Can vouch, I've hired a lot of freelancers on upwork and a few of them I kept on as contractors for multiple years. I've hired everything from graphic designers to developers to VAs... It's great!
It's like uber for professional jobs. There's a lot of slave wage tier gigs, but some good ones as well. I hired some people on there for small jobs I was having trouble with and generally it went fine. For example, if you need a script to automate something at work but you don't know how to code, you can find people that can usually solve it for you with only a few hours of work.
I gave one of the guys a recommendation on his application to our company because he did such a good job on something I needed. As far as the talent pool goes, there's a lot of bottom of the barrel type people looking for work as well as companies wanting top dollar work for bottom dollar pricing. There's also a lot of South Americans and Eastern Europeans that can be very good and reasonably cheap, but I think there's still a place to make decent beer money.
I've been on both sides of it, and generally have had good experiences with small odd-jobs. As a worker, it's easy to get yourself sucked into a project where you're making $2/hour, so you just have to avoid those and wait for better customers. As someone looking for people to do something, you can review their past work and I've found that the better their English is, the better the results. Sometimes you'll find foreign programmers willing to work for peanuts, but they invariably misunderstand what you want and it won't turn out well.
Some examples of bad jobs I've seen:
"Please design and build a website for me for selling X product in Y country. Pay is $200."
"Please compose and write a song for me in X foreign language based around some 16th century battle."
"I need data extracted from this text file and converted to a single .csv file of data, but there's no clear delimiters and the structure varies by page. Also, each file is about 500 pages. I don't really understand the mechanism by which these files are created, but please figure it out for me so I can save a lot of time on manual data entry"
Some good examples:
"I need this 30 page slide deck translated by tomorrow evening for $500"
"I need an alteryx workflow to map sensor data to human understandable location names, compare that against my inventory, and tell me what's in the wrong location / missing. The data is structured and here are examples of each data source."
Very interesting! Thanks for the detailed reply. I do design work in oil and gas and my hours have been cut a lot lately, thought it might be something interesting to try on the side. Unfortunately, I know I wouldn't even be able to charge 10% of my current billing rate, I imagine somebodys always going to be undercutting you? Anywho, thanks again, Ill go check it out.
I mean, to an extent, yeah. But it's the typical situation you probably find anywhere. There are businesses that don't want quality, and they're never going to pay for it. And there are businesses that do want quality, and will pay for it. Or they're behind on a deadline due to someone else's screw-up and just need something fixed.
I never found it a consistent source of income, but it was good for beer money while in school.
I don't know what your skill set it, but I have had alot of recent success on upwork. Close to making an additional 500 a week, maybe worth a look.
Can you fill me in on what you do on Upwork?
CAD drafting work mostly.
Man I wish I could afford a seat of SolidWorks for home. I'd be able to CRUSH some 3D work in the evenings.
Can vouch, I've hired a lot of freelancers on upwork and a few of them I kept on as contractors for multiple years. I've hired everything from graphic designers to developers to VAs... It's great!
10 years drafting and design here, could you fill me in? Pm me if you can!
It's like uber for professional jobs. There's a lot of slave wage tier gigs, but some good ones as well. I hired some people on there for small jobs I was having trouble with and generally it went fine. For example, if you need a script to automate something at work but you don't know how to code, you can find people that can usually solve it for you with only a few hours of work.
I gave one of the guys a recommendation on his application to our company because he did such a good job on something I needed. As far as the talent pool goes, there's a lot of bottom of the barrel type people looking for work as well as companies wanting top dollar work for bottom dollar pricing. There's also a lot of South Americans and Eastern Europeans that can be very good and reasonably cheap, but I think there's still a place to make decent beer money.
I've been on both sides of it, and generally have had good experiences with small odd-jobs. As a worker, it's easy to get yourself sucked into a project where you're making $2/hour, so you just have to avoid those and wait for better customers. As someone looking for people to do something, you can review their past work and I've found that the better their English is, the better the results. Sometimes you'll find foreign programmers willing to work for peanuts, but they invariably misunderstand what you want and it won't turn out well.
Some examples of bad jobs I've seen: "Please design and build a website for me for selling X product in Y country. Pay is $200." "Please compose and write a song for me in X foreign language based around some 16th century battle." "I need data extracted from this text file and converted to a single .csv file of data, but there's no clear delimiters and the structure varies by page. Also, each file is about 500 pages. I don't really understand the mechanism by which these files are created, but please figure it out for me so I can save a lot of time on manual data entry"
Some good examples: "I need this 30 page slide deck translated by tomorrow evening for $500" "I need an alteryx workflow to map sensor data to human understandable location names, compare that against my inventory, and tell me what's in the wrong location / missing. The data is structured and here are examples of each data source."
Very interesting! Thanks for the detailed reply. I do design work in oil and gas and my hours have been cut a lot lately, thought it might be something interesting to try on the side. Unfortunately, I know I wouldn't even be able to charge 10% of my current billing rate, I imagine somebodys always going to be undercutting you? Anywho, thanks again, Ill go check it out.
I mean, to an extent, yeah. But it's the typical situation you probably find anywhere. There are businesses that don't want quality, and they're never going to pay for it. And there are businesses that do want quality, and will pay for it. Or they're behind on a deadline due to someone else's screw-up and just need something fixed.
I never found it a consistent source of income, but it was good for beer money while in school.
How do you start out? do you just take anything that pays at all until you can get better jobs?
You don't want to be yourself? That seems like a very odd thing.