Just to share my experience with others in case it's of value.
I have used IT freelancers from Upwork for over a year. My experience of many Upwork IT freelancers **Edited for Community Guidelines** is that they are either:
- Someone who works for an agency and is just a pretty face, with little IT competence, or
- Someone who works for an agency who has relevant IT skills, but who unbeknown to you will turn over work you have asked them to do, to far less skilled colleagues, who will do most of the work. Your ability to manage these third parties will be extemely limited there is a high risk of inferior quality or unusable work
In my experience, probably 95% of IT "freelancers" on Upwork are of this type. You will spend plenty of money and waste a lot of your time on them.
To address this problem, I have found it helpful to:
- Ask for their Skype ID. If it's smooth and descriptive, eg like "IT Web Developer" or "WordPress Expert", then they are probably part of a company
- See how many contracts they are currently working on. If more than 5, that's suspicious
- Ditto if they have loads of short jobs of perhaps $5 to $25 that give a 100% score
- Enter into a paid contract with everyone you want to evaluate seriously. That scares away people because then if you give a bad review, it will affect them (if they refund you, your review won't be visible but Upwork says it takes such reviews into consideration when look at success rates)
- Make it clear you will test them interactively via video and desktop sharing. A large proportion of people will drop out before the first session is arranged, or do a last minute no show
- During the first session, watch out for people giving them whispered prompts and instant message prompts. When they provide an answer to a question, press them further to see if they understand what they're talking about, or whether they simply repeat what they've just said
- Make it clear, through a series of intial tasks, that the person concerned will be working tightly with you, and it will be dificult for them to bring in less skilled colleagues to do the work
- Make it clear that if they later delegate work to others without your permission, you will report them to Upwork and paste a corresponding review. This helps filter out the competent people who want to pass on work to others.
Hope this is helpful to someone! There are great values to be found in **Edited for Community Guidelines** IT freelancers, but one has to proceed with great caution, and be thorough in the evaluation process.
David
