Chris Johnson was happy in his full-time role at Build.com, an online home improvement retailer. He spent four years there, building the six-person team that led the entire email marketing program. But when a director he worked well with left for another company and messaged him about a contracting role, he made the leap to full-time freelance.
Six months later, that freelance role’s hours dropped. It wasn’t paying the bills.
“I signed a contract with them to work full-time contract, essentially,” Johnson said. “After about six months, the amount of work I was doing dwindled to part-time hours. I figured that at that point, I already had a contracting business; I might as well go and look for other clients.”
Johnson updated his LinkedIn and launched a website –– but few clients came in. He even gave Upwork a try, but it was an “incredible pain.” One problem? The level of freelance surveillance, which Johnson called “Big Brother-y.”
“Every time you're working for a client, you have to use this screen capture program via Upwork to capture your screen and all the work you're doing for that amount of time you want to claim for that client.”
For freelancers who work with multiple clients and multitask throughout the day, like Johnson, that just doesn’t work.
“I would never recommend Upwork to anyone,” said Johnson.