Upwork is far from a perfect platform, in fact its technical systems are quite inefficient, its UI is from +10 years ago, and they operate with very few resources, and are an incredibly slow, bureaucratic and old style organization, basically a holdout from the late 00s.
But also, there is a global recession that has caused liquidity to dry at top companies. This causes a domino effect where mid sized firms stop projects, cannot collect receivables, and where smaller entrepreneurs also are quite uncertain about where to go, specially tech sector.
This began in May 2022, and by October work simply began to dry out as economic activity worldwide slowed down, and by now we are actually entering a deflationary environment as money flows to treasuries, real estate and hiring are completely froze, etc. This will go on at least until fall and likely until next spring.
So yes Upwork is far from a good platform, in fact it is minimally useful, but, but it works for side income and you can have some good months a year My main clients they all tell the same, last year they could not close any big deal and money is not flowing. Until the US Fed pauses rate hikes, and until they announce they will begin to cut rates, we can expect work to be slow, slow.
Lastly for Upwork jobs, AI impact is yet to be seen except for very simple design jobs. The great majority of human beings can barely write five paragraphs in grammatically correct language (including political leaders, managers, corporate vice-presidents, etc), so most of humans simply lack the abstract thinking, cognitive abilities and language skills to train any AI tool.
Quality project managers and developers will take years to train the platforms needed until they can launch human resources-as a service, lawyer-as a service, compliance team-as a service, etc. AI will replace at least a third of all jobs worldwide, but such development will take several years and hundreds of billions in investment. Right now companies are cutting costs and payroll, and any reputable developer firm will charge millions to develop a custom solution to train, implement, test and deliver something that can replace humans effectively. But, it will happen within 5 years for many white collar jobs, that is a certainty.
For logos, small videos, copywriting, yes AI has essentially turned the market upside down. But as for the average client, does it know if the work output is really useful? Is it even correct? Does the app, code, document will hold up to scrutiny? That is where a professional freelancer enters, and while some clients will tell “use AI get this done in an hour just get the correct output”, quality clients will always prefer quality job output.
Except if you sell cheap simple logos, in which case, yes, you are out.
