guru.com / upwork.com / any other freelance sites worthwhile or not?

[grimster]

Hi all,

Considering the bleakness of the current landscape I'm looking at other options to get a bit of money in and fill the yawning gap on my CV since my last contract ended in October.

Have any of you used Guru or Upwork, or any of the other freelance sites? Would you recommend them?

I'm a PM, by the way. Which probably doesn't help.

Thanks

[northernladuk]

They are to some but on whe whole I'd say not, particularly with every man and his dog trying it at the moment as well. Have a look around and see. I doubt there will be anything for PM and service guys as you say though.

These sites have been discussed so might get some insight from previous posts. This was before the world dell apart though.

Try googling this

(keyword) site:contractoruk.com/forums
and see if there are any other threads thst might help.

[GhostofTarbera]

Hi all,

Considering the bleakness of the current landscape I'm looking at other options to get a bit of money in and fill the yawning gap on my CV since my last contract ended in October.

Have any of you used Guru or Upwork, or any of the other freelance sites? Would you recommend them?

I'm a PM, by the way. Which probably doesn't help.

Thanks

Nay a PM job title is now retired

Asda delivery driver will tide you over until you retrain into something useful


Sent from my iPhone using Contractor UK Forum

[jayn200]

Are you looking for a PM job on one of these sites? That's not really the type of things that get posted on here. It's mostly work for a single person, not anything team based that would require a PM.

[grimster]

Ah, that's much as I suspected. Thank you all. I think Coronavirus has been the icing on the particularly crappy cake that's been baked for PMs these last few years.

[Cirrus]

I was a PM, by the way.

FTFY

[Cirrus]

Seriously though, the idea of cloudsourced people is immense. You've got access to billions of people at potentially ultra low prices - the very basis of capitalism. The problem is essentialy it's like the Wild West. You've no idea who you are dealing with, whether they are any good, whether they'll just take your money and run, whether they'll steal your confidential information or IP etc etc. That said, some big companies do use the big sites.

As an experienced project manager you will be familiar with all aspects of computer science, requirements specification, software development, testing, data security, data analysis, architecture documentation, customer management, business negotiation etc etc. You should therefore be able to come up with a 'methodology' that works in this ecosystem.

I spent a lot of time looking into this a while back. I felt you needed some resource to do data- and information- anonymisation including setting up secure test environments. You need system architect resource, developers. The testers must be quite separate. Delivery should be strictly test driven ie people only get paid when the testers pass their work. The design should best be highly modular/black box so if anything needs changing you don't need to go hunting for the person who originally built the module; you just get someone to build another and plug it in - like what your garage does when something goes wrong on your car. I pitched this to one of the major banks but moved on to another client before I had time to follow it up (such is the lifestyle of a contractor). You could try and build such an approach/product/service yourself. It would open up bigger markets rather than the simple website, phone app, translation, blog content jobs that predominate.

One of the big sites does offer you 'PM' service. I can't remember which one and can't remember what they call it but clearly they believe customers want someone to run 'projects' for them.

Might as well have a go. It's leading edge. It might be the future

[Appydaze]

Seriously though, the idea of cloudsourced people is immense. You've got access to billions of people at potentially ultra low prices - the very basis of capitalism. The problem is essentialy it's like the Wild West. You've no idea who you are dealing with, whether they are any good, whether they'll just take your money and run, whether they'll steal your confidential information or IP etc etc. That said, some big companies do use the big sites.

As an experienced project manager you will be familiar with all aspects of computer science, requirements specification, software development, testing, data security, data analysis, architecture documentation, customer management, business negotiation etc etc. You should therefore be able to come up with a 'methodology' that works in this ecosystem.

I spent a lot of time looking into this a while back. I felt you needed some resource to do data- and information- anonymisation including setting up secure test environments. You need system architect resource, developers. The testers must be quite separate. Delivery should be strictly test driven ie people only get paid when the testers pass their work. The design should best be highly modular/black box so if anything needs changing you don't need to go hunting for the person who originally built the module; you just get someone to build another and plug it in - like what your garage does when something goes wrong on your car. I pitched this to one of the major banks but moved on to another client before I had time to follow it up (such is the lifestyle of a contractor). You could try and build such an approach/product/service yourself. It would open up bigger markets rather than the simple website, phone app, translation, blog content jobs that predominate.

One of the big sites does offer you 'PM' service. I can't remember which one and can't remember what they call it but clearly they believe customers want someone to run 'projects' for them.

Might as well have a go. It's leading edge. It might be the future

Had a similar idea of delivering projects via these sites back in 2012, I was looking at E-lance at the time (now Upwork), when I had a long stretch on the bench. Thought process was to create virtual teams to deliver products/services. Can definitely see potential in this, didn't follow through though, got side tracked by the next contract....

[Cirrus]

Can definitely see potential in this,

The difficulty is this: if you worked for a big organisation's IT division and they asked you to set up such a cloud resource capability, you could conceivably build something quite ground-breaking. However as an external provider, how would you sell the proposition? You'd be saying something like "We can provide any capability you like - just tell us what you are looking for". They'd look at you and think "We've already got suppliers or internal teams so thanks but no thanks". So you'd probably have the classic chicken-and-egg situation: you would have to build a defined capability including lining up pre-screened resources before you could go out onto the market. I'm sure there are niche areas (eg Splunk) that you could pick but the emphasis moves, as ever, onto sales rather than delivery.

The other ever-present problem is in many cases building an IT solution is something that can be done quite quickly; the biggest chunk of time on projects is spent on working out what actually should be built - not only what the business really wants but also how all the current systems and processes actually work, and can work in the future. With traditional outsourcers you can let them rummage around trying to find WTF is going on but you couldn't use that approach on Upwork/Freelancer etc. The security aspects would be untenable. So you would need trusted onshore people to do the analysis, specification and packaging, plus implementation into production when everything is finished. It is not easy see where you would make much of a saving when you factored in all these overheads.

But if you're on the bench, it might be interesting to dabble.