How to Leverage Upwork’s Potential as a Full-Time Software Developer

A story on how Upwork can bump your developer rank up

Photo by Elijah O’Donnell: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-woman-lying-on-bed-while-using-laptop-4066041/

Open up Upwork.

What are most offers like?

“Looking for Java Spring boot expert, experience using IntelliJ with some knowledge of Auth0, dockers, mysql, angular, flutter, etc.” — $5-$10/h

Or something like this:

“I’m looking for an experienced Java developer who can implement microservices based on
- Spring Cloud
- Spring Cloud Gateway
- React app” — fixed price $5 (not joking)

What kind of leverage am I talking about? What can you do with $5-$10 bucks per hour? Or a fixed price of $5.

There’s another way to leverage these ludicrous offers. Let’s dive in.

Niche down

If you look for Spring Boot you’ll get vague offers. Also, these vague offers are paid peanuts. As in the above examples.

What do you gain if you niche down?

• You’ll solve specific problems and not some vague stuff.
• You’d get more knowledge if you niche down than if you work on some generic problem.