Why do all freelancers quit?
 

Tell me. You spent 1 hour explaining him what needs to be done. He agrees with everything. He knows everything. He is 100% sure he will do it.

Day after he is still on it, "working". Day after tomorrow he is ignoring you on Skype.

I say, 90% freelancers waste your time :321GFY

I've had success with many freelancers. In fact, three of my full-time guys right now started as freelancers for me.

You are using the wrong one;)

All the wrong ones apparently ;)

further@g male.comped.....your welcome!

just stop hiring those clueless indians.

Are you certain you are giving him 100% of the information about the job up front. I don't know how many times someone has asked me to give them a price for something then once everything is agreed upon they jump in and add a bunch of steps that increases the time needed to do the job.

:2 cents:

This.

Also he didn't "quit" he probably fired you. Yes freelancers can fire clients. I have fired many when I was a freelancer.

Feature creep is a huge issue. Not clarifying what you want well enough is another issue.

Edit://

Also low pay.

Daily thing from my experience. Not referring to OP just clients in general.

I used to freelance a while back (mainstream no in porn) and to my surprise many clients use to say that I am a blessing compared to their previous experience. Many freelancer (especially those newb indians) take bigger bite than they can swallow and when they see that they don't have the skills to complete the project they quit.

As one other person mentioned, the freelancer can fire you too, if you give bad instructions and you don't clarify the job properly before hand (so that the project turns out to be a lot more complex and time demanding than what the freelancer expected and quoted for) he may get fed up with you and drop you as a client.
It happened once to me but in general I was trying to screen the potential clients for this issue and not take them if I suspect it may end up this way...

In general, don't take the lowest and fastest bid, see which bids actually include information of how the freelancer is going to approach your particular problem, what particular challenges may be there and how he is going to solve them... it is a good sign if he wants clarification on particular parts of the task etc; do not take the "I am god" kind of bids where the only think they say is how many projects like that they have done in the past and how piss easy is for them to do it. If their English is crap that may not be such a good idea as well (communication is important).

As a client try to be as clear as possible when outlining the project, also talk with them and clear even the smallest details, you can't be vague about some aspects and then if they turn to be a lot more than anticipated, expect the freelancer to complete the project for the same time and money.

Maybe you just picked the WRONG freelancer?

Yup, get another freelancer until you pick the right one for you.

:2 cents: Really burns my bonnet as well o_O

maybe ask for a reference?

I'm a freelancer and this quote above ^ is very important

You: You need to do A, B, C, D, E and F tasks. For each task you need to do X, Y and Z. Do you understand?
Him: Yes Sir!

5 minutes later:
Him: I am done, Sir!
You (very excited): Wow, that was fast! Let me see, please!
Him (showing you task A, half-ass complete): Here you go Sir!
You: Decent, but OK, we can work on that. Can we show me the others?
Him: Others?
You: Yes, I gave you six tasks.
Him: Oh...
You: OK, can you please get back to work and let me know when you're done?
Him: Yes sir!

5 minutes later:
Him: I am done, Sir!
You: ...



Basically you have to go through a bunch of them, before you find the ones who do a good enough job. Most of the time it's easier to outsource your stuff to Eastern Europeans. They may charge marginally more, but in return they actually complete your tasks much faster and more accurately.

If you think it's costly to work with professionals, wait until you work with amateurs.

Most people in porn think programming takes minutes to hours. Just drop in some API stuff and it links itself.

When I quote anything over $100 most people shit an egg. A large goose egg. But I can get it on Fiverr for five dollars!

When I quote $1000 for something they think I am an asshole wasting their time. But then they get fucked by an Indian all day long.

In mainstream I quote somebody $4500 and they write me a check then and there.

Don't fall for ridiculously low quotes. Often they are made by people who will deliver pieces and squeeze you for more.

So you have probably approached a freelancer, told him what you had in mind that you wanted, and the freelancer figured out he could do it and agreed. As the freelancer advanced in your project he realizes that he has underestimated the complexities of your project and he walks away.

I think both of you could do better. You could prepare a project requirements with a very detailed list of requirements and functional flow. You are not the programmer and don't require to know the technical details required to implement your functionality, however you must know the functionality that you want, how you want it to behave in each possible way, what tasks it must achieve and how. The more detailed your request is, the more accurate the freelancer will be able to give you an estimate.

In the other side, the freelancer must be able to find out the information required from the client. As you have expressed, the freelancer just assumed to be able to complete the task, probably because he was over positive, over confident or simply inexperienced. A good freelancer will ask relevant questions not just listen to your demands, and if your project requirements include aspects that are unknown to the freelancer, such as the environment in which the application will run, the back end that holds everything or simply other specific tasks that require research, he will charge for time required to provide a more accurate estimate and deduct it from the project total if implemented.

Maybe you just picked the WRONG freelancer?

Only use people from sites that allow you to give feedback and only deal with people that already have some, regardless of how plausible they sound or how low their price is.

FYI. Clients RARELY EVER give you everything you need to know when you start the project.

When it comes to Indians/Pakis/Filipinos/Indonesians etc., 90% of them are the wrong freelancer.

One of my first purely programming tasks I was assigned to scrape a directory, and went about it lazily because I had other work I had to do (that I knew payed for sure) and thought how easy it would be. Turns out the site had javascript implemented to prevent raw scrapes, so I had to hire someone who knew frontend scraping (need to learn iMacros) to get the thousands of pages; after which I parsed into an excel file.

I bid low on the job and got it so I could get experience, and actually lost a little money on it, oops. :)

At least I got it done.

Come up with interview questions or test jobs before hiring someone for anything extensive.

As they say: "You get what you pay for."

Try doubling the pay and not choosing primarily based on price.

I've used lots of freelancers in the past fifteen years. I can't remember having any problems.

Most likely this is an issue here.

:2 cents:

Oh come on most programming takes 5 min lol *joke* But it is what many people think...
The reality is most people don't give proper outlines, feature creep kicks in, etc.. all things people have already posted. I'd assume that if ALL or the majority are firing you then it's not them it maybe you.

This is the golden rule. Keep it in mind those who are new to hiring freelancers. Do not go with Asians as you will have troubles and troubles until you find good egg.

Fast, Reliable, Cheap. Pick two.

Cheap + reliable :thumbsup

You'll get your "facebook clone" in 3-5 years. :thumbsup

I second to that, that's why I stayed away from porn when I was freelancing... had some bad experiences programming for adult so I kept my distance.

I like when tons of people are like "tried so many freelancers and they all suck", well not all the freelancers in the world suck so if you are picking all the wrong people maybe, just maybe it may be you. Reflect on what you did in the entire process, from outlining the job to the selection process and what may have gone wrong then try something different next time. Think of it like making SEO if you mess up a site and it gets penalized by search engines you won't try the same s**t on your other sites now would you;

What I am saying is that you have to do your part, even if the freelancer was a total crap - you picked him, didn't you, so you have yourself to blame at least for that, next time try picking freelancers more carefully.

If it happened to me to get a bad client my attitude wasn't like "all the clients are idiots", but "how didn't I see this one is an idiot, have to try harder next time"

And finally, yeah some countries like india, bangladesh etc have abundance of incompetent freelancers but is not a rule, I hated being teamed up or continuing project started by indians because the chances are they will suck, but I got surprised several times. If you know how to select properly you won't pick an idiot regardless from which country he/she comes from.

that's why you need to use established companies wink wink

And the irony is sometimes they have highest ranking on freelance sites.While that rank could be true,problem is how those works are mostly some basic works which could be probably done by anyone.

That's because they rate each other. ;)

:thumbsup:thumbsup

Thank Goodness for the 10% :):winkwink:

Good point. Also, it's Cheap, Fast, Good. Pick two.

Depends on how much you value your time. The chance is that the 90% you have to go through, in order to find the 10%, is gonna cost you more in lost time and revenue than you'd save by either doing it yourself or hiring someone who's actually competent, reliable and who understands instructions the first time you tell them.

I didn't want to start a war between clients and freelancers.

Let me name a few who never let me down on GFY:

- Yuu from Studios Porno (quality design service for a very decent price, good guy to work with)

- Vlad (worked with him on LoveAmateurs.com, expensive service, but totally worth the money you pay)

- Definitively Marco from Sliiing (great and hard working guy who will always do everything to suit clients needs).

Respect to them :thumbsup

I don't think this turned into a war of any kind. More like both sides explaining the issues they run into and clarifying things for the other side. I think it ended up pretty informative.

I agree, some tips and experiences are very informative.

Been on both sides - both as a freelancer programmer and as an employeer now - mostly programming, design and translation services. Top reviews in both roles.

As a freelancer - as a rule, it was very hard to work with US employers. Most of them were having low attention span, and tried to behave like a 'big boss' from cheap movies, invent strange rules etc. Tried to save every penny as well and were overall delusional and expected not just to get something for almost nothing, but some behaved like they were giving me a favor with their jobs. This behaviour wasn't even offending, it was just insanely stupid. I very rarely won contracts with US employers though, most of them prefered cheaper bids. The best employers were from Western Europe and Canada, been in touch with some of them for 10 years. Brits were somewhere in-between. Indians were just batshit insane, couldn't make myself even bid on their projects, so much shit was in their projects descriptions.

As an employer I was struck how much scam and unprofessionalism there is in freelancing world all around.
With translation to european non-english languages I have 2 of every 3 freelancers who tried to scam me doing automated translations instead of manual. And it is after prescreening, after I pay above average price and after I look up the freelancers profiles in Facebook to be sure they are actual native speakers. Without such prescreening and with lower bids it will be 19 of 20 who will try to scam me, pretending they are native speakers.

Things are not so bad with programming jobs. If you write good and detailed specs in advance, with detailed workflow and mention exact technologies you want to see in the product, most of the freelancers do well with such projects. In case of anything bigger than a single php file you have to control freelancers almost day by day, at least the cheaper ones, and set milestones.

With design you just have to be sure that the portfolio you see is actual work of the designer, not just some stolen content. Need to look up their profiles on deviantart and simlar sites. But design is a difficult thing anyway.

We are billing out dev and programming locally at $100 per hour.

Quoted someone from GFY who has for years posted here about having issues with designers and programmers. Cut our rate IN HALF. He tried to tell us that we we out of our minds, that this was a global market and that our rates were out of line with that.

A $10 a hour indian vs. $50 an hour for a programmer with master's in computer science.

Only one of those options is going to get you what you want. You're gonna pay for it either way, but you're going to get what you paid for with only one of those choices.

I think reliable is more important than good. A reliable programmer is a good programmer. :2 cents:


That's when I politely say "pleasure talking with you, but we're going to pass on this job."

That's what we did. A few days later landed a local billionaire's venture fund to build sites for all their upcoming projects. Billed $6500 for what amounted to a one page Drupal site for their first project and now have a 2 year contract that should amount to at least 1 of these projects per month.

Here, we'd have been lucky to charge someone $600 for the same project.