of income after 5 years it all ended up well and they continued with that source of income for two more years until the exact same thing happened to them in which case fool me once, fool me twice applies.
We spent $100k on upwork. The slightly lower rates are nice, but the value is the contractor rep so we don't get ripped off and dealing with moving money. Note that moving money requires more than physical xfer, but also the legal structures and corps and whatever else to make sure we comply with all relevant laws, both here and abroad. The latter is not a trivial bit of work.
Without upwork, we would not be using contractors in Russia or Argentina.
It sounds like what you are saying is UpWork provides great value for businesses looking to hire inexpensive contractors. For US-based contractors, which I assume your parent poster might be, it doesn't sound like they provide such great value. At least, none of your reasons help the contractor any. And being in a system where they can easily be underbid by overseas labor doesn't sound so fun, either.
I have done several jobs on sites like that. Even though I knew there were few if any that would really pay fairly.
The reason is that those sites are a technology designed to solve the problem I had which was programming contracts. They actually do it fairly well in many cases. The problem is that most projects on the site are underfunded and poorly managed.
And then the fact that the third party has control over your money is a big issue.
To me blaming people who participate in this marketplace and saying that you can only take projects via traditional marketing and networking is ridiculous.
In my opinion having a technology platform to facilitate this stuff makes perfect sense. Now, there are issues related to quality projects, quality workers, and control over funds. I believe that these issues can be mitigated in a new open decentralized platform based on cryptocurrency and smart contracts.
Why is this random Trustpilot review suddenly on the frontpage? Is there anything I'm missing? People that had an issue with Freelancer.com just upvoting the headline?
It also should be noted that Trustpilot itself is horribly gamed and its ratings should never be taken as a signal for trust. It can be useful if you think other ratings have been manipulated (i.e., Yelp) and you find it has a peerless Trustpilot rating -- yep, they're fakin' it
recently scammed by freelancer.com and it is already on Bank Of America's fraudulent businesses list. Correctly so, BofA refused to honor a $10 charge through my PayPal account freelancer.com was attempting to steal from me. That forced PayPal to drop my BofA checking account as a payment method. It wasn't too disruptive for me because I don't use PayPal all that much. Anyway, I convinced PayPal rather easily that i never agreed to pay freelancer.com anything and the charge was fraudulent.
Just a warning, using freelancer.com in any capacity can have more downward side effect on your life then you think. You are doing business with, imho, a company that is likely surviving as a cleaner for laundered money, aka, a pure illegal enterprise.
Also - i find it ridiculous that they try to enforce non-external-communication with the people u hire. I want to talk to these guys 5 times a day, share repositories, etc. Its weird
I haven't used the platforms in a few years but I used to. I think the highest pay I ever managed was like $25 or maybe $40 per hour. It seemed pretty hard to get those projects though.
I guess the convenience of having all of those potential contracts is a trade off with the fact that you are competing with everyone on Earth that signed up and looked at that web page. So people that have $100 rent in a small Indian village can and do bid extremely small amounts sometimes and they end up making much more than their friends in the village and are happy to have it.
The reason they try to stop the external communication is because people go outside the site for projects once they have made a connection with a client. To me it's questionable whether it should be legal to force people to do all transactions on your platform. But from a business standpoint it is the aspect that has the most impact on how much cut they collect.
Btw, after having experience with certain car rental company on trustpilot, I don't really trust those ratings anymore. I posted a negative review, then was contacted by trustpilot to provide proof of what went wrong or trustpilot would remove the review in 7 days. I'm pretty sure that is not needed for positive ones...
AladinBS
1 review
29 minutes ago
STAY AWAY FROM FREELANCER, STAY AWAY!!!!!!
THIS IS A WARNING TO ANYONE WHO USES FREELANCER, STAY AWAY, STAY AWAY, STAY AWAY!!!
This company has screwed me over so many times and screwed so many developers and clients that it’s a mystery how they haven't been shut down yet.
It all started with a simple contract i received, and once i received an initial payment of $1300, my account got limited and frozen, i contacted them asking about the reason behind this, and they just simply told me it was because of outside communication, to which i responded that it's very normal call to go over everything, that is a business standard, and the contract went through the platform and so did the payment, so there was no reason behind these extreme majors they took.
The money was frozen and they told me that it would stay that way, up until they closed my account for good one week after with a simple email, saying that they closed my account.
I have worked on this platform for over 7 years, finished countless projects with full perfect five star reviews, never hurt anyone or hurt the platform in any way, and the only thing i did occasionally that was frowned upon was a call here or there to explain something to a client or to share my screen with them, and its not my fault that they did not provide these features on their platform and i had to use something else to make up for their short comings.
In conclusion, i gave them 7 years of my life; they closed my account for nothing, stole from me, and took away my main source of living.
I have not been able to even leave my house for the past week, and had to force myself to write this review, even as just a warning for people, and I’ll make sure that everyone hears about what happened to me.
I'm not sure that's even clear. "The money was frozen and they told me that it would stay that way" What is "the" money. The only money mentioned prior to that is the $1300. No where does the user say all money was lost except the $1300. They say their account was closed, were they sitting on a ton of cash in their account that they didn't transfer out? They don't state that.
Sales is a learnable skill, and in practice I found it straightforward to cut out the middlemen/women completely and avoid platforms and agents.
I wrote a sales guide here, with all the tricks I picked up over the years. I'm not selling anything or have ads, I just want other coders to have this freedom, too: https://www.disconnectionist.com/blog/sales.html
Now, how would freelancer.com know that the people are communicating outside of the platform? I guess if you exchange contact info over their channels... Is that banned?
What if you send encrypted messages via GPG? Or is that forbidden too? Just sending a public key for GPG, will reveal an e-mail address.
How do you exchange passwords and other sensitive access info without encryption?
Never get payment through a third party if you don't expect something like this to happen.
And its insane to freelance develop without contacting the customer/screen sharing outside the platform. Its amazing the guy lasted 7 years like this...
I've tried hiring artists for video games, and the quotes from Upwork/Freelancer.com were about double the going rates (I understand that the platform fee of 20% contributes to part of that). I've had much better success with free, community-run forums instead:
