> I agree that Upwork is a tough market. I've had friends who've made careers off it, though. You just have to be willing to get in and engage at the bottom before you can climb your way up to legitimate rates. Once you do that, Upwork directs people to your inbox all the time, and you can switch clients at the drop of a hat because every day you get several new solicitations within your price range that show up in your inbox.

Yes. They've got dealflow, but upwork is complete whack with their stupid screenshot producing antitrust policy and its boring web dev work. I don't work on user interfaces. I sometimes use upwork to outsource user interfaces that need to be built though. When it can be cheap.

> I've had bad experiences with Toptal at multiple levels. I don't trust them and I don't think they're worthwhile. I absolutely don't believe they're providing the top 1% of workers, which is what they claim. They use Codility for screening which is an automatic fail imo.

Toptal has pretty good dealflow. Not going to comment on any other part of their platform. Never had any issues with recruiters negatively affecting my experience.

> Never heard of Gigster.

Not a big loss tbh.

> I was mostly focused on local clients, which may also have had something to do with it. It sounds like you're mostly online. Before you got a constant stream of referrals, how did you find your clients? Replying to solicitations on classified or job postings? People coming to you for some pre-existing domain expertise, perhaps exhibited through a blog, social media participation, or an open-source project you've contributed to? Finding people on mailing lists and bug trackers and propositioning them? Just curious how you broke in to this.

None of the above. I work at the intersection of applied math/physics/SE and am immersed in a couple industries that are interesting to me/I have friends in. The software that I write always generates alpha (finds money making opportunities) - so the questions I get are less of the "can he do TDD? does he know react? can he write async?" and more of the "I have this business problem, can you help me 10x ROI?" variety.

When I turned 18 I got into playing poker online. I was good at that. Soon I wrote my own analytics software to generate more of an edge at the tables. Then I wrote a bot to play the game for me.

I've written a bitcoin arbitrage service when the markets were really volatile back in '12 or '13? And sold that to some loaded guy.

Then I wrote a couple crawlers for sites that people claim are un-crawl-able like linkedin. And I ran an ill-fated startup that I got suckered into.

I basically have wealthy friends/contacts in 3 industries who know whom to talk about when they have optimization problems.

Maybe its wrong to assume that I'm a software engineer. I certainly wouldn't call me that. Math is my game, software is a tool.

> The most appealing thing about Upwork is the constant stream of automatically-selected clients. It feels less bad than Toptal to me because there's less direct interference from corporate middlemen ("recruiters")

To be honest, I could see how toptal can suck for people who offer basic web dev services, but I'm simply not part of that crowd. I have good relationships with half a dozen of those recruiters and they send the interesting jobs my way.

You certainly need to work them. You need to work everyone you expect to generate revenue for you. But once you've done that, they behave.

> 99% of Upwork's clientele is looking to pay wages that are literally illegal in the United States, but Upwork has so much traffic, they can always supply you with someone in your rate bracket (up to like $120/hr, which admittedly is not very high). Don't have to worry about the stars aligning. That kind of thing is comfortable and well worth a reasonable fee (Upwork's fees are unreasonable, but that's neither here nor there for this discussion).

You just have to hustle. If you want to hustle on upwork, hustle on upwork. I'm sure they take less fees than toptal does. To me, it doesn't make sense to get involved with upwork. If it does to you, you should probably work with them.

A couple months ago I observed the deals they had for a while and it didn't produce a single one that I would care to even apply to.