
How to not get scammed hiring remote freelancers on Upwork - rookhack
https://jamesclift.ca/how-to-not-get-scammed-hiring-remote-freelancers-on-upwork-bfc6d215d22e
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mrwebmaster
From a job seeker point of view, there are also lots of job posters that are
scams or that want to receive free or almost free work.

Some are just trying to steal applicant’s money or identity, but I’ve also
seen legitimate companies asking for long test tasks and disappear afterwards
and employees from high profile organizations trying to outsource part of
their work but paying $6/hour. Upwork is broken, but this also happens on
angel.co and probably on other digital job markets.

Interestingly, most of the advice given in the article for not getting scammed
is also true for job seekers.

~~~
toolslive
Q:"So if the job is writing test scripts in Perl, why do you require Haskell
?" A:"We've found we get better resumes that way."

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superwayne
> I’ve been told over Skype that an applicant who lived in Downtown Vancouver
> couldn’t meet up for a coffee because they didn’t leave their house. They
> lived in Guangzhou.

No wonder when people get paid based on their location and not based on their
output/value. This is what bothers me quite a lot about Gitlab as well.

~~~
learc83
There are legitimate reasons for hiring someone who you can occasionally meet
with. There are also legitimate reasons to hire someone in your own country.
Or at least in a country with a reasonable facsimile of the rule of law and
fair access to courts by foreigners.

~~~
superwayne
Of course, there are very legitimate reasons/incentives to hire someone from
your own jurisdiction. I'm just not a fan of cheap offshoring.

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subhro
There are quite a few things I disagree with in the post.

> Every developer has a Github profile. If their profile is new, yet they say
> they’ve been coding for 10 years — you may want to gut check.

There might be developers that just does not want to commit to public
projects. It is possible that the developer is bound by NDAs that they can't
share customer work. I know I fall in this category.

> It’s 2019. If you’re hiring someone who works on the internet, you will be
> able to find them on the internet.

Again, incorrect. I intentionally make effort to remain as much of an online
ghost as I can. If you search for me on Google then you WILL find a profile,
but that is a profile I am forced to maintain and may or may not be the person
that the profile describes.

> Often it means they didn’t do the work, and will disappear once the money is
> sent.

Possible, but it might also be that the people are running on razor thin
margins and have bills to pay. The whole idea of selection of contractors on
Upwork and similar websites is mainly finding the cheapest guy. If someone in
India is beating others in price, it means that there is really not a lot of
runway to let an invoice sit for weeks. The guy has to buy bread you see....

~~~
aljungberg
I’ve been told by many many candidates that all work they ever did was under
an NDA and so they have no Github profile and not even any code samples.
Somehow they never did a single shareable thing in their lives - not at
school, not a hobby project, not at work.

Potential employers use all the signals available to make decisions and this
is an important one. Many of the other applicants will have solid material. It
may not at all be your fault, and yet also be a serious disadvantage.

~~~
subhro
Ever worked for Federal Govt?

~~~
blaser-waffle
Feddy Gov has their own eval process, and things like active clearances are
useful even for non-gub'mnt work.

But yeah, you can't say or release nothin. But that's true with the Fortune
500 places I've worked, too.

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BjoernKW
The key is to not hire fungible resources based on a set of TLAs but actual
people instead.

Unfortunately, the software industry by and large still seems to insist on
continuing this backward model rooted in scientific management because it
creates a semblance of an industrialised process that can easily be scaled by
throwing more resources with the same TLAs at the problem (see "The Mythical
Man-Month").

If people are treated as a commodity it's no wonder they start acting like
one.

There certainly are largely commoditised areas of software development.
However, especially for those it shouldn't matter where the person doing the
job is located or in fact which person it is that does the job.

All that matters is results. Only settle an invoice once the agreed upon
results have been delivered.

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daveslash
What does TLA stand for?

Also: Mythical Man-Month -- great book. I recommend it to anyone, especially
programmers and project managers. Not too technical. Fairly light read. Good
content.

~~~
BjoernKW
Three-letter acronym. Those technical acronyms CVs tend to be rife with
(admittedly they come in non-three-letter varieties, too), e.g.: XML, CSS, PHP

~~~
vangelis
But can you imagine explaining that PHP: Hypertext Processor stands for PHP:
Hypertext Processor?

~~~
BjoernKW
Piece of cake: It’s a recursive acronym.

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jmull
> It’s 2019. If you’re hiring someone who works on the internet, you will be
> able to find them on the internet.

This guy seems pretty clueless. I’m not sure I’d be trying to absorb his
wisdom.

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stanski
Right. Why on earth would I want a twitter account?

~~~
magic_beans
Is it so outlandish to have a professional LinkedIn account?

~~~
lwhalen
Yes.

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scandox
Some of these encounters can be genuinely painful. People avoiding video chat
is the most obvious sign often. Then you get on a call with someone and they
are as terse as they possibly can be so that their accent will be "masked". On
one occasion I was talking to a TTS.

Ultimately for everything we do, communication is the number one requirement.
We have to be able to communicate fluently in a high level of detail and have
what we say not just understood, but even anticipated and interpreted.

So no matter how good someone is in some other aspect, it's a non-starter if I
can't have a chat with them - and I think vice-versa too ... how can they
enjoy the work and do a reasonable job if I can't really explain to them what
I want easily?

I don't know if I'll ever use Upwork for programmers again. Most of my
experiences have been bad, even when I was quite willing to pay premium
rates.*

* Big motivation for many using Upwork is bypassing conventional corporate finance and the way they pay (or fail to pay) freelancers.

~~~
BigJ1211
I don't do freelance work myself, but based on how software development is
done in most software companies I've worked for. Do you not have open tickets
that need to be done by freelancers? Or are you simply looking for freelancers
to do entire projects on their own?

Most of the software development I do is done based on open tickets that
people can pick up and comment on if things are unclear. The same goes for
when we hire a freelancer, we have open tickets that can be picked up and
completed, once completed they submit a merge request and we go on from that.

That is not to say you can't have a (video)chat, but it shouldn't really be
needed for the actual development part of the job. We only have a call/meetup
if we expect to be working with them for a longer period of time, or when we
haven't worked with them before.

If you were looking to do a videochat with me when you have only a few hours
of work for me I don't think I would be open to that either.

~~~
scandox
Most of the work we want done is project based. Like "Build this API for us
and afterwards we'll take it in-house". Mostly I hire for several weeks or
even months of work. So yes interviews will occur.

As for tickets...well I don't know how someone can just drop into a complex
system and resolve bugs or add features, without understanding how the wider
system works. We don't have work of that nature really.

~~~
BigJ1211
I see, most of ours is as well. But we tend to start people off with simple
stuff so that they can get to know the stack and our software. That way we
ease them into it. It makes it a lot easier for repeat work. That way we get
to know them better and better as well.

We're a small team, but even we often have tasks that are trivial for our
senior engineers, those are perfect for freelancers/juniors to find out how
capable they are without taking too much risk (financially in case of them
being freelancers).

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toddsiegel
On a related note, this is not about getting scammed, but more about getting
the work you need completed.

I have had very poor results using people who have a full-time job and are
trying out freelancing as a side gig. They rarely seem to be able complete the
work on time, and of the quality you desire.

It's never due to a lack of technical skill. It's in part because they seem to
lack time and energy to do the work after grinding it out all day at full time
job. But more importantly, they seem to lack the time-management, and
communication skills to manage the work.

An experienced freelancer can juggle multiple projects, but someone coming
from a single-focus, full-time job often cannot.

I think this is why a lot of people dabble in freelancing, fail and go back to
full-time work.

Edit: This is more a general note, and not about Upwork specifically, but the
same definitely applies.

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learc83
How about maybe stop trying to find the cheapest people you can?

~~~
V-2
Much easier in a world where consumers stop trying to find the cheapest
product they can.

~~~
xhruso00
It’s competition and consumers gets scammed as well. Packaging&Brand increase
the price. If a consumer want quality he has to do some research as well.

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dep_b
Well the location-based bullshit really has to go. I can charge more for
remote work when I move to a higher wage country, while moving to a less ideal
location in terms of timezones. It's to no benefit to the customer yet they'll
gladly pay more.

People always pretend life is oh-so cheap in for example Latin America while a
lot of things including basics like soap and dried pasta can be more expensive
in the supermarkets. And don't even get me started on electronics.

Of course you'll get people that pretend to be from a more expensive time zone
for remote work. It's the same work after all.

~~~
mobilefriendly
The customer benefits from work being done in a location with the rule of law
and independent courts.

~~~
dep_b
Oh sure perhaps for unknown developers but often it’s the same customer I
already worked with for quite a while.

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servercobra
I constantly, like multiple times a week, get connection requests on LinkedIn
that all lead to the same conversation of "hey! let me use your name and
profile on Toptal/Upwork, I'll do all the work, and you can keep 15-30%". I'm
not surprised by any of this.

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xhruso00
The problem is that he has to constantly look for someone new. Why? Not paying
decent salary or short term contracts.

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tschellenbach
yup, I got scammed on upwork for 10k. super hard to know the difference
between a developer that got a little stuck, vs someone that is scamming.
upwork seems to do their best to enable these people as well by hiding
reviews. this guy in particular would do a lot of small projects to cover up
the negative reviews on bigger ones. the other feature which encourages this
is the upworks feature of automatically paying invoices without any checks on
the work being done. the best way to avoid getting scammed is not to use
upworks. its almost like they designed their product to encourage scams.

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jitendrac
I think similar article should be promoted, where we can identify job posters
who are scams.

In past I have used Upwork[when it was odesk]. Not much positive experience.
For them client aka job poster is everything. They could kick you out mid
project/task without any reason, they can deny your milestone work, appeal
will most probably get their side, if you got to have more than two-three bad
subsequent clients and got kicked out mid project. you can got yourself banned

In short its pro job-poster site.

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anovikov
Well... i don't have ANY social media accounts, and there is absolutely
nothing interesting on my github (about 30 repos which i built working for
just 1 client of mine, out of 100+, 1-6 years ago). Am i a fake? I am top #1
Upwork developer in EU by revenue though.

~~~
mindcrime
I'm sure what you say is true, but here's the thing... you know what that
makes you? An exception. And as a first pass heuristic, "don't bet on
exceptions" is a pretty reasonable guideline.

~~~
anovikov
Trick is, i never found out how to go beyond Upwork. I never, ever made a good
deal with anyone outside of it. It gets me super concerned because i'm locked
into one platform, but have no idea what to do.

~~~
jefflinwood
Not to jump on the original point of this article, but I would suggest
creating a personal blog, professional LinkedIn profile, and a technical
focused Twitter account.

The reason you can't make a deal outside Upwork is that all of your
information that would cause someone to trust you is on Upwork, and only
clients using that platform will see it.

