I found that taking a cross-section of freelancers who also have relevant published work, or products, or a company of their own ...... helps weed out low quality. Freelancers who live someplace with a comparatively lower exchange currency contributes to lower cost. Helps to interview ahead of time over something like Skype to filter communication skills, attitude, and other intangible qualities. Always create a work plan with early deliverables with the goal of incrementally assessing knowledge, forward-planning, quality, attitude, and overall ability to get work done the way you want it done.
That sounds strange. Maybe it's about your specific country? It's funny, I found a project on Upwork (or Guru or whatever) that I thought could be interesting. I wanted to contact the guy. They tell me that I need to buy credits that I can use to contact the lead since he did not contact me directly. Right, I'm going to pay to talk to a guy who wants a project to be done for $250 (minus their cut) because it sounds pretty straightforward to him. I think it's just for people who do web scripts and stuff, nothing serious. Maybe toptal is better, but doubt it.
Well let's break this down into a bunch of small segments because you're clearly just upset for whatever reason. First, you're looking for quant jobs. Unfortunately, and assuming you actually possess the talent you claim, you are weeded out of the pool of applicants basically through one simple mechanism - target schools. Banks and hedge funds only hire from schools where they've sank a considerable amount of cash into owning indirectly (MIT, Berkeley, etc take tons of money from these people). As a result, if you don't come from a target school you should not pursue this career. It doesn't matter if you had a 4.0 undergrad and wrote a novel options pricing mechanism for your graduate work. If you don't come from a target school the HR drone will round file your resume. Sucks, but that's life. UpWork is a nightmare. I have credentials that make me an ideal candidate for the platform. I've been consulting software for years and have a verified track record with a handful of high profile clients. I didn't get any work (I was using this to fund my risk account apart from my day job during a few slow months). I got one offer, and they wanted $30/hr. for rather complicated Java work. I gave up and removed my account. You are competing on a global marketplace in a race to the bottom where global workers (in particular India and China) have gamed the "intelligence" tests such that companies can get someone who can ace typical leetcode interviews blindfolded and come in at $15/hr. Coming from experience UpWork provides what is called in my industry "nearshoring". Companies do not want to hire high quality talent. They would rather promote an internal engineer/manager to be in charge of 5-10 $10-$20/hr. workers in another country. This is a nice way to pad the bottom line and make yourself look frugal and diversified to venture capital. You are being eliminated, just like I was, because you're coming in at $100/hr. for work they are willing to cap at $20/hr. because they just want a team to manage rather than committing to a single developer. Your best route into consulting is build in-roads locally. Everyone needs software. Find some people that are willing to pay for your ability. Where do I get my work? Locally. Those clients refer other clients. If you make enough people happy they will send you work. Also, adjust your attitude. You come off high-and-mighty for someone who is judging the entire industry of consulting on UpWork and a rigged system like quant dev jobs. You may be intelligent, but in business intelligence matters very little to anyone. Can you sell yourself properly? Judging by your response posts you need some work in that department.
How do they game it? Couldn't agree more. Romania is actually one of the outsourcing places with very capable people. @Aquarians, are you saying they just expect you to work for peanuts because you are in the region? I was always under impression that overseas developers are gaining at the "expense" of US developers as globalization pushing the wages to the equilibrium (fairly or unfairly). Is this not how it's viewed outside of US? Just curious.
In my experience it's simply a matter of rote memorization - to be fair everyone in the industry does it but the scale in SEA countries is much larger. Are they actually performant programmers? No, probably not (and this goes for western devs as well), but they can pass the smell test that is rather arbitrary. Sort of like how SATs/GREs are gamed. I am not sure if we are really finding an equilibrium price. Rather, we are feeling the effects of globalization across different CPI indexes driving prices to the equilibrium of the average of their local economies. It's sort of like an index where everyone gets punished except the people able to work the cheapest. An equilibrium price would be reached among skilled work. From my experience, the quality is very poor coming from non-western countries. Similar to code camps in the west, the equilibrium is being reached as programming becomes commoditized but the quality of work is going down linearly with price rather than stabilizing as you might expect in a game theoretic equilibrium (boeing discovered this rather painfully).
As a 49years old programmer of 33years i can relate, as I'm only vb6 / access dev ( new vb.net bloody mainlyaweful ) bugger all work out there, focusing on day trading and getting there so all is good.
You guys remind me of Glen Gary Glen Ross: Bunch of losers posting on a forum, " oh yeah, i used to be a programmer, its a tough racket" "You call yourself a programmer you Son of a Bitch" As i often tell the junior members of my programming team: "ABC" A Always B Be C Coding ALWAYS BE CODING!!! "You code or you hit the bricks" "Get mad you son of a bitches, get mad!!"