JSS

[Anton A]

That's a shame that your profile pic with the horse got censored. It's a really nice picture. 

The horse is just an extension of the whole JSS night-mare. Upwork is too rigid and heavy-handed. Perhaps some will consider this professional or useful for hiring freelancers, but my personal preference would be an open-source-style service where everything is out in the open, like the reviews and the scores, and you can have any picture you want. If for some reason you want to use a picture of your pet hampster and think this will get you more jobs, go for it. 

Rigidity, inflexibility, and secrecy are poor selling points for a company attempting to create a new hiring and working paradigm. It never creates a competitive advantage, in my opinion. 

[Patricia S]

Thank you for the kind words. 

I had to laugh because the email that notified me of the offending pic came from "trust and safety." 

And my post about this is now not showing in the thread. Did I miss it? If not, that's creepy. 

I agree, this is no way to run a business. I like your open-source idea with a more transparent administration. 

I don't do much work here, except when people invite me, but I just moved and would like some extra cash. In going after jobs again, I looked at my profile and realized with horror that my JSS had dropped yet again since getting good feedback. 

I'll probably just close my account if no one responds to the last set of applications I sent out. 

[Anton A]

Well, just hang in there, if you can  I had a client that was completely unreasonable, in my opinion. I pushed back, and they pushed back. This escalated to a fairly nasty place. Finally, we decided to be adults about it and talk it out on the phone. It was a nice conversation and we both agreed that this could have been handled better by both sides. Then the client sheepishly asks me "well... uhhh... how are we going to deal with the whole rating thing?" I figured they wanted to make sure I didn't rate them poorly, and I said, sure - we worked this out, let's let it go. I left them excellent feedback, private and public. They left me four stars publically and something apparently horrific in private because my JSS dropped 18 points. I've struggled for many months with fewer job invited and fewer interviews. After I think about 6 or 8months and four new 5-star jobs, my JSS finally crawled above 90. 

Low JSS is certainly not the end of the world, but it does make for a more miserable Upwork experience. I like Upwork enough to continue using it, but the way this place is set up is not conducive to happy healthy human interaction. It's like a job that's OK, but you don't really enjoy going there every day because there's potential nastiness hiding behind every corner.

[AHMED H]

No, JSS is very important. From my opnion its what we really gain.

Sometime I can give up from getting money but I cannot do that with the Feedback. Fair (I won't say good) will get more money but more money won't get Feedback (Do it get!!! Money do everything in fact but not in my case wiith its not too much)

Simply, JSS make me sad and I really feel bad. 

What are you saying man! 

How does it feel to work for month and get 0 payment and project closed without he even say that to you with negative feedback?

That is really hurts me! I did a good job, I was care and worry about the project and I treated like that!

Pfff

I feel too old for that!!

[Patricia S]

Yikes, so sorry to hear about your sneaky client. The private feedback is just insane. What I think UW should do is not utilize private feedback unless you have more than XX incidents involving a score below a certain threshold. It would account for dishonest clients and not penalize good workers who get brought down by one bad review (that the worker can't even see and try to improve accordingly). 

I've submitted 10 proposals in the last week or so, with no responses. Usually, I'd get some hits back. It may be coincidence, or it may be my score--I'll never know. I know I'm getting a lot of invitations for work well below my posted rate. 

I basically use UpWork to fill in because it's easy. Or it was. Once it becomes too difficult to find clients here, or once I have to take jobs that don't meet my financial needs, I might as well go cold pitch clients and look for other job postings elsewhere. It was bad enough when they raised their fees to 20 percent, but the punitive JSS and favoring clients in most conflicts is really doing them a disservice in the long run because high-end workers will leave. 

Thanks for the encouragement!

[Anton A]

You very welcome and best of luck to you!

[Brittany J]

My JSS dropped to the low 80s at one point too even though I didn't have any negative public feedback, and it absolutely had an impact on getting jobs. 

One job I had written a proposal for responded saying that my portfolio looked great but they didn't understand why my success score was so low. Such a fun conversation trying to explain all the factors that go into the JSS when I didn't even fully understand it myself. 

Obviously not all clients will care, but I think a lot do care. Otherwise they wouldn't bother requiring your success score to be over 90% on job posts. 

My main issue with private feedback is how do we know what to improve on as a freelancer if the client is leaving a dishonest 5 star public review but basically saying the opposite with the private feedback. It just seems so horribly deceptive. 

[AHMED H]

We cannot rely on if they care or not!!

There must be a practical solution

If 99% care and 1% are not cares they will still can destory your profile

[Melanie H]

..

[Patricia S]

I posted this above, but it might work better if UW only resorted to using negative feedback for your JSS if you have a certain number of negative private reviews below a certain score. That would eliminate the case where an otherwise good worker is getting hurt by one bad client. Multiple bad private reviews would be a more reliable indicator that the worker has problems.