**Making Good Money on Upwork**

Making $152 an hour on Upwork is indeed a good amount of money, especially considering that the platform takes 20% of earnings. However, it's essential to understand that this rate can decrease when charging clients at higher hourly rates, such as $190 or $197 per hour. As the saying goes, "money is money," and any income is better than none. But to make the most of Upwork, one must provide high-quality work and add value beyond what's expected from a freelancer.

**Challenges in High-Value Freelancing**

For developers, particularly those based in the United States or Europe, competing with lower-cost talent from India and Pakistan can be challenging. To succeed, freelancers need to offer more than just their coding skills; they must provide additional value through services like writing better documentation, providing education, or specializing in high-demand areas of expertise. By doing so, they can charge premium rates and justify higher earnings.

**The Ideal Freelancing Strategy**

For those seeking a fulfilling and stable career as a freelancer, it's essential to diversify income streams and build multiple avenues for leads. This can include publishing articles, networking locally, participating in competitions like Kaggle, or leveraging social media to generate name recognition and attract potential clients. While online platforms like Upwork can be a convenient way to find work, they often come with limitations, such as restrictive contract terms and limited control over profiles.

**Contract-Type Work**

One alternative to freelancing on Upwork is exploring contract-type work. This approach involves working directly for larger companies, which typically have more established roles, better management structures, and fewer issues related to client management. Contract work can provide stability and predictability, but it often requires a strong resume, effective cover letter writing, and marketing oneself effectively to attract clients.

**Applying for Jobs: The Process**

When applying for jobs, especially after graduation, it's essential to prepare for rejection and understand that even successful candidates may not be selected. In reality, many job postings are for internal positions, which can lead to a lengthy process without guarantees of success. However, this doesn't mean aspiring freelancers or contractors should give up; instead, they should continue applying, developing their skills, and learning from rejections.

**A Word of Caution**

While freelancing and contract work can be rewarding careers, there are risks involved, especially when working with online platforms like Upwork. The platform's terms and conditions can change at any time, and clients may cancel projects without notice. Additionally, the experience of freelancers on these platforms has only worsened over time, suggesting that future prospects may not improve.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, making good money on Upwork requires a combination of high-quality work, added value, and effective marketing. While contract-type work offers stability and predictability, it often comes with its own set of challenges. By diversifying income streams, building multiple avenues for leads, and staying adaptable in the face of rejection, aspiring freelancers can increase their chances of success in this field.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back everybody for another video so it up work a viable platform for data scientist and machine learning engineers to find contract and part-time work in 2020 let's find out but first if you are new here I am dr. Phil taper in 2012 I got my PhD in experimental condensed matter physics and probably went to work for Intel Corporation as a back-end dry etch process engineer in 2015 I left to pursue my own ventures and have been doing consulting freelancing and contract work ever since really quick announcement is that my new course deep you learning from paper to code is on sale for the next four days in honor of my 38th birthday so if you want to learn how to turn deep burning papers into functional PI torch code then go ahead and click the link in the description to get it for $9.99 but enough Schilling the reason for this video is that I recently saw some content by a guy named Joshua fluke who I recently started watching if you're not familiar with him he is a fellow youtuber that does content in the developer space he talks about career development basically freelancing type stuff and he made a video talking about how up work is a steaming flaming pile of garbage those aren't his words it's kind of the vibe I get from the video and I'm going to address some of the points he made because he makes many valid ones in this video in his video and I'm gonna address them here some of them I agree with some of which I do not so let's start with what I agree with he says that up work can revoke your membership at any time for any reason and in fact they don't even have to let you on the platform I had many of my I have any comments in my videos of people unable to get you know up work profiles approved so that is a real phenomenon and he's absolutely correct Oh Burke is under no obligation to allow you to use their platform and they do and can terminate your account at any time for pretty much any reason though there are only a handful of reasons for which they would do so but nonetheless it is a rather tenuous kind of on ice sort of situation and so using up work as a central pillar of your freelancing and or contracting consulting strategy is going to be a terrible mistake and I highly recommend you do not do that that said is there a place for up work in your consulting business yes I argue there is now Joshua of course disagrees and he raises some valid points so let's address those one by one so he says that upwork charges something like 60 cents per job application when she says is the hallmark of a scam well this is partially true so what is a scam a scam is when someone is trying to get you to give them give you their money in return for something that doesn't actually exist right you're ordering an iPad they send you a brick in the mail that's a scam up work and indeed many job sites not job sites but there are many job listings for which there the charge application fees and there's no real job ever it's just some scammer collecting your money and basically you know you send your money often to the board you never see it again that is certainly a scam over an up works case it is not really a scam because there is a legitimate job at the other end of course there's no guarantee you're going to get it or that your application will even be read and so your $0.60 may very well be wasted so it's most accurate to say that your money could be wasted and most likely will be wasted because let's face it you know you're gonna apply to a whole bunch of jobs and you're only gonna get a handful of them so those 60 cents are gonna go bye-bye but is that such a bad thing so I have been on both sides of the Oak Brook fence I have done both contract work for other people as well as hired contractors of my own I've hired people for you know logo designs for other ventures I've hired people for content creation for photo editing a whole host of stuff and I can say with absolute certainty that the vast majority of applications I get our total garbage and they range from the people that did not actually read my app to people that simply spam out the same proposal over and over and over again now that latter one is the worst sin I can forgive someone not thoroughly reading my job posting but if they do not completely but if they do not write at least a personalized proposal then that goes straight into the garbage now of course that 60 cent fee while nominal at least for us in the United States is good at least make people think twice about sending out that identical proposal to 50 different jobs in the hope that some desperate we'll click on it not knowing any better so it helps improve the client experience which let's be frank is uh perk central goal they exist to serve the clients not the freelancers and so this step is really great for the clients because it helps weed out people that are just gonna spam out you know the same Carbon Copy proposal to a bunch of different jobs without tailoring it to the specific job from the freelancers perspective that helps you as well because as a freelancer you are competing against all these people that spam out proposals and that just increases the noise to signal ratio right too much noise not enough good signal so it's harder for you to get noticed because the clients eyes just kind of glaze over and you know they read through a proposal under proposal and they may miss yours in the malaise of reading a bunch of crappy cop copy-pasted proposals so cutting down the number of those copy pasted and terrible proposals actually helps you because it increases the signal-to-noise ratio and so you're more likely to actually have your proposal read and you're gonna be dealing with a much less frustrated client in the end now another point that Joshua raises is that up work and really all the platforms really discourage you from attempting to contact clients off the platform now this is a bit of a double-edged sword I'm not you know I'm speaking of hypothetical terms here but you know if I were contracting on there you know there would really be nothing preventing me from conversing the client through Skype and I don't think up work would really care about that so long as the contract is maintained on up work their platform particularly for video calls is terrible it is not very reliable it doesn't work really well on Linux I run Ubuntu and there would be many instances when I couldn't get in a call with a client and so I had to use Skype because well you know what other options that I have you certainly want to get on a video call with a client so they know who you are right they know that your profile matches your face because that is a bit of a problem on the platform as well as helping to build rapport and helping you to sell more effectively and so I never face any negative repercussions over that you know and I never attempted to take clients off of the platform he's phrases is in such a way that a he views it as a negative now it can be a negative but it actually helps to some extent so why would it help so upwork provides some level of payment protections so as long as you submit work if the client doesn't file a formal dispute with the quality of the work in other words if they don't formally request changes through a specific Avenue through their user interface you know they just type it in the chat and say hey can you fix this if the changes they request are insane if it amounts to a total rework of it you don't have to do it because you've already submitted the work for approval and as long as they haven't used the proper Channel it defaults to you so it within two weeks you get the money that saves my bacon at one point when a guy tried to scam me out of 500 bucks I did the labor did the work he wasn't happy with it and in hindsight it wasn't the best work but he was totally unreasonable and basically wanted a refund of all the money he had paid me prior when all of the work was already up on his website you know that's not how the internet works he can't really take stuff back so I said you know man I'm not Walmart pay me my money and then just buzz off well he just goes to me and then two weeks later I got the money anyway and of course he left a negative review and there was no real negative consequences outside of that so the payment protection is real it does help you at least in some limited instances if you were attempting to get money out of clients using something like PayPal or QuickBooks or other accounting invoice software there's no real recourse if they don't pay you my last gig I had a client stiffed me out of $1,000 they had attempted to take me off the up work platform and you know the quality of the workplace had just kind of degraded I didn't like it and so I just coasted I said I quit they thought I was trying to angle for more money I wasn't I was serious I was quitting and they basically disregarded the last invoice I sent because they had already taken the job off up work you know I already made around you know $15,000 off the gig so I was like well whatever these guys seem relatively up and up but boy was I wrong so the you know the the concept of taking work off of up work is a double-edged sword upper provides some protections in return for that 20% cut then 10% and 5% graduated kind of tax scheme that they use they do provide some protection and that's for that money so you know is that worth it to you that's up to you but I found them in at least some instances it did help me and the other point he brings up is a race to the bottom in terms of pricing now this is true and not true at the same time so I worked for a person who was charging $200 an hour and getting it consistently on up work so I was kind of not subcontracting but the person was acting as an interim CTO and they were managing me as part of a team and charging the client a couple hundred dollars an hour or something maybe 175 bucks an hour but and looking at this person's profile I could see that they had a history of making you know 150 200 dollars an hour over an extended period of time and so I know that making really totally decent money in $152 an hour is pretty good even if upwork takes you know 20% and believe me doesn't take long to get down to the 5% range when you're charging somebody $200 an hour so you know what is that you know 190 a 197 dollars an hour so that's really not too bad for a platform like upwork so it is possible to make room on e on there if you provide real value now the other caveat there is you have to be doing a task of high value if you're just another PHP developer then you're gonna have a hard time making good money right because you will be competing if you're in the United States or Europe you're gonna be competing against people that are in India Pakistan who are gonna do a fine job and do it for much much less you have to add additional value beyond the work that the client can assign real tangible monetary value to made me write better documentation maybe provide better education maybe you write higher quality code maybe you specialize in a certain type of work that only you are really known for and so you can charge a premium for that and that goes back to marketing yourself something you should always be doing so what is the ideal then for doing consulting work well the ideal would be to be building in multiple avenues of leads for yourself so you could be doing a posting of articles you could be doing local networking you could be doing other things to generate a name for yourself competitions things like Kaggle anything you can do to generate name for yourself to bring inbound leads as well as to provide social proof that justifies your higher-priced tear up work can certainly be a part of that I would not make it the central part of your you were playing because as I said I've had negative experiences they can cancel you at any time they have canceled people and the in general the experience has only gone down over time and I don't expect that trend to reverse anytime soon but if you have a gap in your work and you're trying to hunt up other leads and you see a handful of jobs an up work you can apply for why not do so right money is money you may not prefer the type of work but any income in a pinch will do so I think it is worthwhile to consider it as part of your consulting strategy though not the central pillar of your consulting strategy and this applies to fiber applies to freelancer I've never used those platforms but they suffer from the same limitations where they don't want you taking work off the platform and they own your profile and whatnot so it really applies to them as well so what about the contract type work that he suggests in the video you know I think that's a great idea it can often have the benefit that you work for a larger company that has more well-defined roles a better management structure you won't deal with some of the issues I've dealt with as a freelancer on up work and so that is a totally viable strategy and I highly recommend you watch this video to see this process for doing so and the name of the game there is gonna be having a strong resume and writing a good cover letter marketing yourself effectively as well as volume when I was applying for jobs after grad school I applied for something like 50 jobs and it was like screaming into a vacuum there was you send out these applications and you never hear back you never know why you weren't selected right you never know why you didn't get a call back you just throw it out into the void and that is that now in reality many of these posts are for internal positions but they have to put up something external so they can justify all we couldn't find a good candidate so we had to give it to this person internally and in reality they've created so they've concocted a list of impossible demands that only this specific person within the company matches and so you're never gonna get the job but you don't know that when you're applying but nonetheless it's good practice to go ahead and apply and get used to rejection because that is you know skill in and of itself but is a highly viable route I don't let my negative talk here discourage you it is it is probably a great route for those that like stability but for those that like to do multiple different projects perhaps in parallel certainly in serial than the more traditional routes of freelancing and consulting and contracting work is really gonna be a viable career path in 2020 so I hope that was helpful share your experiences with freelancing if he was if you've used up work let me know how that went for you I'd love to hear your horror stories or maybe your success stories on the platform but leave a comment make sure to subscribe hit that Bell icon cuz I know only 14% of you are getting my notifications and I'll see you in the next videowelcome back everybody for another video so it up work a viable platform for data scientist and machine learning engineers to find contract and part-time work in 2020 let's find out but first if you are new here I am dr. Phil taper in 2012 I got my PhD in experimental condensed matter physics and probably went to work for Intel Corporation as a back-end dry etch process engineer in 2015 I left to pursue my own ventures and have been doing consulting freelancing and contract work ever since really quick announcement is that my new course deep you learning from paper to code is on sale for the next four days in honor of my 38th birthday so if you want to learn how to turn deep burning papers into functional PI torch code then go ahead and click the link in the description to get it for $9.99 but enough Schilling the reason for this video is that I recently saw some content by a guy named Joshua fluke who I recently started watching if you're not familiar with him he is a fellow youtuber that does content in the developer space he talks about career development basically freelancing type stuff and he made a video talking about how up work is a steaming flaming pile of garbage those aren't his words it's kind of the vibe I get from the video and I'm going to address some of the points he made because he makes many valid ones in this video in his video and I'm gonna address them here some of them I agree with some of which I do not so let's start with what I agree with he says that up work can revoke your membership at any time for any reason and in fact they don't even have to let you on the platform I had many of my I have any comments in my videos of people unable to get you know up work profiles approved so that is a real phenomenon and he's absolutely correct Oh Burke is under no obligation to allow you to use their platform and they do and can terminate your account at any time for pretty much any reason though there are only a handful of reasons for which they would do so but nonetheless it is a rather tenuous kind of on ice sort of situation and so using up work as a central pillar of your freelancing and or contracting consulting strategy is going to be a terrible mistake and I highly recommend you do not do that that said is there a place for up work in your consulting business yes I argue there is now Joshua of course disagrees and he raises some valid points so let's address those one by one so he says that upwork charges something like 60 cents per job application when she says is the hallmark of a scam well this is partially true so what is a scam a scam is when someone is trying to get you to give them give you their money in return for something that doesn't actually exist right you're ordering an iPad they send you a brick in the mail that's a scam up work and indeed many job sites not job sites but there are many job listings for which there the charge application fees and there's no real job ever it's just some scammer collecting your money and basically you know you send your money often to the board you never see it again that is certainly a scam over an up works case it is not really a scam because there is a legitimate job at the other end of course there's no guarantee you're going to get it or that your application will even be read and so your $0.60 may very well be wasted so it's most accurate to say that your money could be wasted and most likely will be wasted because let's face it you know you're gonna apply to a whole bunch of jobs and you're only gonna get a handful of them so those 60 cents are gonna go bye-bye but is that such a bad thing so I have been on both sides of the Oak Brook fence I have done both contract work for other people as well as hired contractors of my own I've hired people for you know logo designs for other ventures I've hired people for content creation for photo editing a whole host of stuff and I can say with absolute certainty that the vast majority of applications I get our total garbage and they range from the people that did not actually read my app to people that simply spam out the same proposal over and over and over again now that latter one is the worst sin I can forgive someone not thoroughly reading my job posting but if they do not completely but if they do not write at least a personalized proposal then that goes straight into the garbage now of course that 60 cent fee while nominal at least for us in the United States is good at least make people think twice about sending out that identical proposal to 50 different jobs in the hope that some desperate we'll click on it not knowing any better so it helps improve the client experience which let's be frank is uh perk central goal they exist to serve the clients not the freelancers and so this step is really great for the clients because it helps weed out people that are just gonna spam out you know the same Carbon Copy proposal to a bunch of different jobs without tailoring it to the specific job from the freelancers perspective that helps you as well because as a freelancer you are competing against all these people that spam out proposals and that just increases the noise to signal ratio right too much noise not enough good signal so it's harder for you to get noticed because the clients eyes just kind of glaze over and you know they read through a proposal under proposal and they may miss yours in the malaise of reading a bunch of crappy cop copy-pasted proposals so cutting down the number of those copy pasted and terrible proposals actually helps you because it increases the signal-to-noise ratio and so you're more likely to actually have your proposal read and you're gonna be dealing with a much less frustrated client in the end now another point that Joshua raises is that up work and really all the platforms really discourage you from attempting to contact clients off the platform now this is a bit of a double-edged sword I'm not you know I'm speaking of hypothetical terms here but you know if I were contracting on there you know there would really be nothing preventing me from conversing the client through Skype and I don't think up work would really care about that so long as the contract is maintained on up work their platform particularly for video calls is terrible it is not very reliable it doesn't work really well on Linux I run Ubuntu and there would be many instances when I couldn't get in a call with a client and so I had to use Skype because well you know what other options that I have you certainly want to get on a video call with a client so they know who you are right they know that your profile matches your face because that is a bit of a problem on the platform as well as helping to build rapport and helping you to sell more effectively and so I never face any negative repercussions over that you know and I never attempted to take clients off of the platform he's phrases is in such a way that a he views it as a negative now it can be a negative but it actually helps to some extent so why would it help so upwork provides some level of payment protections so as long as you submit work if the client doesn't file a formal dispute with the quality of the work in other words if they don't formally request changes through a specific Avenue through their user interface you know they just type it in the chat and say hey can you fix this if the changes they request are insane if it amounts to a total rework of it you don't have to do it because you've already submitted the work for approval and as long as they haven't used the proper Channel it defaults to you so it within two weeks you get the money that saves my bacon at one point when a guy tried to scam me out of 500 bucks I did the labor did the work he wasn't happy with it and in hindsight it wasn't the best work but he was totally unreasonable and basically wanted a refund of all the money he had paid me prior when all of the work was already up on his website you know that's not how the internet works he can't really take stuff back so I said you know man I'm not Walmart pay me my money and then just buzz off well he just goes to me and then two weeks later I got the money anyway and of course he left a negative review and there was no real negative consequences outside of that so the payment protection is real it does help you at least in some limited instances if you were attempting to get money out of clients using something like PayPal or QuickBooks or other accounting invoice software there's no real recourse if they don't pay you my last gig I had a client stiffed me out of $1,000 they had attempted to take me off the up work platform and you know the quality of the workplace had just kind of degraded I didn't like it and so I just coasted I said I quit they thought I was trying to angle for more money I wasn't I was serious I was quitting and they basically disregarded the last invoice I sent because they had already taken the job off up work you know I already made around you know $15,000 off the gig so I was like well whatever these guys seem relatively up and up but boy was I wrong so the you know the the concept of taking work off of up work is a double-edged sword upper provides some protections in return for that 20% cut then 10% and 5% graduated kind of tax scheme that they use they do provide some protection and that's for that money so you know is that worth it to you that's up to you but I found them in at least some instances it did help me and the other point he brings up is a race to the bottom in terms of pricing now this is true and not true at the same time so I worked for a person who was charging $200 an hour and getting it consistently on up work so I was kind of not subcontracting but the person was acting as an interim CTO and they were managing me as part of a team and charging the client a couple hundred dollars an hour or something maybe 175 bucks an hour but and looking at this person's profile I could see that they had a history of making you know 150 200 dollars an hour over an extended period of time and so I know that making really totally decent money in $152 an hour is pretty good even if upwork takes you know 20% and believe me doesn't take long to get down to the 5% range when you're charging somebody $200 an hour so you know what is that you know 190 a 197 dollars an hour so that's really not too bad for a platform like upwork so it is possible to make room on e on there if you provide real value now the other caveat there is you have to be doing a task of high value if you're just another PHP developer then you're gonna have a hard time making good money right because you will be competing if you're in the United States or Europe you're gonna be competing against people that are in India Pakistan who are gonna do a fine job and do it for much much less you have to add additional value beyond the work that the client can assign real tangible monetary value to made me write better documentation maybe provide better education maybe you write higher quality code maybe you specialize in a certain type of work that only you are really known for and so you can charge a premium for that and that goes back to marketing yourself something you should always be doing so what is the ideal then for doing consulting work well the ideal would be to be building in multiple avenues of leads for yourself so you could be doing a posting of articles you could be doing local networking you could be doing other things to generate a name for yourself competitions things like Kaggle anything you can do to generate name for yourself to bring inbound leads as well as to provide social proof that justifies your higher-priced tear up work can certainly be a part of that I would not make it the central part of your you were playing because as I said I've had negative experiences they can cancel you at any time they have canceled people and the in general the experience has only gone down over time and I don't expect that trend to reverse anytime soon but if you have a gap in your work and you're trying to hunt up other leads and you see a handful of jobs an up work you can apply for why not do so right money is money you may not prefer the type of work but any income in a pinch will do so I think it is worthwhile to consider it as part of your consulting strategy though not the central pillar of your consulting strategy and this applies to fiber applies to freelancer I've never used those platforms but they suffer from the same limitations where they don't want you taking work off the platform and they own your profile and whatnot so it really applies to them as well so what about the contract type work that he suggests in the video you know I think that's a great idea it can often have the benefit that you work for a larger company that has more well-defined roles a better management structure you won't deal with some of the issues I've dealt with as a freelancer on up work and so that is a totally viable strategy and I highly recommend you watch this video to see this process for doing so and the name of the game there is gonna be having a strong resume and writing a good cover letter marketing yourself effectively as well as volume when I was applying for jobs after grad school I applied for something like 50 jobs and it was like screaming into a vacuum there was you send out these applications and you never hear back you never know why you weren't selected right you never know why you didn't get a call back you just throw it out into the void and that is that now in reality many of these posts are for internal positions but they have to put up something external so they can justify all we couldn't find a good candidate so we had to give it to this person internally and in reality they've created so they've concocted a list of impossible demands that only this specific person within the company matches and so you're never gonna get the job but you don't know that when you're applying but nonetheless it's good practice to go ahead and apply and get used to rejection because that is you know skill in and of itself but is a highly viable route I don't let my negative talk here discourage you it is it is probably a great route for those that like stability but for those that like to do multiple different projects perhaps in parallel certainly in serial than the more traditional routes of freelancing and consulting and contracting work is really gonna be a viable career path in 2020 so I hope that was helpful share your experiences with freelancing if he was if you've used up work let me know how that went for you I'd love to hear your horror stories or maybe your success stories on the platform but leave a comment make sure to subscribe hit that Bell icon cuz I know only 14% of you are getting my notifications and I'll see you in the next video\n"