Richard T.

I joined for the full year membership thinking I would be taking courses specifically in UX Design. That was not the case. I have a bachelors degree in digital design. The courses offered covered material that every designer learns, not anything specifically to UX design. In fact, all it took was one trip to Barnes and Noble to find numerous books, from numerous authors, and numerous publishers, on UX design that contained information very different from what the courses at IDF offer. The site is great if you want to become a designer in general, (graphic designer, production designer, visual designer, etc.) but does nothing to prepare you to delve into UX design itself. It also is not self-paced has advertised. You have to wait week after week to progress through the courses just like you would in a college classroom, each one taking 4 to 6 weeks. Inside the courses themselves, I found myself routinely answering the same essay questions over and over again. In other words, they would ask the same question a different way several times. Which is fine if you are doing multiple choice, but these were essay questions. So it was infuriating to have to write the same essay question answer over and over again. And the "certification" is through LinkedIn... NOT an academic institution. Its in the fine print after you sign up. LinkedIn.com is a website... NOT a school, college, or institution. The only place this certification is accredited for is LinkedIn's website. That is clearly not what people are lead to believe when signing up. In other words, this is NOT accredited by any means.

First off let me say this. I was a long time freelancer on Elance and then was moved to Upwork when they merged. I held a 98% Success score for years, I was on their Enterprise Bench - which you don't know what that is you have to be invited by Upwork to be on. I was an elite freelancer and only had 1 bad review in 6 years, and even that one was edited by Upwork because they felt it wasn't fair. That being said, as an elite user, I had a direct line (phone) to their customer service.

Over the course of this year (2017) I discovered, from the inside as an elite user, that two main features of Upwork are NOT what Upwork says they are.

The first feature is the Time Tracker they claim protects freelancers and clients alike. It does not work. It will cut itself off at random. When it does, all a freelancer can do is enter the missing time manually. As soon as you do that, you are no longer protected. All guarantees are null and void. I had tickets open to address the problem for months, Upwork never fixed the problem. They know the problem exists, but has never corrected it.

The second is the JSS (or Job Success Score). This "secret" algorithm is supposed to show a freelancers or clients success rate. It doesn't work at all. It's complete crap and a lie Upwork uses to draw in new freelancers and clients alike. For example, if a client leaves a contract open assuming they will have work later on, Upwork claims that is "Neutral" and does not affect your score. That is a lie, it does drop your JSS score. Any feedback given by a client to a freelancer that criticizes Upwork in anyway will be edited by Upwork. And vice versus. My score in particular dropped from 98% to 88% because of contracts that were open, but had not been active for a few weeks. That doesn't mean the clients or myself did anything wrong or negative and we should not have been penalized. We were.

For a company that takes 20% of any job and monthly subscriptions, these two features should have worked properly. They do not. In my case, Upwork was making easily $600 to $800 a month off of me. For that much money a month, EVERYTHING should work. Yet Upwork knows and has not corrected either of these problems.

In addition, the customer service completely sucks. They do not abide by their own Terms of Service. They routinely ban both clients and freelancers for raising these issues. They edit feedback, forums, anything that criticizes Upwork as a company.

So at the end of the day, you are paying for nothing. The reviews are edited, the scores are not accurate at all, the guarantees are worthless, nothing on that site is true. If you are a freelancer, you will be exploited. If you are a client, you will be lied to. Period.

In my opinion, this site should be hit with a class action lawsuit and forced to return every dime it has ripped off from clients and freelancers. And that's coming from me, one of their chosen elite.

Somebody on this site needs to seriously look into this company.

I have spent the last year... YES, I said year on flexjobs. I have applied for a few hundred jobs. Every single one I was able to contact the company posting the job at some point. And every single one said they either didn't even know they were posted flexjobs or that the job posted was weeks and even months old.

The whole point to paying this site is that they are supposed to clearing or making sure the jobs were legitimate and up to date for you. Clearly they are not... or who ever should be over there should be fired.

At least half of the so-called-positive reviews here appear on other sites exactly, and I do mean word for word as they do here. Which leads me to believe there is a marketing firm or PR firm that is just posting positive reviews for them to offset honest reviews like mine.

You have better chance of winning the lottery than you do finding a job on their site.