I have been working on upwork (odesk) for several years, when i first started out i was learning the basics of office macro building and wanted to take this road with my career on upwork, it started out slow naturally as a first timer but it slowly picked up to a point where i pulling several jobs a week. Most of these kind of jobs are just one time jobs that (dont tell anyone) usually i could finish in a matter of minutes or hours because i was pretty good at it and i was happy, my clients were 99% of the time happy everyone got what they wanted.
I landed a full time job with a client that i spent 18 months working with and basically forgot about upwork during that time, but still was being paid through upwork under the initial job post (probably a mistake and should have updated the contract properly). after this job ended i spent 3 months looking for a new job on upwork and didnt get a single reply to any of my applications, not a single one. since i lost my income my resources became limited and i lost my internet connection for a year.
During this time i decided to concentrate on raising my kids and supporting my partner in her career until a month or so ago when we decided to get an internet connection again in an attempt to continue my work (and my career) on upwork. I was happy that my rating was still above 90% after all this time and i tried to update my profile a bit and try to find some work again.
This is what i have noticed so far........bare in mind im looking for office automation, data scrubbing, SQL and app dev on windows (im not interested in web or anything outside .NET)
there is an abundance of people applying for simple excel work, copy paste type jobs, there is basically nobody applying for macro building and maybe a few applying for simple office automation and app dev. This really encouraged me since my field is lacking in freelancers applying but guess what. the clients want to use me expertise that took me years to attain and pay me $5 (i dont bother applying to these jokers) or i apply and nobody responds. you can clearly see on my profile that if someone is prepared to pay me $20000+ over a years work that im probably capable. so what is going on here? out of maybe 50 applications in the past year i have landed a single job...... this is a big disapointment and clearly tells me i need to change where im looking to sustain my family.
I guess this post is directed at upwork, i think your priorities towards the clients are a little out of place and its clear that you allow a field of work that demands skill and training to be abused.
If other freelancers have felt this burden recently please share your views.
