This is an old one but I've made a pretty decent income mostly from eLance (now Upwork) and similar sites for a good few years. Most of the rates are terrible but you learn to recognise the valuable jobs that are actually worth your time. You'll probably never get rich from it, but it gives you a lot of freedom and a reasonable amount of money.
I work on Upwork for 6 months, during this time I completed 10 jobs and earned 7.5k $ There are very good projects for which they pay generously, but there are about 10% of such projects, but one such project will provide you with good and interesting work for at least a couple of months or even half a year. Clients are usually looking for a specific specialist who, as a result of correspondence and communication, will show himself to be a professional and be competent in the required field. Of all those who respond to this work, there are few such potential competitors, for example: 1) 20 people answered, 1/2 did not even read the publication of the work, but simply sent a standard response to the work, with a 95% probability the client would not even answer them. 2) of the remaining 10 1/2, according to the client’s requirements, the performer will not fit 1/2 (a specialist in another field does not speak English well, works in inappropriate programs) 3) 3) Of the remaining 5, about 1-2 person are incompetent so much that the client will not want to take off work. 4) As a result, you are competing with about 2-3 specialists, and here it is important to have a good portfolio, suitable skills for this work and, as a result of the dialogue, to prove yourself as a specialist able to do what the client wants. Therefore, if you are a professional, you have created a good portfolio and are responding to the work that corresponds to your skils of winning approximately 30%. I have a great Canadian client who found me and invited me to work with him. He needed an aerodynamics specialist who is also competent in the propagation of noise, especially aerodynamic noise. I didn’t suit him by the criterion of knowing English (I’m not fluent in English), so he hired me and I did the work needed, now he has to do tests so that we can continue. The second client who wanted to work with me but due to the fact that I don’t know English had to choose another engineer was ready to conclude a contract with me for 50k$. Here you can work and earn well, but I would not give up a permanent job in favor of upwork Yes, I agree there are many stupid or impracticable works, and very often you can see the work that is estimated by the client 10 times cheaper than it really costs, but the professional will not take such a job, and the one who does it will obviously be a non-professional, will do everything very badly. When a client tries to save money on skilled labor by hiring cheap engineers, this always leads to poor results and problems. Good clients understand this and do not make such silly mistakes. «The greedy customer pays twice, the fool pays three times and the greedy fools pay their whole lives»
That's a really good breakdown. It can be a bit disheartening when you see '50 people have applied for this job', and you think you've got not chance! I've actually used some of these platforms to hire people too and I had a similar experience. Most of the applications are either just obvious copy-and-paste jobs or just aren't relevant to the job at all. Then from the level of the replies you can tell if lots of the others would be a good fit, so it's fairly easy to whittle it down to two or three hires. We also have a bit of responsibility as the hiring people to give people a fair rate and treat them well!
