Freelancer Reviews

Pros

You're probably wondering why the reviews are so polarising, that is because Freelancer is that type of place, those that fold under pressure will leave very nasty reviews. Those that succeed don't have the time to write a review. Freelancer is a high octane place, and you will get worked to the bone, you will be holding responsibilities that other companies require a whole department. Freelancer is the hyperbolic chamber, and every year spent there is like five years spent at another company. Enter at your own risk & glory. Freelancer alumni run half of the Sydney tech scene: CEOs, CTOs, Heads of data, product, engineering, design across all the top names. (Canva, atlassian, Google, prospa, zip, macqurie, petcircle, the list goes on and on and on). 1. You are responsible and have the opportunity to work on new and challenging problems. 2. You get to work with brilliant colleagues and have direct access to all the senior leaders, even the CEO himself. 3. There is minimal red tape if you've articulated your hypothesis with data and clarity.

Cons

1. There is ALOT of pressure to deliver, and at the most senior level the flexibility on how to deliver is restricted. 2. If you want to progress in Freelancer, you will find it challenging to balance work and life. 3. There is a lot of churn because the environment is challenging. If you get an offer, accept with the attitude that you are going to learn a tonne and level up faster than your peers.

Pros

You can gain Knowledge about industrial aspect by searching and applying by yourself

Cons

If you don't have time than you couldn't connect and be out of contention.

Pros

- Free lunch on Fridays. - Fridges (almost) always full.

Cons

The top-down culture is really toxic. I wouldn't recommend working here.

Pros

Great culture, great environment, great tech stack, more room to learn

Cons

Some good engineers are leaving due to lack of career progress, the company is working on this to retain good talent

Pros

Free food on Fridays and free drinks, cool hackathons, new office soon

Cons

CEO needs to spend more time doing CEO things. Does not set a good example when he waste his time being middle manager, cc whole company about features. Everyone is scared and just agree and obey. Also spend a lot of time being social media star on Twitter

Pros

- Events team throw great events that help bring teams closer together - Parroting other reviews, junior and mid level staff are great

Cons

- Visionless, directionless company. Company thinks vision = list of features to get done... Leadership has no opinion on it because the less vision, the more micromanagement. - People are not respected. Intense micromanagement and staff are treated in ways that would be fireable in past companies. Lots of arrogant people in leadership (read people's interview reviews to hear more about this) - Selectively data driven, depending on whether senior leadership's narrative - Obsessed with making product teams run like growth teams. Everyone is doing cheap, short-term experiments to try and drive revenue. No focus on user, no focus on long-term direction. - Mismatch between who they hire (people who like autonomy, think critically and independently) and who they want (people who will follow what is being dictated). This makes people either quit fast or succumb to accepting paycheck to paycheck with no care about product - Lots of quality issues and scammy tactics in the product. Lots of red tape and incessant A/B testing when people try to make changes. Stems from glorification of the high growth days when they were full blown scamming everyone in pursuit of "growth". No concrete stance on quality and ethics, just lip service. - CEO doesn't understand the idea of sunk cost fallacy. A.k.a. past features should never be revisited, and failed products should continue to be funded. - Fails to be "data driven" to realise their current approach is not sustainable or good for the stock price, employee churn, or company direction. Continues to "bootstrap" the company and refusing outside funding, meaning resources will continue to be stretched thin, hyper focus on revenue will continue, and hyper focus on short term will continue - ultimately I give them 3-5 years.

Pros

The junior to mid-level staff are all great people, you can make good friends working at Freelancer.

Cons

There are a lot of bad things about freelancer. A lot of these have been mentioned in previous reviews. One of the biggest issues are that management is incompetent, they constantly flip-flop between projects and never seem to achieve any substantial product result. Projects are undertaken with a half thought-out-idea from senior management with no road-map to success and extremely unreasonable deadlines. When a project invariably fails, or fails to move the needle, the blame falls upon the engineers and product managers when it is a top-down problem. If the engineers and project managers push back on the deadlines to do things properly they are seen as incompetent. The phrase "it's just one-line of code" [why is it taking so long?] has become a meme amongst the product teams. All of this can be explained by desperation; the company seems to be desperately trying to make progress in ANY vertical instead of committing to key verticals and performing well. The biggest con working at freelancer is that senior management doesn't give a damn about professional development. - There is little to no on-boarding, little to no formal ongoing training (and you're criticised when you don't "know it anyway"). - The "incubation" programs are a joke, they don't provide any value to the people that enter them. - When you seek advancement it takes months to even have the conversation, at which point focus is on minor failures rather than achievements or strengths vs weaknesses, it takes months more to continue the discussion and never at the behest of management. Most eventually give up because the process is so bad. I've seen very junior members of teams put in positions of extreme pressure and expectation, perform excellently, and not get so much as a change to their junior title. Senior management will say "we have plans to improve the process for advancement" , but they also say "we have plans to improve mid career training", "we have plans to improve onboarding", "we have plans to improve culture", "we have plans to ... " You'll never see these plans, management can't execute, and it is the staff that suffers and is blamed for it. The culture is toxic, because employees aren't valued. Who cares about hackathons and ping-pong when there are underlying systemic issues that cause your employees to feel like the company doesn't care about them? The company leans on a start-up culture from 5 years ago, that culture doesn't exist any more.