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Freelance Platform Upwork's Opt-in Service Tracks Freelancers By Capturing Screenshots, Webcam Photos and Measuring Clicks and Keystrokes Frequency (buzzfeednews.com)
Caroline O'Donovan, reporting for BuzzFeed News: To convince workers to join the unstable and unreliable world of freelance work, startups and platforms often promise freedom and flexibility. But on the digital freelance platform Upwork, company software tracks hundreds of freelancers while they work by saving screenshots, measuring the frequency of their clicks and keystrokes, and even sometimes taking webcam photos of the workers. Upwork, which hosts "millions" of coding and design gigs, guarantees payment for freelancers, even if the clients who hired them refuse to pay. But in order to get the money, freelancers have to agree in advance to use Upwork's digital Work Diary, which counts keystrokes to measure how "productive" they are and takes screenshots of their computer screens to determine whether they're actually doing the work they say they're doing.
Upwork's tracker isn't automatically turned on for all gigs on the platform. Some freelancers like it because it guarantees payment, but others find it unnerving. [...] Upwork maintains that freelancers don't have to use the time tracker if it makes them uncomfortable. [...] But while Work Diary may be opt-in on its surface, Microsoft Research's Mary Gray said freelancers may not feel like they really have a choice.
Upwork's tracker isn't automatically turned on for all gigs on the platform. Some freelancers like it because it guarantees payment, but others find it unnerving. [...] Upwork maintains that freelancers don't have to use the time tracker if it makes them uncomfortable. [...] But while Work Diary may be opt-in on its surface, Microsoft Research's Mary Gray said freelancers may not feel like they really have a choice.
I'm a consultant and have been for a long time, and I know this business. I don't think counting keystrokes and in many cases screenshots make any sense, so I think the implementation of this is totally bogus, but the concept makes complete sense.
"I've never had a client expect to be able to look over my shoulder"
Right well UpWork isn't your client. I don't think your clients should, and to another person's point, yes your clients should trust you.
But this is in the case of when you do the work and the client _doesn't_ pay. This is UpWork covering your ass, when they really have no obligation to. They want a way to prove that you are least did some work, so likely they can go after the client later and recover costs.
This seems absolutely reasonable and honestly a heck of a bargain. Again, I think the implementation of counting keystrokes seems like a stupid way to do it, but coming up with a tracking method to _optionally_ guarantee payment even in the case of client non-payment is the deal of the century in the freelance world. Don't believe me? Try freelancing for a while and see how many clients stiff you after you've completed the job. There are literally advertisements in the NYC subway about it.
(Yes, retainers, payment up front, et ceteta -- no the world does not always work that way.)
On various different platforms, people wanting to watch coding in remote sessions, etc. They can get fucked. Check the repo at the end of the day, week, whatever...other than that...fuck off.
Counting keystrokes is a silly idea!!!!!!!!!! Really it is !!!!!!!!! That could never be abused!!!!!!!! No way to pad that!!!!!!!!
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Working from home is great. And sometimes I even put clothes on!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I worked for a $40B multinational when I got out of grad school and they used this technology to track employee productivity. They had an entire office devoted to developing AI to pore over records of screen shots and keystrokes to determine the "Employee Performance Factor." In our annual review our review score was scaled by our EPF, as determined by said unaccountable office in India. The target we were held to was 96% EPF - that means doing productive work 96% of the time we were at the office.
It was an awful place to work.
As creepy as this is, if I could pay my bills doing, say 2-3 days a week on this platform, I'd drop my full-time gig in a heartbeat.
How is it you can't spoof key strokes, screen shots, and bits of Web cam footage? Get a little done in the first half hour of the day, screenshot (or screen record) several dozen files being edited, and have the clock spliced into the screenshot automatically throughout the rest of the day. Auto-hide your task bar so there's never a clock. Use video recorded on different days throughout the day, based on time of day.
It's a 200-line bash script.
Coding time and KLOC are similar concepts. You won't hold freelance contracts very long if you produce at extremely high costs--such as by having normal hourly rates but charging for 6x as many hours.
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They're the foreman, and there is no shop steward to make 'em knock it off.
You don't have to use the time tracker... and ya don't have to be paid by them either.
I love subtlety
It's a dumb way of measuring productivity, but ... at the end of the day, you don't have to be a freelancer and you certainly don't have to work for Upwork. As long as they are upfront about these things and not buried in a mountain of "fine text".
This is of course highly illegal in any civilized country. (E.g. the EU laws are demanding the exact opposite.)
But it would be shocking, that so-called people are allowed to treat others in such a psychopathic way, and everyone acts like it's just another corporate thing... if I didn't know certain studies, that predicted that most students in the US (and many in Europe) were selfish psychopaths (especially with the right presciption drugs), more than a decade ago. Now we get to reap the fruits.
Reminds me of the tales my grandma told me about the Hitler Youth SS, at the end of the war. She said they were incredibly creepy, because they looked like humans, but did not behave like humans at all.
TopTal / Top Tracker does it, and is very up front about it. This practice is intended as a way for the freelancer to ostensibly prove, when necessary, that they were actually doing client work during the time they clocked. It’s also very simple to turn it off.
If you don’t like it, don’t use them. I’m not feeling the outrage here.
#DeleteChrome
... but fuck that. If employers don't trust their employees with a proven track record of getting things done on time, then it is time to move on to the next job.
So what happens when someone walks up with a laptop running linux?
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
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this may make the freelances W2 and not 1099.
As they are being forced to there tools and there may even be time clock issues with them being marked inactive when not making keystrokes as if all work must be done online and one system.
What if someone is on a call?
What about stuff like working in an Linux distro that they don't have software for. (centos 7 is on that list)
In office meetings?
Drive time?
so-called 'weather' advancing to top 3.. keyclicking that out of the system should be a priority? thanks
and use it only for this somewhat Orwellian monitoring tool.
If they're counting keystrokes and doing screenshots, it doesn't take
much effort to either do the work, or fake it to look like you're productive.
Do all your other "stuff" on your personal system...
I've worked with outsourcing firms who provided their own metrics to us for their
contractors "productivity" which never reported the hours the contractors spent on google search for code somewhat relevant to their work.
So the quality of your work doesn't matter, as long as you sit there and look like you're doing a hell of a lot of it?
Got to pound the non-round pegs into the same round holes everyone else fits into, or you're not a 'productive worker'!
People do not like having anyone looking over their shoulder all the time, whether literally or 'virtually'.
You want people to be productive? Let them know what you need done, then get out of the way and let them do it. If they consistently don't get it done, then you can replace them with someone else, but micromanaging people is just plain stupid and that's what all this surveillance of 'freelance workers' is.
for 30+ years. If a client ever proposed this I would pass on the project.
;)
If you want to be an anal retentive micro manager hire a programmer in house.
Want to improve your chances of delivery and acceptance. Write a great Design Specification and Acceptance Criteria document in the beginning. That protects both parties not this BS.
Just my 2 cents
I use Upwork to hire small or complicated jobs I don't want to do myself (or hire for). I've never heard of this level of tracking.
However, I only ever do fixed project bids: if you write X by Y and it meets Z quality standard, I will give you $$$. I could give two zits if you hacked it together in two hours or it took three times as long as you thought it would as long as you hit my quality standard. Not even remotely interested in knowing what else my hires were doing with their time as long as my thing was done.
you b#####ds, I clicked on a buzzfeed article without checking, shame on you
For saving me the time of writing this...
Anyone who thinks this is a good idea should google for the history of the concept of "Piece work" and its abuses. Try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work for starters.
Anyway, this methodology probably won't be useful (even to the abusers) for any tech work above codemonkey level. Totally useless for hardware dev.
It's my understanding Windows 10 does much of the same, taking screenshots, recording keystrokes, listening to the mic, and uploading it to "the cloud".
They have a new multi-desktop feature that also goes to the cloud, their ultimate goal seems to be transferring your desktop as-you-use-it to the cloud so you can go to another computer and pick up where you left off.
Oh, and scan it all for stuff of interest to target advertising.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
So they don't even let you take any breaks? or they force overtime.
assuming 8 hour day with 2 15 minute breaks, the max epf would be about 93%
...just so that I can show them a big hairy dick the next time they take a photo from my camera without authorisation.
On a more seriosus note, Freelancing is an equivalent of almost-free work and in developed countries is dead. You can't even hope to compete with Indian cheap labour.
The Upwork tracker has always done this, as did the oDesk client before the merger with Elance.
Everything about oDesk was far less buggy than the platform in place now, which is clearly developed offshore, along with seemingly everything else they can outsource.
The choice put before freelancers has always been: use the tracker or give up guaranteed payment. What's changed is Upwork's strategy, focusing on new client uptake and short-term projects. The top fee rate used to be 10%, but after the merger Upwork changed this to 20% for the first $10,000 of hourly work. Their automated job matching is feeble and basic... I'm not interested in 90% of the recommendations I get. Similarly, almost all of the interview invitations I get, which are sent by clients themselves, have little or nothing to do with my skillset.
The newest alarming thing is Upwork's account verification policy. For obtuse reasons, they will suspend your account until you verify your identity over video chat (with outsourced staff). It happened to me, and I've seen at least three Reddit posts about it.
Upwork has overall become a shitshow from the freelancer's perspective. But not because of the tracker app.
Allow me to share an old parable with you...
One day, a factory has a problem. Their processing plant has stopped functioning. None of the staff engineers know whats wrong and they can't fix it. So, one of the old timers says "we need to call a consultant. we need to call Bob". Bob has been around, he knows how things work. His experience enables him to produce more results than the average.
Bob shows up at the site. He looks around, sniffs a few things, taps on some guages, and says "a ha". He walks over to a valve and hits it with a hammer. There are some clicks and clacks, and everything starts working.
Bob turns to the site manager and says "that'll be $10,000".
The site manager says "what? that's insane! You've only been here for 20 minutes. I'm not paying you 10,000 to swing a hammer!"
Bob responds "No, you are not. You are paying me $10,000 to know where to swing the hammer."
Don't measure hammer swings if what you want is results.
Yeah, nothing like aimbots could ever be deployed on such platforms
*facepalm*
Can I get a Ren Hoëk? You eeeeeediots! lol
I've earnt $200k+ with upwork, all of it with the time tracker. An hour worked and logged, is an hour paid. No ifs, buts, maybes or discussion. No clients have ever had questions about the screenshots, I assume they review them. It's a good system that serves the interests of both parties. I much prefer using the tracker. It takes as long as it takes, and I get paid for it. Win. I should also note that fees go down significantly once you do 1/10k with a client. Upwork have looked after me very well and always pay on time. I doubt a significant %o f those hating on upwork and freelance gigs in general have ever logged any hours.
I'm not sure how this counts as news. Freelance sites have been doing this for years. It's at the option of the people offering the gig. The most common was just a webcam that took your picture every minute or so.
It's been like this for at least ten years.
Kriston
20 min break only is SOP at call centers. Awful abusive places with psychopath management, even within larger companies.
I've tried several times to get on the platform, re-done my profile several times to cover different aspects of work that I can do, yet they always come back with sorry we have too many people with your skills in my area, despite me searching my area for the skills and finding nobody! I've been freelancing for 18 years, maybe I'm over qualified...
But saying that, I'm glad I didn't get on there now if this is the way they want to log time.
Nobody would even consider such a job, if he had a real choice.
And one of those choices would be: Have robots and computers do 95% of the work, and give the resulting wealth to everyone, in the form of credits to get their fair share of the resulting products.
The 5% can then be extra-prestigious professions, not jobs, that give a bit money on top of that, apart from being way more engaging.
Name of multinational?
I would be extremely reluctant to accept a milestone based contract. If problem come up that are not my fault but which delay the milestones then I'm going to be paying for that.
As a company I'd be worried that the contractor is only interested in hitting the milestones as quickly as possible, rather than delivering good code or a robust system.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I've earnt $200k+ with upwork
Really? $200k in what time frame? Doing what type of work?
It's all about risk management. In regular business contracts, pay per milestone is also known as Firm Fixed Price (FFP) - the price is fixed and based on effort estimates alone. Sometimes there may be continguencies but the risk is borne by the undertaker, so the price generally reflects this. (i.e., it's cost of doing the work plus overheads, plus profit, plus risk margin).
The other method, pay by the hour is generally referred to as Time and Materials (T&M). Here the worker is paid by the hour to do the work and it can take as long as it does (up to a cap). The risk is borne by the customer and often the margins are much smaller
The thing that changes is usually changes. In FFP, changes are typically followed by a change request and a bill for new charges for the changes. On T&M, the change is usually absorbed into the contract (it just takes more time).
In addition, the first work inside FFP is agreeing to not only the requirements, but an acceptance test plan - the milestone markers will not be decided one way or another, but by passing the tests specified in the test plan. So M1 might be passing tests 1-5, M2 1-10, etc. Never accept any FFP without a test plan in place or at least have a test plan as a milestone that needs acceptance.