Scams aside, were you using Upwork as a freelancer or client? The experience is very different depending on which side you are on. It’s a client market currently as there a glut of freelancers for your picking right now. Lots of competition.
As a freelancer. All the rave reviews were from clients.
After the fact, I asked around for friends that had tried it as freelancers, and they all had similar stories to mine.
It seems that Upwork is really a platform for offshore work. Some of these folks are undoubtedly good, but it's probably a crapshoot, which, to be fair, is also the case for local talent. With cheap offshore work, you can try out a couple of outfits, and not lose your shirt, if things go South. I will say that the people who told me it was good, had quite positive experiences (as clients), and they had all settled on offshore talent.
It's been years since I was on Upwork (started w/ Elance) and I felt similar frustrations. Then I signed up as a buyer, posted a job similar to the ones I was seeking, and analyzed the patterns of freelancer pitches and how the system was structured.
I started noticing missed opportunities. As a buyer, you only see the first few sentences of a proposal unless you hit the See More option. Most freelancers weren't maximizing this space. NOBODY used video. There was minimal personalization. And so on.
So I would make a personalized video for every pitch and reference it in the first sentence. Short, nothing with production or anything like that. Mostly I wanted the buyers to get a vibe for me. I'd do light research on the buyer and look at his/her feedback and reviews for other freelancers they've worked with, then I used that language to demonstrate that I had the same characteristics and skills they value the most.
This all increased my interest and close rate tremendously. I also learned which gigs to never bid on, which is a little art and a little science. You can tell by how the project descriptions are written which ones to avoid.
The same thing that would make me pass over a resume/cover letter for a job I'm hiring for: vagueness. The more specific and transparent a posting is, the more confidence I have in the buyer knowing what they need and who they need to achieve that goal. You get a lot of amateurs/first-timers on these sites, and that's often a recipe for misaligned expectations.
You need to learn to game the system like the most popular freelancers and agencies seem to learn to do; you're not getting kicked off the platform as a freelancer/agency even if you engage in blackmail/extortion for 5 star ratings - even when there's proof - as I have experienced.
It's like you need to start to create some fake accounts, or friends to signup, give you projects - worth a lot or not, or hidden, but with a great testimonial left. Then you'll increase in the rankings, get more attention from legitimate people, etc.
Freelancers on Upwork are mostly always listed as available, even if they aren't - the trick being you're listed for $x-xx higher than your previous rate - so you're getting a revenue increase if you take new jobs.
Personally I'd be too honest to trick people like that, but people who are open to dishonest or bad actions on the platform seem to do well.
> Personally I'd be too honest to trick people like that, but people who are open to dishonest or bad actions on the platform seem to do well.
Yeah...not for me. Personal Honor and Integrity are a big deal for me.
It's funny. I'm open and extremely honest. Scammers see that as "gullible," but I've been swimming with some of the world's nastiest sharks for 40 years. It's actually kind of difficult to scam me.
I've just learned that I don't need to use nukes to enforce my boundaries. Even scammers react well to simple respect, and it's quite possible to discourage them without being a prick.
I've also learned that it's not a good idea to antagonize crooks. They can often be a bit vindictive.
>Scammers see that as "gullible," but I've been swimming with some of the world's nastiest sharks for 40 years.
This makes me think of the proverb, "You can't cheat an honest man". It sounds strange on the surface, but I think there's something to the idea that if one is too honest to be tempted into dishonesty by avarice that most scams fall apart.
If you are hiring, you have to have tasks of staggered difficulty and pay by the hour. Risks still include a skilled worker being swapped out later. If you have a project with a multi-week timeline, the final product delivered at once, you are setting yourself up to get fucked.
* referring to software development. Other tasks are an order of magnitude easier to hire for.
