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Upwork Works Up Until Working Doesn’t Work
I tried to make that as difficult as possible to say in your head. Did I frustrate you? Good.
I’ve had an Upwork account since I was visiting Norway during a long, boring winter season back in 2017. You heard that right. Vacationing bored me to tears so much that I quite literally searched for ways to work again.
I mean, Norway is kind of a boring country, sorry to burst your bubble for my fellow metalheads that treat Norway like it’s some kind of socialist utopia where everybody walks around in corpsepaint and rocks Darkthrone. It’s stable and the living standards are great, but damn if those winters aren’t completely brutal on the senses. All I remember was writhing of cranky boredom in my bed during one dark afternoon when the thought had popped into my brain that hey, maybe I ought to try to work online!
And so I did my research. Freelancer.com was filled with scams and lowpaying odd jobs. I know lots of people have success on Fiverr but the premise insulted me. Come on, guys. Five bucks is your selling point? I know people charge way more than five bucks on average, but still! I felt insulted.
So, the last option I saw was Upwork. Upwork looked decent enough — it had a smooth interface and had several reputable jobs and demanded transparency of both client and freelancer. So I signed up. Within half an hour, I was ready to go.
I set my initial rate per hour to be $18. As a GIS Analyst, I’m sure it was obvious that I didn’t have a lot of expectations.
Within an hour, I had received my first project. I was to correct SQL code for a Real Estate agent who was trying to write effective code to filter properties in parts of rural California.
After five hours of both doing that in addition to writing some SQL code myself, I was thrilled to have earned close to a hundred bucks.
I continued working, and not just in my field. By the time I was set to leave Norway and return back home to the United States, I was working on three concurrent projects, some of which were fixed price. I recall one of them was writing course content for an online class about ethical hacking. For each lesson, I had earned $250, and each…
