What has happened to Upwork? It became so bad, bugged and unuseable...

[0d6aafa6]

We already worked with Upwork for many years and spend thousands over thousands of USD here working with different freelancers. We had a break due to the bad quality of Upwork in general and just decided to came back and look if we can go on spending our money here.
I cannot believe how bad Upwork has become. We tried to post a job for like 2 days now...we really just wanted to spend some money 😄
But its not possible...after many problems and bugs (the support chat had to help us manually due to these bugs) jobs are not visible on the marketplace. We even tried to delete the job and publish again but nothing works.
Some years ago i could post a job and had like 20-80 applications in no time. First applications came in after just seconds! Now we wait for hours and days and try different jobs, but 0 apllications and 0 visibility. Instead we receive lots of completely bugged messages from Upwork...for example some "employee" will help us to find freelancers...the employee is offline and the message is in archive. We get like 3 mails in a row to activate our mailadress (which has already been done before by the support).
Few years ago, in 2 days i could have given like 20 jobs away here on Upwork. Now i cant even find 1 freelancer or post 1 job. Instead i read like thousands of bad reviews outside of Upwork of how bad this platform became. I even tried to contact the support chat again but this is also not possible and after hundreds of clicks i always just end up in this "community"...i can type a real question or just bs like "ghjhgjhsd"...both the same for upwork and both will be redirected to Community.
Now i sit here and have to decide, if i should spend more days trying to work with Upwork again or just delete the bookmark, laugh a bit and move on...stunned how bad people can present their platform.
I guess its really time to move on and leave Upwork alone...few more years and it will probably we gone due to absolute incompetence.

[prestonhunter]

Mirko:

I appreciate your taking the time to share your experiences.

I don't doubt the accuracy of you description, but I wonder if there is something else going on that can explain this particular case, in which you have not had usabel responses to your job post.

I have hired over 70 freelancers on Upwork.

My typical way of hiring is to hire freelancers very quickly for short-term jobs.

On many occasions I have posted jobs, hired people to do work, received the work, closed the contracts and closed the job postings - all within 1 or 2 hours.

So my personal experience as a client on Upwork does not match what you have described. Which leads me to think there is a temporary technical issue with the site, or a glitch with your account, or something off about the job posting itself that you are not aware of.

Having said all that, it HAS been a few months since I last hired on Upwork. Maybe something is different no since the last time I posted a job here.

[prestonhunter]

re: "Instead i read like thousands of bad reviews outside of Upwork of how bad this platform became."

Well, that can be said about anything... Upwork. Starbucks. Movies. Frank Sinatra. Puppies.

I will grant that the overwhelming majority of bad reviews stem from users' real experiences with the site.

But reviews on external resources are not created or controlled by Upwork and do not actually change the site's functionality.

I imagine that the majority of bad reviews are written by people who had a bad experience, and that those bad experiences mostly came about because people were using a powerful tool (Upwork) with relatively little knowledge of how that tool works. They used the tool unwisely and ended up with poor results.

This IS partially Upwork's fault, because it is not impossible to use the tool unwisely. There are effective and safe ways to use Upwork that are not always obvious to new users.

This does not pertain to you, because you are an experienced user. But if you were to delve into most of those reviews, you would find that they were written by people who made mistakes and bad decisions as users that you would not make yourself.

[0d6aafa6]

Thanks for your anwer Preston,

you could be correct on that "bad reviews" topic, but it was something i havent seen some years ago. At least it seems like more and more users have a bad experience with Upwork (just like i had).

I didnt received an e-mail by the way (for the answers), but i received one for some person liked my post. I clicked the button "email me when someone replies" so this is just another bug it seems.

I really hope you are right and this is just a technical and temporary issue. I got just 3 applications right now, so maybe it already gets better. Pretty weird, because in my job description i was searching exactly for 3 freelancers. And the fact that all 3 applications came in the exact same time and also exactly after i wrote my post in this community makes me curious. Maybe some Upwork employee saw my post and send me those 3 guys. I cant know that.

But lets end this with hope. Maybe its all just a big coincidence and it was just temporary technical issues and now it will work fine. I will see.

[kochubei_valeria]

Sorry to hear you feel this way about Upwork, Mirko. 

It looks like you decided to set up a new client account and therefore had to verify your email address. Unfortunately, it looks like the verification email was being rejected by your email administrator. For more information, please refer to the most recent reply on your support ticket and feel free to follow up with any questions or details. You can also check your email settings to make sure emails from Upwork are allowed and not blocked. If you had an account on Upwork that you used previously and would like to use again instead of the new one, could you please send its details to the team via the ticket as well?

Thanks!

[0d6aafa6]

Hi Valeria,

beautiful name...
Well, we are a company and one employee had an Upwork account for many years. We used it, but always had problems with the german tax office. The documents from Upwork were just not accepted...wrong names etc. and also the Upwork team wasnt able to help us with some changes. They did change some information manually, but some could not be changed (according to support).
I made a new account, so i dont always need to log in with one of my employees accounts and we won't have trouble with false information for the german tax office. This should be fine with Upworks terms as far as i know. And i pretty much dont care about our positive feedbacks on the other account. We will have the same positive feedback after some new job-offers with the new account.

The e-mail was just 1 of many problems, valeria. And it was already taken care of. The support employee manually approved our mail. Just 1 day after that i received 3 new mails, all asking me to approve our e-mail. It isnt a problem, because the account is already approved, but it is clearly not like it should be and was a great example. There are many more things, that are worse now on Upwork than they have been years ago. At least in my opinion.

But its just like i said: I am willing to give it a try. I am patient enough to wait some more days, post some more jobs and just see the results. So far its pretty bad, but hopefully that will change.

Have a nice day.

[kochubei_valeria · Accepted solution]

Thanks for following up, Mirko. I'm glad to hear the email verification issue has already been resolved. I also checked search and was able to find your job there just now. So hopefully soon you'll get enough great proposals for your job. If you have any more questions or run into any further issues, please let us know here or by replying to your ticket.

I hope you have a wonderful day too.

[c5df59c1]

I agree with you.  I've spent nearly $200k over the years with elance, and now upwork.  Upwork has gone down the drain.  The quality of bids is very poor.  Now freelancers are also gaming the system.  They want to do a demo before you give them the job so that they can protect their reputation.  Previously when I posted a job I used to get so many bids now only 1 or 2.  I think it is time for us to move on.