Data scientists shouldn't use Upwork

&gt; the dataset contained ... demographic attributes like <i>race</i> ... to predict actual work performance<p>Regardless of the original intent, that&#x27;s a request to launder a protected class into an opaque &quot;work performance&quot; metric. Also, while they are not on the unfortunately short list of protected classes, using demographics like age is probably going to create similar discrimination problems.<p>If you want to know about job performance, use data that is at least theoretically related to someone&#x27;s performance. While machine learning is going to find some sort opf signal in whatever pile of data you feed it, that doesn&#x27;t mean it actually predicts something complicated like job performance. When you feed it a bunch of general demographics, it&#x27;s going to find one of the signals that we know are present throughout existing demographic: the institutional discrimination and similar problems of the past.

I freelanced on Upwork for a bit. It was all the worst aspects of having an abusive boss (the platform itself), and all of the worst aspects of freelancing (unpredictability, getting ripped off by shifty clients).<p>&quot;Creepiest shit ever&quot; is a pretty accurate description of Upwork. If Upwork&#x27;s attitudes and policies were described to me in the 90s, I would have said it was lame, unrealistic science fiction with an over-the-top villain.<p>If anyone wants to do freelance work, I&#x27;d recommend marketing yourself directly to local businesses, print some business cards, schmooze. It&#x27;s about as much work and stress as using Upwork, and you don&#x27;t have a misanthropic middleman taking their cut.

Long term upwork Data Scientist here. It seems he had a bad experience, that could have happened on any other place &#x2F; platform. There are always horror stories about how platforms deal with conflicts (think PayPal, Stripe, Uber...)<p>Out of &gt;30 contracts I had, only 1 resulted in a dispute, and it was decided in my favor. I do agree the whole monitoring thing is absurd and I generally don&#x27;t take jobs from clients that demand hours to be logged through the monitoring app. If you want to see how the jungle looks like, please have a go at freelancer.com.

My company uses Upwork (as a services buyers) for hundreds of contracted hours per week, and have been for many years. We’ve never required any contractor to use screen recording for hourly work — that is optional — and have never heard of anyone using a webcam. We’ve also never disputed a single hour of work that a contractor has billed, nor have we heard any of the dozens of contractors we’ve hired mention this as an issue.<p>I think you might be extrapolating from a single bad data point (never a good idea, especially for a data scientist) and reaching an incorrect conclusion about the Upwork ecosystem.

I&#x27;ve been using UpWork for over a year now and never had a dispute so far.<p>The author is right in saying that UpWork only guarantees payment when time tracking using their app. Where he is mistaken though is where he says that the app requires camera to be on at all times. There is such an option but personally I&#x27;d never go for a project like this. And yes, the app will take the screenshot of the stuff you are working on.<p>I don&#x27;t get why author&#x27;s customer would launch a dispute over not completing a 10 minute survey. Given that it was an hourly project I bet there were issues with communication and perhaps the author should have double checked with the client before closing the job.<p>UpWork is far from being flawless but for me it has been working quite ok.

I&#x27;m surprised that the complaint is about getting paid, rather than pointing out that Upwork facilitated an illegal and immoral system to be built. You don&#x27;t get to use &quot;demographic information&quot; like &quot;race&quot; or &quot;age&quot; or probably many of the columns the post mentions to make hiring decisions. For the sake of the jobs industry, the author should change their post to say this.

&gt; The central computer notices just about everything. Keeps track of every key you hit on the keyboard, all day long, what time you hit it, down to the microsecond, whether it was the right key or the wrong key, how many mistakes you make and when you make them. You&#x27;re only required to be at your workstation from eight to five, with a half-hour lunch break and two ten-minute coffee breaks, but if you stuck to that schedule it would definitely be noticed, which is why Y.T.&#x27;s mom is sliding into the first unoccupied workstation and signing on to her machine at quarter to seven. Half a dozen other people are already here, signed on to workstations closer to the entrance, but this isn&#x27;t bad. She can look forward to a reasonably stable career if she can keep up this sort of performance.<p>Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson<p>And now, from the convenience of your home...

As a buyer I had a few good experiences finding contractors on Upwork. If “no one should ever use it,” does anyone have a good suggestion for a better place to find good freelance coders for small projects?

Upwork is ruining it for gig economy &#x2F; freelancing &#x2F; outsourcing. They create a race to the bottom and prioritize the client over fairness. Fiverr isn&#x27;t much better.<p>It&#x27;s hard for any &quot;we focus on everything&quot; platform to get the specific needs of each vertical (customer + talent side) right. It&#x27;s why TaskRabbit (focus on everything) never reached the scale of Uber&#x2F;Lyft (press a button, get a ride).<p>I&#x27;m not deep in the Data Science world, but hopefully there&#x27;s a platform focused on vetting customers + freelancers and providing a platform for working together easily, fairly, transparently (without the creepiness). Platforms should also decide what kind of work is fine to outsource. Long-term&#x2F;strategic work the company has to live with for many years (i.e. a core prediction model or fundamental backend arch) shouldn&#x27;t be outsourced. People who will see the benefits of their work in 5+ years should be the ones working on stuff that&#x27;ll benefit the company in 5+ years.<p>I appreciate the mention of Turtle (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.turtle.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.turtle.dev&#x2F;</a>) in this thread already (I&#x27;m one of the founders).<p>For freelancers, Turtle: - Makes sure customers are vetted (just as freelancers are). - Pays for all hours billed (even if customers don&#x27;t pay). Freelancers are trusted to enter all hours manually. No creepy screenshots. - Provides an easy-to-use platform for task management, chat, video, payments.<p>We&#x27;re specifically focused on React, React Native, iOS, and Android dev now. Front-end&#x2F;mobile is easier to compartmentalize. I&#x27;m not sure if that&#x27;s possible for many forms of data science.<p>Part-time work is an important part of our economy and will become more important as the world further globalizes (ex: &quot;Remote&quot; now being a hot topic) -- but the infrastructure is seriously lacking. UpWork is a sloppy solution attempt.<p>I encourage freelancers, customers, and platforms to be honest about what should and shouldn&#x27;t be outsourced, to make sure there&#x27;s quality on both sides (great freelancers and shit customers fail), and to make sure there&#x27;s an easy process to follow (great freelancers, customers, with shit process still fail).

Archive link: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Is2Uk" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Is2Uk</a><p>The title is &quot;Why data scientists should never use Upwork&quot;

Upwork rules require you to have their desktop app installed and let yourself be filmed for the duration of the task? Holy s<i></i><i>

You can&#x27;t be precious on Upwork. And there&#x27;s a strong GIGO factor.<p>What you have to do is churn a bunch of jobs&#x2F;contractors until you get the one that really pays off. Don&#x27;t let the hassles get to you, just keep turning the crank.

A lot of people from India on there posting dumb jobs. Though, dumb jobs can come from anywhere. It takes hours of sifting to find real offers. Most people want you to solve climate change for $1k or build their amazing idea they haven&#x27;t thought through. It&#x27;s a dumpster fire but there are real offers on there. With data science, you have to stress that it is research. You can only give probabilities, there&#x27;s a chance it never works as you suspected or you don&#x27;t come to a conclusion.

Archive link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Is2Uk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Is2Uk</a>

_Nobody_ should use Upwork. You won&#x27;t get paid what you&#x27;re worth, and it&#x27;s the worst of both worlds when you compare it with normal freelancing or working in a regular job.

Site down, we &#x27;ll never know why ...

I’ve probably hired about $150,000 of contracts through up work and never once have we required the monitoring app to be used. However, we have a bit of a different approach, we will “pay” you through upwork for the first month, but if we are satisfied with your work after a month we pay you directly through PayPal or wire transfer and then we cancel the contract on upwork. Out of all of the contractors we have hired (20-30) I can only think of one who wanted complete payment through upwork.<p>I know how bad upwork is and when we hired we genuinely always set out to get the contractors we worked with off using it so they can keep more money.

&gt; This was the first task I ever received and it flickered my curiosity. In the problem set, the dataset contained survey and demographic attributes like race, age, computer proficiency, immigration status….etc.. to predict actual work performance.<p>&gt; I completed the survey which was asking me workplace situational questions testing my unconscious biases and then quickly rejected the dispute.<p>This sounds like the &quot;consulting company&quot; was someone running a scientific experiment to see who is willing to create racist&#x2F;ageist&#x2F;otherwise unethical models.

what would be a way to start contracting if you have no existing network, no existing clients to get references?

With Upwork, since they&#x27;re an intermediary and marketplace and hirers are the ones who are paying and providing supply, it&#x27;s in their interest to offer services that cater to them like time logging and charging connection fees, even if it&#x27;s unfriendly for freelancers.<p>Your best best is to take matters in your own hands, and proactively email people you know you can help with your services. This way, there&#x27;s no intermediary controlling your relationship with your client and you don&#x27;t have to play the waiting game either (waiting for referrals or networking to pay off, waiting for people to find your website, etc.)<p>This may seem hard at first glance but let&#x27;s the take the example of data science work. You can reach out to startups who recently raised a sizable investment round (sign they have the budget and bigger growth goals) and share a few interesting ways you can help them uncover user behavior patterns that would them hit their next milestones.<p>Further reading:<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;artofemails.com&#x2F;get-new-clients" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;artofemails.com&#x2F;get-new-clients</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.hubspot.com&#x2F;marketing&#x2F;best-guest-post-pitch-example" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.hubspot.com&#x2F;marketing&#x2F;best-guest-post-pitch-exa...</a>

this article has nothing to do with &quot;data scientists&quot;. It is just a runt by some guy who used Upwork for the first time, did not follow their (admittedly stupid) rules and got into payment dispute.

Anyone using upwork knows you need to have the software running when you have an hourly contract. Fix contracts are different and upworks judgements can be awful but for hourly as long as you have the software running you will be paid.<p>Data scientist doesn&#x27;t read agreement.

Here&#x27;s the post on medium. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@jayfeng&#x2F;why-no-one-should-never-use-upwork-a2da9c42769b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@jayfeng&#x2F;why-no-one-should-never-use-upwo...</a>

The gig economy sucks.... surprise!

What does this have to do with Data Scientists? So you didn’t read up on how to log time, made unnecessary mistakes, and an inflexible collective of likely underpaid service reps didn’t care enough to go beyond the letter of the law. That’s hardly a scam. That’s you not knowing what you’re signing up for and then being upset when you didn’t get the outcome you wanted. Hardly deserves front page news.

&gt; Their rules state that you must have the Upwork Desktop App on you computer which installs some sort of video malware onto your laptop AND have your webcam visible and on at all times so that the customer success agent can audit that you looked like you were working through the webcam while staring at a screen. How is that not the creepiest shit ever?<p>Gross

&gt;Their rules state that you must have the Upwork Desktop App on you computer which installs some sort of video malware onto your laptop AND have your webcam visible and on at all times so that the customer success agent can audit that you looked like you were working through the webcam while staring at a screen. How is that not the creepiest shit ever?<p>Compare this to the Upwork App&#x27;s description <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.upwork.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;211064098-Log-Time-with-the-Desktop-App" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.upwork.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;211064098-Log-T...</a> .<p>It seems pretty reasonable. By default, it snaps a picture every 10 minutes. If you do not want to upload a snapshot, it removes the 10 minutes from your recorded hours. It captures info about how often you used keystrokes and clicked, but not what you typed or clicked.<p>The benefit of using the app is instant approval and payment.<p>On my reading, it looks like the author failed to take a 10 minute survey in 3 days, losing his work hours. That seems like a pretty reasonable ask that he failed on.

This is standard industry practice. I remember hearing about one of Upwork&#x27;s constituent companies, oDesk, doing the same thing 13 years ago. You had to run their time logger program, which would periodically screenshot your desktop and take a webcam photo to ensure you were working.

There&#x27;s also an older post about the same topic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackernoon.com&#x2F;why-you-should-never-use-upwork-ever-5c62848bdf46" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackernoon.com&#x2F;why-you-should-never-use-upwork-ever-...</a>

This is very typical for Upwork. I have entirely stopped using their platform.

Elance was so much better

Well, maybe a data scientist should do some research into a platform&#x27;s terms before taking on a job there. And read up on a topic properly when writing a blog post.

Nobody should use Upwork, it&#x27;s filled with scam artists and Upwork doesn&#x27;t actually adequately block the scammers.

So hidden in the article is the real reason that data scientists might not want to use Upwork:<p>* They record your screen * Your screen contains data * GDPR.

s&#x2F;Data scientists shouldn&#x27;t&#x2F;No one should&#x2F;<p>No?

s&#x2F;Data scientists&#x2F;people&#x2F;

tl;dr OP accidentally left a survey unfinished for the client, this a dispute was made. OP completed survey, client was okay to pay, but OP hadn&#x27;t logged hours with always-on webcam thus money was refunded to client.