If you can land a contract for development work on freelancer.com you can find a decent paying job for the same work.
Freelancer.com provides nothing, and takes money out of your pocket.
Freelancer.com provides nothing, and takes money out of your pocket.
There is some value they provide - but they enforce their place in the food chain harshly.
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.
>> what you are saying is UpWork provides great value for businesses looking to hire inexpensive contractors
Or translators from Russian and Spanish, people can hire overseas for several different reasons.
That's not sfbay pricing obviously, but it's not what you would consider cheap.
Our primary use for contractors was spinning up engineers immediately.
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.