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sph

Meh, that's a dishonest title.

Yes, Upwork are moving everybody on the 10% fee. But they previously had a progressive fee:

* 20% fee for the first $500 earned from a client

* 10% fee between $500 and $10,000 earned

* 5% fee after the first $10,000 earned

Those figures are per client. Start a new job with someone else, you start from the lower bracket again.

So they were basically living off short term contracts and low paid freelancers. Now it penalises everyone the same, but 10% is much more reasonable than 20%

I've been trying to stay afloat in this terrible hiring market through Upwork, and I'm ambivalent. Without it, I'd pretty much be broke. But even with a profile that has been created in 2012, has $50k billed, I've only been able to find short term consulting or sysadmin jobs paid terribly, and lost 20% off each of them because of the prohibitive lower bracket.

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IMHO, most of the Upwork jobs are upwards of $1000 if it's a serious client.

A large number of freelancers & agencies have built a stable clients on Upwork from years together. It will be a little revenue shock for them. Or eventually clients will pay more to cover the costs.

Let's assume you are a freelancer with a client relationship of 40k

* 20% fee for the first $500 earned from a client - $100

* 10% fee between $500 and $10,000 earned - $ 950

* 5% fee after the first $10,000 earned - $ 1500

New model - 40k

Am I missing anything here?

* 10% fee of any amount - $ 4000

True, your figures seem correct.

I guess the problem is that I haven't had any luck finding any serious client, due to the competition and race-to-the-bottom.

Some clients want quality, of course, but in this economy if it's a lottery to find a job in the real world, it's a lottery for those billing upwards of $100/h on Upwork.

So what's left is small contracts where being a seasoned expert to deal with emergencies is more important than being cheap.

In general, you're probably an at least somewhat known quantity for clients that aren't especially price-sensitive (so bill in the $100s/hr range) or you're a name in a hat along with a bunch of people who will just take anything they can get. The middle-ground seems like a difficult place to be.

Yeah, a lifetime 10% just for making the introduction is pure exploitation. On the buyer side we have been defrauded by Upwork providers and the company did absolutely nothing. Clear cut case of illegal activity and ToS violation, Upwork did nothing other than take our money. The FTC needs to beat this gang of criminals into the ground. They are a racket from top to bottom. Fraud shouldn't pay. Exploitation of workers shouldn't pay. Breaking the law shouldn't pay.

I don't know, it seems like an impossible market for an honest middle man to me. 10% of short term contracting being a total bust where a worker should none-the-less be paid seems like a cost companies had that dealt with the lowest of job agencies. If those job agencies could afford to reimburse its because they were taking 50%.

Lifetime, in theory. In practice, you can move the relationship off Upwork after 2 years.

See https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043210654-Mo...

Has anyone paid this fee? I think when it gets to the point of dropping 12% of a freelancer's annual income to just talk outside of the platform it's simply not worth it.

If you wait two years per grandparent's post, the fee is only $1, which probably is worth it.

If you want to convert sooner, it's a percentage of the income for that specific client/freelancer relationship, and not total work for the freelancer. So it is probably a more palatable amount, assuming the freelancer has multiple clients.

Yeah but the fee is calculated as a percentage of a full time (2080 hour) year. So it's only worthwhile if you're being hired fulltime, near full time, or at a much higher rate than your existing upwork rate.

> Taking a relationship outside of Upwork without first paying the Conversion Fee is a serious violation of the our Terms of Service.

This sounds like something a pimp or a mob boss would say.

It's hard to find any important difference between the two.

Have you filed your concerns with the FTC? Have you contacted your congress person?

These seem like real concerns and failures of the market. I know Upwork has strong network effects, so this seems like a justified government intervention

Upwork contractors reside in many different jurisdictions around the world so I won't even trying guessing the legalities. Certainly they are breaking the law somewhere. However, one thing is certain: there is a very strong incentive to not look for long term contracts on Upwork.

That incentive always was there, but it was small. It isn't small any longer. The trajectory makes one wonder what this fee will be in another year or two. Clearly they won't be lowering it.

Upwork is not an independently sustainable company. Upwork shares are worth less than at their 2018 IPO. They've never really been profitable. They rarely have a positive free cash flow. They've increased outstanding share count 26%. The things they've done only reduced the value customers receive from them (like when they decided to charge extra money to view contractor reports.)

How did they never make any money? Companies spend billions of dollars a year on recruiting. This isn't a tiny market. Someone grossly mismanaged Upwork -- for their customers, for their contractors, and their shareholders.

I've hired people with Upwork a few times and I just hire them for a single job and if I'm happy with it. I move to whatsapp and pay via revolut. Everyone seems happy besides upwork to me. lol

The problem with the new pricing is that matchmaking value drops the longer a contract goes on. Once the relationship and trust is established, they can go around Upwork for 0%.

Yes, milking the lower end is just unfair and will obviously create resentment in freelancers. A really long time back I complained to them that their fees were unfair (I think about the time when eLance and oDesk merged). And their reply was educational to me - "Why are you paying the fees? Bill it to your client or share the cost with them?". And I did start doing that. Few clients were ok with that because the <$500 crowd are the "cost conscious" (to be polite) crowd. The higher brackets were somewhat more easier to convince because they had more to lose and thus felt the indirect payment through UpWork offered them some protection. But yeah, even 10% is still high if they are also charging the other party too.

All fees get paid by the customer in one way or another, it's just how it's advertised and how you think about it.

With business-related things it's better to have it upfront in my experience.

> All fees get paid by the customer in one way or another

In theory only partially if the freelancers are competing with those who are not using the platform and just bill their clients directly.

Not a dishonest title. The word "bracket" refers to this sort of thing at least with tax brackets.

I could not find a ClickHouse expert for some project, not sure where to look such people

Not a direct answer but: don't look just for ClickHouse experts. When you hire a plumber, do you only hire experts of that exact brand?

90% of the job I apply for, on Upwork or otherwise, are always looking for an expert in a particular niche technology, and hire only based off that small nugget of information.

I have been doing Elixir full time since 2016, and got a contract with someone that was looking for a Phoenix.Socket expert—a small WebSocket server module part of a larger framework—and the interviewer spent 30 minutes drilling down how much I know that small piece of logic. In this case it's like hiring plumber asking them how much experience they have in square zinc kitchen sinks. Given that I couldn't convey how dumb that is, I had to lie and say that in all of my 7 years with Elixir I have been using Phoenix.Socket pretty much daily. And as expected, it was a bog standard job doing nothing more complicated than an intermediate Phoenix tutorial.

If someone has a lot of experience in databases, and in competitors to ClickHouse they might be good or better than someone that claims to be a world class expert in ClickHouse and nothing else.

(Not to pick on you in particular, but as a true generalist this hiring pattern has been bugging me more and more as my breadth of experience grows.)

When I'm hiring an employee, I'm looking for you! A generalist who will apply their wealth of database experience to my problems and learn what they need for my specifics along the way. I expect to pay some on ramp time where I don't get much in return.

When I'm hiring a contractor, I'm not really interested in paying them to learn, I'm interested in getting my need fulfilled as efficiently as possible. If the problem I have is my square zinc kitchen sink it makes sense to find someone who already knows about them.

Makes sense, but I do not completely agree.

In my 11 years of experience as a consultant, people hire me because they need a square zinc sink fixed, but as soon as they see that I know much more than that, they ask me to redo the living room wall and trim the topiary.

Being an expert gets me through the door, being a generalist keeps me around.

The problem is that the square sink expert filter is the biggest obstacle to getting a contract. Reason why with 17 years of total experience, I'm still without a job after 4 months, my longest jobless stint in my entire career (to be fair, I'm pivoting towards starting my own business rather than keep being rejected by clueless recruiters)

This makes total sense to me as both an employer and for hiring contractors. Sure, if it’s easy to find a square sink expert (it’s usually not), then select for that, generally though, my needs are more varied than that, even if that’s my immediate need and I’d prefer a targeted generalist to be able to solve my immediate problem with a short ramp up time and then hopefully go on to provide value in other areas.

You don't have to pay them to learn. I'm also a generalist freelancer and those general skills make me as productive as most specialists, even accounting for ramp up time. If it does take me more time to learn a new tool, I don't charge for those hours.

This doesn't apply to everything, but Clickhouse is not so different from other analytics tools it requires a specialist.

If you need a contractor for 4 hours then sure finding an expert and paying a premium for that match is useful. However, there’s also a huge opportunity cost in looking for someone that‘s an exact match for what you want.

At around 2-3 weeks of work paying a someone that’s very close but not quite what you’re looking for saves your time and means at the end of it you have someone that you can go back to with the exact skill you’re looking for.

It really doesn’t take long before the contractor’s overall competence dwarfs how much specific time they have with some niche thing.

One thing I like about this thread is the idea of a sink made of pure zinc as a metaphor for a typical codebase.

Not sure if you're still looking, or what your budget is, but back in 2018(ish?) I worked at a semiconductor company that was looking to write their own system for analyzing production test data. We tested a bunch of databases and decided to use Clickhouse. We paid for a support contract from a company called "Altinity". They consulted on the the schema, how we were loading the data, the queries and even fixed some bugs in Clickhouse that we hit.

Looking at their site now, it looks like they've grown a lot and aren't a just boutique Clickhouse consultancy, but offer managed clickhouse cloud instances. There's still a reference to their support contract on the site though, so might still be worth a chat with them.

I have no affiliation with them, just an extremely pleased ex-customer. That was a long time ago though, so I take no responsibility if they've gone to shit now :D.

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