Upwork is still my favorite freelance site if we exclude all the cool stuff I’m involved in building at the moment. 🙂
There are features on that platform, though, that make freelancers either laugh or cry, and sometimes we don’t even know which one is more appropriate!
The ridiculous Upwork stories in this article include:
- The funny badges including Top Rated Plus
- Scammers and other hazards
- Invitations to ridiculous Upwork jobs
- Reverting Upwork to the 2016 version
Without further ado, let’s dig into the juiciest and the most ridiculous Upwork stories I’ve learned about until today.
1. Top Rated with Plusses and Minuses and other badges/badgers
One of the constant topics of ridiculement is the ladder system with badges of the most imaginative names:
- Rising Talent could well be Rising Star for all I care. Star would look more brilliant! 😉
- Top Rated is probably the only decent badge that sounds OK to me
- Top Rated Plus sounds like there’s something unnecessary and extra, like around my belt line.
- Expert-Vetted is the hardest one to get but also the most ridiculous one. Who the hell wants to be “vetted”. We do vetting on dogs… and also “petting”. 🙂
And these badges may not correlate with achievements at all. In fact, many times succeeding on Upwork and keeping things going is hardly challenging. In fact, it gets really easy! For instance, one year, my Top Rated badge was secured with a whopping amount of work: 3½ hours. 🙂
Keeping the Top Rated badge with 3½ hours of work.
Some found the badge categories and the rules for achieving them as hilarious as me.
Getting some of the badges is just… strange.
But some find these badges motivating… motivating enough to read some of my classics like the Expert’s Game article and learn more about freelancing.
Posting about some achievements trigger others to learn more!
Also, the coconut angle of the CocoLord seems to inspire some…
Being a “killer” sounds a bit drastic, but as a yet another nickname, I’ll take it!
Talking about all these plusses, minuses, and stars, I couldn’t help but to think of all the “rockstars” on Upwork. Yes, there are so many!
Too many! More than 500 pages (5,000 individuals) in fact.
Rockstar freelancers deserved their own post.
Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be that many jobs for all those thousands of rockstars, so they might end up in the Race to the Bottom. Combined with that disastrous Proposal Boost feature, this is a killer combination!
Only 6 pages of jobs, though…
But hey, look at the bright side: Rockstar is better than Kick-Ass, Wizard, or Ninja, don’t you think? 🙂
Or is it…?
Sometimes, it’s the expectations of the freelancers that makes things look all too funny, and quite honestly, very unrealistic.
Know your expectations, top the game.
Many know this plot already.
But now, back to the badges. When Upwork launched their new Community Forum badges that absolutely nobody asked for, we all went even more (coco)nuts than usual!
Badges… dozens of them… all at once!
Let’s make suits of them, we’ve got plenty!
This idea spawned more and more ideas along the same track. Soon, we all became badgers!
Badge, badger, badgerst… what?
This thing went on for a couple of (dozen) posts… like this masterpiece.
Others took it even further with a slightly cynical tone.
But, of course, we couldn’t leave it there, could we?
Thanks, Upwork!
Even months later this thing lived in our minds, despite the serious context!
A good meme will be remembered months later. 🙂
2. Scammers and other hazards
You know, the year 2022 was the year of the scammers on Upwork and all other sites. This unfortunate phenomenon resulted in various posts on LinkedIn and the Community Forum, Quora and Facebook, and so on.
Some of the ridiculous Upwork scam stuff deserved a little more than what was already given, so I thought I’d make a parody post about how many LinkedIn posts about Upwork went that year.
A shallow discussion deserves a good parody post.
Let’s just say, Upwork would do well by not copy-pasting the same response every time and actually go and do something more effective.
Some people totally got it.
Some got it very differently. Praise diversity!
And then there were all these ridiculous job posts that don’t make any sense… but hey, everyone can post a job, so why not?
What the fgggggggggg is this job about?
This discussion blew up (or went totally coconuts, see it for yourself and tell me)!
Some are masters of all arts.
Others wanted to find out who was guilty…
At some point I thought I found the guilty one!
Someone even managed to decipher the message. 🙂
3. Invitations to ridiculous Upwork jobs… Coconuts, go!
Upwork is (in)famous for all kinds of funny jobs. And it’s more than random ridiculement of what people hire freelancers to do… see it for yourself!
The original post was about a job for forging a death certificate for the noblest of reasons.
The job is legit as hell, right?
Of course, I had to pour gas on the fire!
“This is how we work now”… and we know it 🙁
It was around that time when that ridiculous Upwork ad was seen by everyone everywhere.
And some of the comments tied all too perfectly to previous articles on this site like The Dog Ate My Business Plan.
That bloody dog!
Every now and then, despite the outrageous rates I put upfront in my profile, I still get invitations to completely random jobs. Like this one.
Business plan, healthy lifestyle… yeah, does my coconut lifestyle count?
I went and actually replied to that one (as I tried to be more polite than usually).
I did write a reply… not so serious one, though.
Did I get that job? Nope. Nor did I want to get it. Random stuff! But what I did get is an awesomely scientific/philosophical advice!
Comments like these should be put in a frame and hung on the wall.
Sometimes, you don’t even need to write anything to get forward with talking about a deal. This is the shortest proposal I’ve ever written.
Brevity is beautiful when it works!
Sometimes, it’s not the client nor the freelancer that get funny. Sometimes it’s the Talent Specialists!
My favorite response to ridiculous Upwork Talent Specialists.
But this is hardly all. Once, I was invited to something by Upwork itself! Yes, the Upwork LIVE Expert Talent Talk that I did in May 2022.
This one went totally coconuts. Both during the talk and after it. 🙂
My not-so-secret source of power…
The aftermath was probably even funnier than the talk itself.
Coconut power!!!
And there was more, much more.
More power!
4. Revert, eject, and evacuate!
Finally, I think what I suggested should happen soon: Revert Upwork system version back to what it was in 2016.
This discussion is too long to copy-paste here, so you might want to dig in on LinkedIn yourself now. Most people who are old enough to know how it was back in the golden days were more than thrilled about this fantasy world I just pictured.
In 2016 Upwork was still really, really good!
As the last straw, I couldn’t help but to post what all this random stuff looks like – using a well-known snooker fluke analogy.
Snooker fluke, Upwork fluke… anyway, a lucky fluke.
Is there more to it than all this ridiculous Upwork stuff?
Yes! There is way more than this, what you’ve seen so far was just the fun part. In fact, every now and then, you can get insanely good gigs without doing anything at all! Like this one!
Still, Upwork provides great opportunities like no other platform.
Or this Upwork Enterprise Client who hired me because my rates were multiple times higher than all the others.
20 hours well spent working for an Upwork Enterprise Client.
But you already know this. You remember my sweet list of top invitations I posted years ago, right? And my whole story has been out there for years and years.
Ok, maybe that’s enough ridiculement for one article.
But wait, there is more (as usual)! To continue on the funny path, go check out the funniest invitations I’ve ever got on Upwork. Worth a few more laughs if your stomach can handle it! 🙂
