As you know or not, from time to time I work as a freelancer. I do this because I want to stay in touch with some technologies I do not use too often at work. Most of the projects I do with vWorker (now Upwork), previously called RentACoder. If you’re interested in cooperation, you can reach me via my profile.

Anyway, lately I had a bad experience with some kind of project on vWorker. I’ve decided to make a project for someone via TeamViewer. It was pay for deliverables project. The problem is that in this kind of project on vWorker if you not upload anything on the site you did not your job! The project was very interesting, but after 15 hours spent with the employer, I felt that the guy wasn’t sure what should be done, and some necessary elements were not ready, and the employer presented new things to do… What’s going on? I wasn’t sure what to do, but Sunday was lost for sure. I don’t like to work without clear requirements, it usually leads to misunderstandings. So I just put some summaries about the project and asked the employer to put the project into cancellation – I thought that it’s better to lose 15 hours instead of 30 or more.

But when the project went into arbitration, I got a clear message from vWorker: you did not do your job, and you have to pay for it (cancellation fee)! You should use in this case Pay for time project. Ups. But why does vWorker allow posting such a project when the worker is unprotected in this case? I get information that next time when the employer suggests such things, I should inform the vWorker team. Yes, first we take care of money, then we do the same with rules.

There are two good things about this project. I’ve learned one thing: I will never make something like this again. I will ask the employer to move the project to oDesk. The second thing is that the employer decides to pay a cancellation fee.