Waseem Senjer

How to Get More Jobs on Upwork

Waseem Senjer — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 11:08:50 GMT

Upwork is one of the most popular websites for freelancers working online. I have used the website myself for two years. My experience with the website was very good; I got some clients that I loved working with. Those clients didn’t only work with me, they referred other clients to me.

I always hear from my friends that it’s very hard to get your first job on Upwork or other freelance websites in general. This is actually true, because, let’s face it, if you are a client and you want your job done with good quality in a short time, would you be willing to take the risk and give the job to a freelancer with no reviews or rating? I don’t think so.

Here are some points which I hope will help freelancers secure more jobs on Upwork or similar websites. These points are not only for new freelancers but may also benefit experienced freelancers.

Be an early bird.

It’s very important to be one of the first freelancers who bid on the job. You’ll get the client’s attention first. When there are several freelancers already bidding on the job, the client will be more likely to read the first bids. Other than that, when there are already 50 bids on the job, the client might be overwhelmed by the number of bids that he has to read.

Don’t brag about your experience; they don’t care about it.

Seriously, clients do not care about how many years you spent writing PHP codes or how many full-time jobs you took in the past, they posted the job because they want it done. Instead of annoying the client with details of your past experience, try to attract him by giving him some ideas on how you’ll solve his specific problem.

The client will be very glad when he reads how much detail you provided him about his job, not anything else. I know some guys have a ready-written template for the bids, and the only thing they do is copy and paste this template and send it to the client. This is a so awful thing to do. Clients always tend to avoid generalized bids, don’t do that, please.

Complete your profile

Make sure that you complete your profile, especially the identity verification. Also, try to list all your skills in order, and take the skills tests seriously. I took the WordPress test and got a high score in it (Top 5%). This score helped me to get new jobs, I didn’t only put it in my profile, but actually told the clients in the bids that I’m from the top 5% of WordPress developers in Upwork.

Furthermore, make sure that you add your previous work to your portfolio. Later on, you can attach these works with your bid when you submit it to the clients.

Professional Profile Picture

When you upload your picture, make sure to choose the right one. There is no harm in looking like a professional in the picture. You want the clients to take you seriously, don’t you? Once you've uploaded a picture, you can change it later but the problem is when you change it, Upwork will remove the verification badge from your profile, and you have to verify yourself once again. That’s why you should pay attention to your profile picture.

Specialize in a specific niche

I bet you've already noticed how huge the number of bids on jobs like “PHP website”, “WordPress website” or even “PSD to HTML”. The number of freelancers doing these kinds of jobs is crazy. My advice is to take a small niche and specialize in it. It will be your brand and with time, no one can compete with you in it. For example, there is a Russian company which specializes in optimizing the speed of the websites. They even named themselves “Speed Optimization “. I bet that they secure speed optimization jobs very easily.

Moreover, I myself have specialized in WordPress plugin development, not just that, but I focused on WooCommerce plugins, which worked very well for me. There is less competition in micro-niches, therefore you can ask a higher prices and get much more attention in that specific field.

Be sure that you get five stars.

It’s very important to get a 5-star rating, especially for new freelancers. The second you finish the job, send the client a message and make it crystal clear that you want a 5-star rating. Explain to him that his rating is very important to you in securing more jobs in the future. But before that, you must make sure that you deliver high-quality work.

If you think the client is going to give you a low rating, send him a polite message to explain to him how much his low rating would harm you in the future. and if he doesn’t give you 5 5-star rating, ask him to at least leave the job without a rating.

Conclusion

I hope this short list will help you in your freelancing journey, I will write more posts in the future about freelancing. Please, make sure that you get back to my blog or subscribe to my mailing list to get all the new content immediately.

Finally, regarding freelancers without any rating, I always advise them to bid on low-budget jobs (20-30$), These jobs do not have high risk according to the client, You can explain to him in the bid that you’re bidding to get a good rating, and you’ll be very glad if he helps you with this. Good luck!

Neglect of silos in tech teams

Waseem Senjer — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 10:48:09 GMT

Imagine waking up to a sunny morning, feeling good about the day ahead. You head to work, enter the office, open your laptop, and start working on an interesting task. Everything seems fine until you realize it's time for your team's standup. Your colleagues are discussing their plans for the day when, at the last second, David drops a bombshell: he's handing in his notice and leaving the company.

While you're sad to see David go, you suddenly realize that he's the only person who knows about the invoicing service. He built and maintained it alone for the last two years. This situation highlights the importance of knowledge sharing and the risks of neglecting silos.

In any tech team, it's essential to ensure that knowledge and skills are shared and distributed among team members. This not only fosters a collaborative and efficient team but also protects against the "bus factor." The bus factor refers to the risk of losing key team members due to accidents or other unforeseen events.

Unfortunately, many tech teams fall into the trap of neglecting silos, where knowledge or expertise is held by just one or a few team members. This can occur due to a lack of communication or investment in team training and development.

Silos create a single point of failure within a team. If a team member holding knowledge or skills within a silo is unavailable, it can severely impact the team's ability to complete tasks or projects, leading to delays, frustration, and even project failure.

To protect against the bus factor and the negative impacts of silos, tech teams should take steps to ensure knowledge and skills are shared and distributed among team members. This can include team training, cross-functional collaboration, and creating documentation and other resources to share knowledge.

By taking these steps, tech teams can create a collaborative and resilient team that is better equipped to handle unexpected challenges and changes. This can improve team efficiency, productivity, and ultimately, the success of the team and its projects.

Tech Conferences are for networking not for knowledge

Waseem Senjer — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 10:58:02 GMT

Here is my current take on tech conferences. In my opinion, the benefits of attending tech conferences revolve around three main things:

Learning.
Inspiration.
Networking.

After attending many conferences in the last couple of years, I realised that if you are not into networking and getting to know people in the conference days, then the main benefit of attending is gone. If you would like to learn and get inspired, just watch the talks online. I understand that attending the talk may give you a chance to ask the speaker a question. But this can be done also on Twitter, I believe most speakers are on Twitter and they are happy to answer the questions you have.

I also believe that inspiration can be achieved by watching the talks, DHH and GaryVee inspired me for years by only watching their conference talks but I've never met them in person. It worked for me, I also understand if you met them and talked to them in a conference you may be getting more inspired but not all conferences have the people who inspire you anyway. And to be honest with myself, I would go to a conference just because of some specific speaker are there, but most conferences do not have such speakers all the time.

For networking, this is the main benefit of conferences, you go out there you try to promote your work, find business partners, making deals, make connections with people and companies. So if you want to do networking, conferences are the best place to do so.

Probably, with almost all conferences last year (2020) happened online, this idea of getting the learning and inspiration part became more convincible. You can even argue that networking can be easily done online via social media or online conferences. But I think meeting in person still has its benefits and many people will still go to conferences just because it is fun and to meet new people and visiting new cities. This alone justifies going.

The open source paradox.

Waseem Senjer — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 12:43:00 GMT

Something that bothered me lately is the lack of giving back to the open-source community. Not a monetary contribution for maintainers or not even open-sourcing any internal tools that can be beneficial for others. Companies using open-source tools do not have to reinvent many complex wheels and make millions of revenue. Yet, they refrain from giving back. Keep in mind that, legal and license-wise that is ok. No problem whatsoever. But when it comes to the positive roles that companies should play in the open-source world, it is a harsh reality that they choose not to give back.

Even if the company feel unwilling to contribute a monetary amount for maintainers, at least they can open source tools and projects that can be opened without exposing the company's security or IP to any threats.
Nevertheless, these companies may take these free-to-use tools for granted with the subconscious belief that they have no responsibility to give back.

I also noticed some companies release open-source software without spending any effort into promoting them, with no documentation, no blog post, nothing, just a repository on GitHub that no one knows about. If the idea of contributing is to release the software just to be tagged as a contribution, then you did not contribute. Go the extra mile and be grateful to the community.

But ...

Do they have to? Isn't the idea behind open source to be the response against proprietary software by providing source codes to the public using free and open licenses? If we ask software consumers to give back things in return, then what is the dissimilarity between proprietary and open? Whoever wants to contribute, let him contribute, and whoever wants to consume they shall consume, free and open.

You do not have to pay, or contribute, just do not make the life of maintainers hard. I can not imagine being a maintainer of a large open-source project, and I do not mean coding, that is the fun part, but managing issues and people would be a nightmare for me. Particularly you would be dealing with a public space where everyone on the internet can suggest, complain and scream at you.

DHH addressed this issue in an amazing keynote last year at RailsConf 2019 and his conclusion was really inspiring.

Podcast: Pilot: #1 Coronavirus talks from March 2020

Waseem Senjer — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 12:19:31 GMT

My Problem with InertiaJS and Livewire

Waseem Senjer — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 19:26:00 GMT

First of all, both tools are great, I used them and I released more than one product using Livewire components.

Livewire

Livewire is great if you want to add interactive components to your website without using jQuery or a SPA framework. It is awesome if you do not want to bother writing ajax calls and jQuery DOM manipulations. Even though the interactions need to call the backend to be performed, the UX is still acceptable to me. But if you want to build a SPA then Livewire is not for you, even if you think that using the Turbolinks library, it is just not the same.

InertiaJS

Again, it is a great tool, I did not use it for any products but I experienced with it. And I had plans to use for an incoming project of mine but I could not go through. But why? InertiaJS gives you the ability of rapid development where you can use VueJS for example without the need to build API endpoints. The problem is that the tradeoff (for me) is huge, it just makes the app routing slow because the app is waiting for the backend to decide which component to go to. So even though you are using the best frontend frameworks out there, you are not giving the user the experience of it. You can see what I mean in action with this template which has two versions InertiaJS and VueJS. Try to navigate the left sidebar menu and you can see the difference in the page load.

InertiaJs version: https://luma-vue.demo.frontendmatter.com/app/student-my-paths

VueJS Version: https://luma-vue.demo.frontendmatter.com/app/student-my-paths

I can not justify this huge tradeoff, in some applications I want the full SPA experience, and for this kind of apps, I would go with VueJS.

If you are reading this and you think that I might be wrong about something I wrote here, please let me know.

Code Gratification

Waseem Senjer — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 22:06:42 GMT

If your future plan is to stay in a 9 to 5 job building software for your employer and climbing the ladder of the corporation to reach high career titles, and you think that would make you happy, then this post is not for you. Keep doing what are you doing. If you are happy doing it, then you already won.

This post may not apply to all individuals or projects, it is just my observation and personal experience. So, take it with a grain of salt.
But if you are working as a software engineer, and your mind and soul are eager to create your own path by moonlighting side projects that you enjoy working on, and wanting to be as independent as it gets. Then these words are for you.

You may do not want to invest a lot of time on crafting your software, but invest your time to put it on production. Focus on validating your idea as soon as possible and do not focus on which design patterns that you should write your code. Do not try to build it using the latest shiny framework in the market, but build with the tools that you already know and master.

If your idea is destined to fail, then allow it to fail as fast as possible, and move on. Building minimal viable products is not a bad idea at all. Once your side project has its initial attraction and you feel that there is a potential, you can bootstrap it and if it becomes profitable you will have all the time in the world to rebuild it as shiny as you want.

Starting a side project and focusing on a detailed aspect of the code instead of building the business value can drain your enthusiasm for completing the project without you even realising it. You will find yourself slowly stopping working on it and finally abandoning it.

Keep in mind, that does not mean that people with gratification for programming never released a successful side project. People are different and ideas as well, every project has its series of circumstances which contributed in its failure or success.

Boreout

Waseem Senjer — Sat, 17 Aug 2019 19:48:15 GMT

You probably heard many times of people burnout at work. When someone is put under extreme pressure at work, it is possible to feel overwhelmed and emotionally drained, that can result in a burnout.
But is the opposite of these factors can lead to something else? under pressured, unchallenged, repetitive tasks, and feeling of no purpose at work. These conditions can lead you to boreout.

This is what I felt in the last three months at work. And based on my short experience with it, I believe it can be as dangerous as burnout. I felt extremely bored with my job tasks, no well to go to work, and high well to leave work as soon as possible. I even started to talk to recruiters to change my job in the hope it would help me get rid of the emotional state that I was in. I started to take antidepressants but that did not help. I found myself extremely unproductive without having any control over it.

What helped was the introduction of a new project at work where I felt interested to participate in. The boredom started to fade out and I felt of some kind of purpose again. What will happen when this project is over? I don' know. But I hope that employers give importance to boreout as much as they might give to burnout. I believe both are extremely harmful.

Noise Cancellation headphones worth every penny.

Waseem Senjer — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 08:37:00 GMT

I always wanted to buy noise cancellation headphones but I was reluctant to do that given that they are pretty expensive. Two months ago, I did purchase one. And I only regret not buying them as earlier as I could.

Do you think travelling in an airplane or a train for long hours can be tiresome? Especially if you end up near a crying baby traveller or chatty fellow traverlers. These headphones can save you the trouble and make the trip much less irritating. I travelled to Berlin for 4 hours trip on the train, and using my headphones was outstanding.

Your company has an open space office with people talking all the time around you, and you want to focus? or maybe you work from home and your kids are making noises in the other room, your headphones are there for you.

In a nutshell, it is worth it. I have Bose QuietComfort 35 II and it is great.

Imposter syndrome, why is it dangerous on developers

Waseem Senjer — Mon, 30 May 2016 19:09:00 GMT

Imposter syndrome is a state of mind where you think that you achieved a success by luck, timing or deceiving others into thinking that you’re intelligent. Basically, it’s when you say to yourself this thought: “I’m a fraud and everyone is about to find out“. A research conducted in 1980s suggested that two out of five successful people consider themselves frauds. Don’t think of it as a disorder, because it is not. Overcoming imposter syndrome is not hard but it may become a threat to your career, academy, or life paths.

Why it is dangerous

The syndrome can happen to any individual despite the level of their success. It happens to presidents, scientists, engineers, and any individual in any career or position. It happens as a result of self-doubt, and it becomes dangerous when you strangle your own progress by questioning whether you are worthy of certain achievements. It will hold you back from being the best you can be.

Why developers should be aware of it

Did you ever find yourself in this position? “You created this software, many people like and use it, but you’re afraid if other developers viewed your code, you will get scathing comments on your bad coding skills“ or when you struggle with a bug for days and you say to yourself “Ok, that’s it. I’m doomed. I’ll never solve this bug and everyone in the company will know that I’m a fraud“. Most of the times, you’re wrong. your code is fine and the bug is really hard to solve.

Any developer who doubts his skills should remember that it is natural that we all have doubts about our abilities. Developers should not only address the symptoms of this syndrome but also know how to overcome such a feeling. Here are some things to remember if you ever have these feelings in the future.

Accept that you have had a role in your successes.
Say it to yourself, “It’s just a syndrome” and get over the feeling on the spot.
Realise that nobody knows exactly what’s going on.
Realise that your skills are in constant development over time.
The most successful people on earth can experience the imposter syndrome.

Conclusion

The bottom line of this post is to not feel intimidating by other’s success and for you not to underestimate your powers and self-value. You must acquire a mindset of self-confidence and not to compare yourself to others. Be consistent and eliminate any doubtful thoughts inside of you. Remember, it’s a very common syndrome and overcoming it is very important to expand your possibilities.