How to not get scammed hiring remote freelancers on Upwork

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.<p>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&#x2F;hour. Upwork is broken, but this also happens on angel.co and probably on other digital job markets.<p>Interestingly, most of the advice given in the article for not getting scammed is also true for job seekers.

&gt; 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.<p>No wonder when people get paid based on their location and not based on their output&#x2F;value. This is what bothers me quite a lot about Gitlab as well.

There are quite a few things I disagree with in the post.<p>&gt; 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.<p>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&#x27;t share customer work. I know I fall in this category.<p>&gt; It’s 2019. If you’re hiring someone who works on the internet, you will be able to find them on the internet.<p>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.<p>&gt; Often it means they didn’t do the work, and will disappear once the money is sent.<p>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....

The key is to not hire fungible resources based on a set of TLAs but actual people instead.<p>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 &quot;The Mythical Man-Month&quot;).<p>If people are treated as a commodity it&#x27;s no wonder they start acting like one.<p>There certainly are largely commoditised areas of software development. However, especially for those it shouldn&#x27;t matter where the person doing the job is located or in fact which person it is that does the job.<p>All that matters is results. Only settle an invoice once the agreed upon results have been delivered.

&gt; It’s 2019. If you’re hiring someone who works on the internet, you will be able to find them on the internet.<p>This guy seems pretty clueless. I’m not sure I’d be trying to absorb his wisdom.

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 &quot;masked&quot;. On one occasion I was talking to a TTS.<p>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.<p>So no matter how good someone is in some other aspect, it&#x27;s a non-starter if I can&#x27;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&#x27;t really explain to them what I want easily?<p>I don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;ll ever use Upwork for programmers again. Most of my experiences have been bad, even when I was quite willing to pay premium rates.*<p>* Big motivation for many using Upwork is bypassing conventional corporate finance and the way they pay (or fail to pay) freelancers.

On a related note, this is not about getting scammed, but more about getting the work you need completed.<p>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.<p>It&#x27;s never due to a lack of technical skill. It&#x27;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.<p>An experienced freelancer can juggle multiple projects, but someone coming from a single-focus, full-time job often cannot.<p>I think this is why a lot of people dabble in freelancing, fail and go back to full-time work.<p>Edit: This is more a general note, and not about Upwork specifically, but the same definitely applies.

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

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&#x27;s to no benefit to the customer yet they&#x27;ll gladly pay more.<p>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&#x27;t even get me started on electronics.<p>Of course you&#x27;ll get people that pretend to be from a more expensive time zone for remote work. It&#x27;s the same work after all.

I constantly, like multiple times a week, get connection requests on LinkedIn that all lead to the same conversation of &quot;hey! let me use your name and profile on Toptal&#x2F;Upwork, I&#x27;ll do all the work, and you can keep 15-30%&quot;. I&#x27;m not surprised by any of this.

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

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.

I think similar article should be promoted, where we can identify job posters who are scams.<p>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&#x2F;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<p>In short its pro job-poster site.

Well... i don&#x27;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.