It's been years since I went down this route, but after a while I had a list of clients that were pretty good to work for.
For example, one client had a custom CMS/Webshop that was on its ass. It was a data corruption in their MongoDB (of course...) the code didn't really deal well with. They had contacted two people before who looked at it and said it was "unrecoverable" and nothing could be done. I solved it in an hour, and their business was back up and running. This wasn't act of genius on my part or anything: most people here probably would have been able to do it, it's just that the previous people were the software equivalent of quacks.
Needless to say, I earned a lot of points and trust with that, and did more work for them on various things, at reasonable rates.
But you do have to dig through a huge pile of crap to get these kind of things. Overall, it's not really worth it. Plus the cut UpWork takes is not in proportion to the value they deliver IMHO, so I ended up giving up on freelance work (I'm not the kind of person that's good at "hustling" in the tradition freelance sense).
Yes agreed. I had a single good experience with Upwork as well, but I probably spent more time sifting through the crap beforehand than I actually spent on the task itself, and the platform couldn't even handle charging VAT properly.
For example, one client had a custom CMS/Webshop that was on its ass. It was a data corruption in their MongoDB (of course...) the code didn't really deal well with. They had contacted two people before who looked at it and said it was "unrecoverable" and nothing could be done. I solved it in an hour, and their business was back up and running. This wasn't act of genius on my part or anything: most people here probably would have been able to do it, it's just that the previous people were the software equivalent of quacks.
Needless to say, I earned a lot of points and trust with that, and did more work for them on various things, at reasonable rates.
But you do have to dig through a huge pile of crap to get these kind of things. Overall, it's not really worth it. Plus the cut UpWork takes is not in proportion to the value they deliver IMHO, so I ended up giving up on freelance work (I'm not the kind of person that's good at "hustling" in the tradition freelance sense).