
Upwork Freelancers Who Want Guaranteed Pay Have to Opt in to Tracking Software - minimaxir
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/upwork-freelancers-work-diary-keystrokes-screenshot
======
aclimatt
I'm a consultant and have been for a long time, and I know this business. I
don't think counting keystrokes and in many cases screenshots make any sense,
so I think the implementation of this is totally bogus, but the concept makes
complete sense.

"I've never had a client expect to be able to look over my shoulder"

Right well UpWork isn't your client. I don't think your clients should, and to
another person's point, yes your clients should trust you.

But this is in the case of when you do the work and the client _doesn't_ pay.
This is UpWork covering your ass, when they really have no obligation to. They
want a way to prove that you are least did some work, so likely they can go
after the client later and recover costs.

This seems absolutely reasonable and honestly a heck of a bargain. Again, I
think the implementation of counting keystrokes seems like a stupid way to do
it, but coming up with a tracking method to _optionally_ guarantee payment
even in the case of client non-payment is the deal of the century in the
freelance world. Don't believe me? Try freelancing for a while and see how
many clients stiff you after you've completed the job. There are literally
advertisements in the NYC subway about it.

(Yes, retainers, payment up front, et ceteta -- no the world does not always
work that way.)

~~~
riffraff
Isn't there some deliverable that proves the work was done?

~~~
ggg9990
Yes but Upwork wants a metric that doesn’t need a software engineer to
adjudicate. If you say “this XHMTL validator works as specified because RFC
1913 was never formally accepted” it takes someone with a clue to figure out
what you mean. Upwork would rather say “you types all day, you get paid.”

~~~
sdegutis
Still very easy for people to bypass. Just pushes the adjudication into the
"interpret screenshot" layer. The screenshot can be a completely valid
Photoshop mockup that looks exactly like the client's specifications for the
Rails app they hired you for, showing that you pretended to do the work.

~~~
sjburt
I'm guessing that that ploy would work once or twice before you got pushed off
the platform anyway. Same goes for a client that regularly claims the work is
incomplete.

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dopeboy
I've been consulting off and on for the past five years and I've steered way
clear of these marketplaces. It's a very obvious race to the bottom sort of
situation they're plotting for which I get. I'd be optimizing for that outcome
too if I were one of them.

Here's my advice to developers who want to freelance: network and network some
more. Write blogs, create content marketing material for yourself. Go to
meetups, tap your alum networks, go to hackathons, and work your networks.
There's a lot of noise on LinkedIn but if used correctly, it can yield a lot
for you.

Every single client I've had is someone I've met in person. I get to know
them, they get to know me, we establish trust. Any sort of opening meeting or
two is free. Formally, we use it to talk requirements. Ostensibly, we use it
to vet each other.

~~~
ivm
_> Here's my advice to developers who want to freelance: network and network
some more. Write blogs, create content marketing material for yourself._

There are many developers who can't do it because they live in Eastern Europe
or Asia or Latin America and speak only conversational English.

Upwork has a lot problems but it's providing $25+/h rates for thousands of
professionals who otherwise would get only $10-15/h or less locally. (I'm one
of them.)

~~~
gaius
_Eastern Europe or Asia or Latin America and speak only conversational
English._

It’s the opposite - they have access to markets that English-only speakers
don’t. A Brazilian developer networking with Brazilian companies is going to
be much happier than one scrabbling for work in a race-to-the-bottom
marketplace like Upwork

~~~
ivm
These markets rarely pay as much as US or even UK. I've seen dozens of
developers with 2-5 years of experience earning more on Upwork than senior
developers in their countries.

Also, it isn't a "race-to-the-bottom" if you have a good portfolio and know
how to present your skills.

~~~
realusername
If they want to be paid well, they are probably not going on Upworks anyway...
These websites are the bottom of what you can get as a consultant.

~~~
ivm
But where should they go with no presence in English-speaking Internet and
only conversational language level?

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lechiffre10
That doesn't even scratch the surface of Upwork issues though. Has anyone
recently seen how much clients are willing to pay for work? I'm seeing avg
pays of about 9-10$ an hour for mid-complexity jobs. Even see some clients
willing to pay 600$ for fully functional IOS, Android and Web App iterations
of an App.

~~~
x0x0
There definitely are clients who are happy to pay $40-$75 an hour for senior
full stack eng talent. We are such a client, and two VPE friends also commonly
use upwork for 1-3 month gigs where they don't want to pay $175/hour for an
sfbay contractor. The reason you're not seeing them is good clients eventually
find a good contractor and either just run fulltime ongoing work through
upwork (for eg payment convenience) or move off upwork.

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
I was earning $95/hr as a ux UI designer. Now I run a consultancy and charge
per project which equates to 260-300$ an hour. Upwork has many issues and
limitations but if you do well by good clients you can make it work pretty
well.

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naeemtee
Not to shamelessly plug, but this Upwork monolith (and the general sub-
optimized gig economy right now) is harmful not just for the freelancers
themselves, but also the clients (from a price optimization perspective).

We're trying to solve it with a blind marketplace model at ContentFly
([http://contentfly.co/](http://contentfly.co/))

~~~
AngeloAnolin
Would you care to elaborate how you see the Upwork Monolith is trending to
become harmful to freelancers? It would be nice to see your thought on this.

I'd like to see a more balanced Upwork type of freelance work, where perhaps a
lot more people are given the chance to participate through quality, rather
than quantity.

~~~
s73v3r_
I think that's why it is harmful: it's basically a race to the bottom, and
requires unsustainable prices to get any work.

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prepend
This work should not be hourly. I think if I don’t know someone well enough to
trust them logging hours, I don’t pay hourly.

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SN76477
I just allow manual hours. If I dont trust them to do the right thing why
would I even get a freelancer the job?

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lemonghost
As far as I know this has always been the case. oDesk had a screenshot
tracking program too for hourly jobs prior to the merger and rebranding.

~~~
maerF0x0
It did/does. I did not have an issue with it, besides occasionally having to
go delete a ton of screenshots when I accidentally left the tracker running
while I wasnt working (not attempting to be fraudulent, just careless)

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devoply
I wonder if anyone in developed countries can actually make a living from
something like Upwork. It seemed to me whenever I have looked at it, that it's
mostly people and companies from the developing world who work for less than
minimum wage or close to it in developed countries... and the expected cost
matches these sorts of rates. So it does not make sense for anyone other than
the most desperate people in the first world to try to get work on these sorts
of sites.

As such that sort of labor is easy to exploit. They have no bargaining power
and are already working for peanuts.

~~~
fipple
"Not in San Francisco" and "easy to exploit" are very different. I had great,
professional work done in Russia on Upwork. It didn't cost $200 per hour, but
it didn't cost $2 per hour either. The engineer who did the work was the
vendor, and I was the client, so I was definitely the boss and treated as
such, but he was clearly not hurting for work and if I started behaving
inappropriately he could have easily dumped me and found another client. I
don't know how far his salary went where he was living, but there are many
places in this world where 20 US dollars per hour can sustain a very nice
lifestyle.

~~~
anoncoward111
20 US dollars per hour is already more than I make as a full-time SaaS
salesman in New York City, and I'm not even hurting for cash either!

~~~
jerry40
Do not forget about Upwork taxes:

Specifically, Upwork charges the freelancer a fee of: 20% for the first $500
billed with the client. 10% for lifetime billings with the client between
$500.01 and $10,000. 5% for lifetime billings with the client that exceed
$10,000.

~~~
anoncoward111
God that's horrid. Not to mention the slew of taxes one pays by being a 1099
contractor. And it's not like the clients one attracts on Upwork are
particularly good.

------
chuckgreenman
I do some freelance work through Upwork. I like the tracking software, it
shows that I'm doing work, all my hours are verified and they are guaranteed
to be paid. It's completely worth it, people who have been stiffed on
contracts before, its a no brainer.

~~~
bredren
Me too. I did 40k of work for an employer who ended up stiffing a ton of
employees but I was protected because of upwork’s setup.

I used to hate it and still I exit the app unless I’m actively working. But it
assures payment which is important.

------
Roritharr
Recently a friend of mine pointed me towards TopTracker. It's an interesting
concept, having kind of a papertrail for what you worked on can be really
valuable in any setting, even the most friendly ones, because even yourself
can loose track of all the yaks you've had to shave to fix a certain bug or
make a gizmo spin a certain way.

I've seen so many freelancers waste company time and endangering otherwise
great projects in the past and have even done so myself that I really think a
proper, fair and well balanced tracking suite would have benefited all parties
as it would have created a much more formal and clear reminder of what
screentime in this setting is for.

Obviously the flip side is that through the "invasive tracking", work stays
work and everything not-work needs to happen on another machine. This means
less mixing of private stuff into your work life which many consider something
positive, but is counter to what the larger trends in IT are. (Corporate
Campuses that fulfill every need...)

At the end of the day i'm really not sure where I stand on this, as it opens
so many positive possibilities (f.e. proactive encountering of
procrastination) but also so many negative ones (abuse of power). Surveillance
is never an easy topic.

~~~
spadros
Yeah this is really dumb. If you're charging hourly, but don't trust someone
is actually working, don't charge hourly.

If you want full control of an employee don't get a freelancer. If you want to
constant surveillance of any artists' computer; fuck off. If you don't trust
the artist to work, get a new artist.

~~~
Roritharr
This, while not really being nuanced, strikes the most important point. Trust.

Building trust for a freelancer is hard, especially one working remote with
little on-site. Transparency usually helps in these settings.

I've had to work on projects as a freelancer where there simply wasn't much
progress for weeks because they were such monstrosities, that trust and a
prose-documentation of my work was the only thing keeping me afloat. (think 5
different languages talking to each other via SOAP, consuming 3 different
databases, all with encoding problems between every possible step)

Just being able to point at all the screenshots from the bazillion different
debugging windows, log diffs, etc. would have made things much easier back
then. Swapping me out for someone else two weeks into this project would have
been a terrible mistake, but besides my assurances and some prose the manager
had to trust me. Bad for him, bad for me.

~~~
spadros
If you're a company that commonly outsources, you should have good freelancing
game. By that I mean you build a network of freelancers you've worked with
before or have heard good feedback from trusted sources.

My girlfriend is a manager at a writing company. She has a group of about 30
freelancers she keeps in touch with on top of the 10 people who work directly
under her at her company. When too much work comes in she leans on the
freelancer that best fits what she needs. These are people she has worked with
before, has had success with, and most of all trusts. She, of course, has to
try new freelancers occasionally. But the bad ones get spit back out.

It sounds like the company you were working for doesn't have very good
freelancing game.

~~~
Roritharr
The company actually had, that's why things worked out and I returned to more
projects afterwards, but it was stressful and not a job they would have given
someone else, because of the lack of trust inherent in any new freelancer.

If you want freelancing to stay mostly something for people great at selling
themselves, managing customer relations etc. that model works well, but that's
IMO not optimal for the company nor the majority of people who would enjoy
being freelancers.

~~~
spadros
Hmmm, interesting. I wonder how important self advertising is in this case,
though. I know that she usually posts content she can't get done with her
normal freelancers on this writer's freelance site. Freelancers make bids,
negotiate terms, etc, through the website. After she's worked with someone she
likes through it she tends to keep their email and ask them directly next
time.

I think you're right that this type of model benefits freelancers that manage
their own group of clients rather than through an agency, however.

------
candiodari
Anybody who dealt with upwork knows perfectly well that "guaranteed" ... there
is nothing guaranteed with these systems.

And in my experience, the people wanting more control want it because they
know that they themselves would, given the chance, betray the trust. If
someone demands this happen, you can bet they're looking to exploit you. You
don't want to work for these people, you don't want to touch them with a
10-foot pole.

~~~
duxup
I worked at a company with multiple teams doing basically the same job at
multiple sites. The guys out in CA were always talking on the conference calls
about the metrics being gamed by some other sites. It was all blame and
innuendo with these jerks. Their numbers weren't as good as other sites
(despite being paid substantially more than anyone else).

Finally the guys in CA got their wish and a stupid amount of energy was put
into finding who might be gaming the system..... it turned out to be the
people who worked for the guys in CA... their own direct reports.

------
Hello71
I see many comments saying that this is fine because it's optional. Based on
the previous posts discussing Upwork
([https://hn.algolia.com/?query=upwork](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=upwork)),
it seems to me like today this is optional and tomorrow this will be mandatory
and the next day it will add machine learning webcam face detection
technology.

------
nihil75
Had a dev use macro keystrokes to cheat it. worthless.

~~~
shawn
Hahaha. What? That’s awesome. What did the macros do?

I’ve always wanted to make a plausible code generator based on markov chains.
It still seems like an effective way to trick people into thinking you’re
working on some hard problem.

~~~
nihil75
No need for pseudo-code, random clicks/strokes will do (he used the arrow keys
to move around code and switch open Atom tab).

------
mike503
I’m not a fan of it, but it is a necessary evil sometimes. I had a client
dispute my work after he asked me to spend hours on tangential crap, then
claim I wasted his time (he asked me to do the work and bill the time,
approved of it at the time too, but later reversed his decision)

Upwork’s mediation process was hokey at best but in the end they reviewed the
time logs and gave me all but a couple 10 minute chunks of time worth of
payment.

I have just gotten used to being monitored while the clock is on, and don’t do
sensitive things while it’s happening... I can always turn off the clock quick
if needed.

I do feel like if I was buying services I would want some way to guarantee
someone isn’t billing me time for doing nothing, this encourages some sort of
transparency and attempts to curb timecard “fraud”

~~~
kumarvvr
> approved of it at the time too, but later reversed his decision

This is a very serious problem with upwork. I once had a client accept a
finished project, give me an amazing review and then, close the project and
complete the payment. A month later, he reversed the rating and review and
started an issue with the Upwork system. The problem was that the third-party
software service I used (as per the clients instructions) to perform a set of
tasks, changed their policy and stopped allowing remote clients to their
service.

I explained to the client during the development phase itself that this could
happen. He explicitly told me that it was ok, and to go ahead.

Inspite of showing Upwork all the communications, my warnings, etc, they still
sided with the client, blocked my account and transferred some balance amount
in my account to the client.

The last time I used Upwork.

------
nmg
I've been using Upwork for side gigs since it was Odesk. The tracking system
(which has scarcely changed in 5+ years) has always seemed fair and flexible
to me. the tracker works well cross platform.. I can move from OSX to Win10 to
Ubuntu (previously they supported Debian, and in the past I've managed to get
it tracking successfully on Slackware) .. minimal downtime, good communication
from their engineers. Being able to selectively trim the fat from my diary in
10 min increments on Sunday night is helpful in preparing clean weekly reports
and reviewing my own workweek.

------
cleansy
I am absolutely not surprised about this BS tracking software stuff. I was
interviewing with Upwork a couple of month back. I live in "western Europe"
and what they offered me was actually less pay than being employed full time
here. For the moment I accepted but more out of interest to see what the rest
of their interview looks like.

The questions they had were quite specific about corner cases of the language
used. I liked that a lot. However, it's also just stuff that you can read in a
couple of blog posts about python corner cases.

What struck me the most was that they seriously asked me to write up a program
to prove my coding skills - despite having send samples - at which point I
dropped out.

Several things just turned me completely off about Upwork:

1) They claim that they have the "1%" of the best developers in the world. BS.
With the kind of money they offer: forget about that. Maybe you have a couple
of imposters who don't know that they can charge easily double of what they
offer but the majority will be mid level for sure. So this claim is a lie.

2) They obviously cannot guarantee that you will be assigned a project anytime
soon once you complete the interviews. But asked as well for a lot of
engagement from your end to go through the process.

3) It was something like $6.000 per month - market rate for a contractor in
Germany with comparable skills and experience is more in the range of $12.000

However, and that's my take from it: if I ever have to hire mid level
developers for remote positions I definitely will look at Upwork's portfolio
and pirate them away. Put the 20% that UW charges on top of their salary and
the deal should be golden.

------
swedish_mafia
Run the tracker in a virtual machine running locally. Run your “work” apps in
that vm.

This is so stupid.

~~~
juice_bus
This is what I was planning to do when I landed my client but they trust me
and enabled the option to log "manual hours".

I don't trust UpWork anymore than I trust PayPal so as far "guaranteed" hours
are concerned it doesn't matter - I withdraw my funds every week.

------
sparrish
Even with this screenshot tracking, I've been swindled on Upwork by fake devs.
They take the time to fake it, why not just do the work?

~~~
justwalt
It probably has more to do with not wanting be constantly spied on. That’s how
I think I would feel, anyway.

------
kschlagel
Shamefully hijacking, I’m actually building something similar but it
_does_not_track_keystrokes_or_take_screenshots_ because we agree that that is
too intrusive. It’s made for lawyers to match their file activity with time
entries.

[https://griffn.io/](https://griffn.io/)

We’re also YC Winter 18 hopefuls..!

~~~
rob_b
I believe ‘his’ should be ‘he’ in this context - “His has built widely used
software ranging from award-winning individual apps to corporate workforce
software.”

------
ChicagoDave
The old Elance was great. Miss it a lot.

------
King-Aaron
We use 'TimeDoctor' as our tracking app at work, and it does an alright job.
It also takes screenshots and checks for user activity.

A lot of people bitch and moan about it. But if you go work in a factory - for
instance - you'll be clocking in and clocking out just the same.

~~~
jasonkester
_A lot of people bitch and moan about it._

... and your best people will leave. Over time you’ll be left with just the
ones who don’t have any options to go anywhere else.

It’s kind of a self-inflicted Dead-Sea Effect that you’ve set up.

------
homero
They've done this for a decade since odesk. I've caught many freelancers
watching porn or one was trying to sell data off the backend and freely
chatting about it.

But I like the feature as an employer. I like seeing the process of the work
being done.

------
ikeboy
Knowing multiple business owners who have complained about remote employees
faking hours, installing mouse simulators to trick time tracking software,
etc, I'm not particularly sympathetic.

------
Kagerjay
Semirelated but I run timesnapper, which is a private tracking software
running only on my PC so I can check if I've forgotten to save a doc and
wanted to see what it looked like 2 hours ago.

~~~
severine
Interesting!

Link: [http://timesnapper.com/](http://timesnapper.com/)

What would be the *nix alternative?

~~~
Kagerjay
Great question, I needed a macOS equivalent for my macbook. Technically this
is *nix since its unix flavored

[https://alternativeto.net/software/timesnapper/](https://alternativeto.net/software/timesnapper/)

I haven't tried any personally, but digging through the alternatives I
actually didn't see any resembling it. All the other alternatives were
designed to manage employees & their time. None of them seemed to offer video
playbacks like timesnapper, only screenshots. And they worked online which is
a giant red flag for me.

The closest one I could find though for linux and macOS is this one called
productivity-peach [https://www.etopian.com/software/automatic-screenshots-
windo...](https://www.etopian.com/software/automatic-screenshots-windows-mac-
linux/) . I strictly wanted to avoid "remote monitoring" or "employee-
tracking" type software

I did pay $30 for timesnapper (one license works on more than 1 PC).
Timesnapper is nice, you can playback your entire day and see everything that
was done. Super useful if you do sysadmin stuff as well, sometimes you might
change a setting on AWS/cpanel/etc and it screws up everything. Now you can go
back and see what you changed. You can add a password too which I do as well,
your video playbacks are encrypted

~~~
severine
Funny, I did the same thing.

The answer below by mmel is more appealing to me after looking through those
alternatives...

I agree, that the closest is Productivity Peach, but being a closed source
Java app, and my circumstances, that one liner could be going more my way,
thanks Kagerjay and mmel!

------
supercanuck
...meanwhile, books on managing anxiety are soaring.

------
debt
I don't think this is a bad idea at all. Micro-work should be tracked for both
the worker and client's sake. Paying hourly is highly inefficient as we all
know it's very difficult to work every second of an hour. So if something
could more precisely track how often you work during an hour it may encourage
you to work less not more as you'll be able to see when you start to taper
off; the longer you work the less efficient you may become.

------
davidgatti
I'm confused, why is this news? This is how its been for ever. I get my most
interesting projects form upWork since I can check before applying what the
job is about, which is something carder to do when you talk with a client of
the street. Not to mention that you get guarantee pay every week. You don't
have to spend time and energy to force the client to pay you. Which is the
best part of upWork. Sure they get a 10% cut, but perennially is well worth it
for the ease of mind.

And the tracking app also allows me to organize my work by living notes to the
clients to let them know what I worked on. Which is always appreciated.

To sum it, up – not sure where the problem is. This is what it is, it works
and if you are good you'll make plenty of money for yourself and upWork ;)

