Freelancer reviews

There are a lot of bad things about freelancer. A lot of these have been mentioned in previous reviews. One of the biggest issues are that management is incompetent, they constantly flip-flop between projects and never seem to achieve any substantial product result. Projects are undertaken with a half thought-out-idea from senior management with no road-map to success and extremely unreasonable deadlines. When a project invariably fails, or fails to move the needle, the blame falls upon the engineers and product managers when it is a top-down problem. If the engineers and project managers push back on the deadlines to do things properly they are seen as incompetent. The phrase "it's just one-line of code" [why is it taking so long?] has become a meme amongst the product teams. All of this can be explained by desperation; the company seems to be desperately trying to make progress in ANY vertical instead of committing to key verticals and performing well. The biggest con working at freelancer is that senior management doesn't give a damn about professional development. - There is little to no on-boarding, little to no formal ongoing training (and you're criticised when you don't "know it anyway"). - The "incubation" programs are a joke, they don't provide any value to the people that enter them. - When you seek advancement it takes months to even have the conversation, at which point focus is on minor failures rather than achievements or strengths vs weaknesses, it takes months more to continue the discussion and never at the behest of management. Most eventually give up because the process is so bad. I've seen very junior members of teams put in positions of extreme pressure and expectation, perform excellently, and not get so much as a change to their junior title. Senior management will say "we have plans to improve the process for advancement" , but they also say "we have plans to improve mid career training", "we have plans to improve onboarding", "we have plans to improve culture", "we have plans to ... " You'll never see these plans, management can't execute, and it is the staff that suffers and is blamed for it. The culture is toxic, because employees aren't valued. Who cares about hackathons and ping-pong when there are underlying systemic issues that cause your employees to feel like the company doesn't care about them? The company leans on a start-up culture from 5 years ago, that culture doesn't exist any more.

So so much. For starters, so many reviews speak of a boys club mentality, that you would be frowned upon if you left on time, and as true as they are(or were in some cases, some things have changed for the better), the biggest problem is a select few individuals who created a spineless management, who's attitude towards the company exists just to accept paycheck-to-paycheck. The leadership are there just to accept their paycheck with no real care about what each product is doing. This is evident in the way that they deal with product managers, and that relays down to team members. Micromanaging them and not letting the product manager make the pragmatic decisions needed, without listening to the team either. You'll find conversations that circle 4-5 times, going through stages of being a confirmed decision, progress has started, and the goals change 3-4 times within the span of several days, all without "data" and based on pointless questions that are asked just to prove a specific point. 2 weeks later, they'll ask why it's not done, then forget that they were the ones who said to put things on hold until a decision was made to push through. Key members of staff who have been there for years, will be gone overnight with no answers except "we just had to let them go". Confidence in keeping your job is low if you ask too many questions. That's why there's a strong belief of a "boys club". Don't expect a promotion or pay rise anytime soon either. You'll find better rates elsewhere, but do expect to learn a truckload while you're at Freelancer. Just know where to draw the line of sacrifice to learn, and know that you can learn anywhere.