Sites like upwork, which appar­ent­ly absorbed the for­mer elance ; and free​lancer​.com offers the illu­so­ry provoca­tive sense of ​“work”. In real­i­ty they are noth­ing more than gim­micky brand­ed vari­a­tions of Craigslist. It’s also full of low bud­get clients who want qual­i­ty work for dirt cheap. Of course this lures the entire coun­try of India and Pak­istan to come flood­ing these web­sites with their padded, over­in­flat­ed 10 pager resumes of qual­i­fi­ca­tions.

Why would you even want to bid on a project with 90+ bids all try­ing to under­bid one anoth­er ? For spare change on top of which. This isn’t idio­cy it’s pure luna­cy.

Free­lancer was quite hor­ri­ble, actu­al­ly. They make you jump through hoops in their ​“ver­i­fi­ca­tion” process and charge you $5 for a poor­ly timed test. In mid­dle of said test, which I was try­ing to com­plete (it’s one of those Eng­lish tests to prove you’re a native born speak­er of Engr­ish) a sign popped up on my screen say­ing some­thing like ​“Couldn’t com­plete, some error occurred” and a big fail­ure noti­fi­ca­tion. Appar­ent­ly I’m not a native born eng­lish speak­er and didn’t pass even if I got 78% cor­rect mid-test. Yeah that’s very pro­fes­sion­al. One upside to upwork is that their tests don’t actu­al­ly mat­ter because you can keep tak­ing them until you get your ide­al per­fect score that enables you to sleep well at night know­ing you’re a smart cook­ie and nobody can tell you oth­er­wise.

Ulti­mate­ly these sites, besides employ­ing the entire coun­try of India or Pak­istan only gen­er­ate a bid­ding war to see whose A. the high­est qual­i­ty and B. for the low­est pos­si­ble price. You shouldn’t have to short change your­self much less at the prof­itabil­i­ty of ques­tion­able clients. Have some self respect and just use oth­er chan­nels and avenues to pro­cure legit, gen­uine and sol­id work. Even Craigslist for all of its shady char­ac­ters and cheap bar­gain base­ment clients felt a notch above these oth­er plat­forms. Seri­ous­ly though, why would any­body want to will­ing­ly do chal­leng­ing work for the same hourly as a man­ag­er at Bed, Bath and Beyond ? Or a Star­bucks bar­rista ? For qual­i­ty cod­ing + design ? Get real !

One site that seemed to be promis­ing was sug­gest­ed to me by a bud­dy of mine : Field​na​tion​.com. This one’s real good if you’re into IT/​tech or are just a handy resource­ful Mac’Guyverish type of cat like myself. No frills, no has­sles, just sign up and get ready to get to work. They tell you all the specs of the job and you list out which job cat­e­gories you’re inter­est­ed in. I haven’t yet found any gigs through them but lik­ing what I see on there.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, for those who vest far too much faith and stock in this tech­no­log­i­cal ter­ror we call the inter­webs, we have to chan­nel that into our­selves as a pre­mi­um brand, not our dig­i­tal selves in the matrix of online liv­ing. Read self help books, take some cours­es in this or that ​“trend­ing” thing, dis­cov­er your sweet spot you want to be liv­ing in…the promised land over­flow­ing with milk + hon­ey.

Any­way just thought I’d write this up since I found all of these bid­ding war web­sites quite repul­sive and tire­some if not down­right God awful and dis­cour­ag­ing. Thanks for read­ing ! Please enjoy.