Sales Org is a Mismanaged Dumpster Fire - Business Development Upwork Employee Review

1.0
Apr 26, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Had market potential given the shift towards remote work over the last year.... but they didn’t harness it as an competitive advantage to get ahead.

Cons

Have you ever seen an organization from which the best performers run away screaming? Look no farther than Upwork. The bdrs are literally running away from the epic leadership dysfunction.... lack of promotions...and internal politics. In the last few months, there has been a mass exodus of the BEST performers including leadership. What does that say when the only talent that is actually hitting quota is leaving?????????? Don’t expect to make any money as most aren’t. Instead of focusing on the advantage they have being leader in the market, they focus on everything else and butchered every strategy. Don’t believe what they tell you about growing pains. There’s growing pains and then there’s Upwork. A train wreck in slow motion. Competition is catching up. The sales leadership is the worst. Absolutely mismanaged, changing strategy aimlessly, and instead of focusing on identifying what works and harnessing that - they force strategies that just don’t work and refuse to admit their mistakes and fix. Will blame everything and everybody else and never take accountability. Most of the sales organization is nowhere near quota and have limited support. Leads are a disaster..... management is aware and refuses to address. Nobody knows why because everybody in the sales org is begging for a better leads system and have been for months. Micromanagement and PIPs. Metrics are constantly changing and never for the benefit of the employees. In general with the new CEO the culture has gradually shifted from fun to fear. They like to say nice things and tie them up in a pretty bow but do not practice anything that they preach. While preaching unity, they blindside fired a huge chunk of their sales organization and from the current state it seems they are trying to clean out the rest. HR is nonexistent. Promised a bunch of people promotions if they hit certain metrics, and then backtracked when they did. Currently looking for a new job as I’m sure the rest of the BDRs are too.

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Upwork Response
4y
Thank you for being so candid with your feedback. I appreciate it. I am disappointed to hear your experience and that you are looking for another role. I would love to discuss with you 1:1 --- please slack me so we can set up time. -zoe

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1.0
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It's remote, and most ICs are talented and kind.

Cons

Oh my, there are so many clowns at this company—nearly all of them in leadership. Mostly executive cronies from dinosaur companies like CareerBuilder and Yahoo, who are out of touch with the tech industry at large. This hysterical leadership shifts strategy every 3 months or so, resulting in whiplash for their poor staff as well as frequent layoffs and reorgs. In my time at this company, I’ve seen nearly every -ism you can imagine, frequently and repeatedly: racism, cronyism, sexism, and nepotism. The business model exploits freelancers, essentially offshoring work for clients (cheap global labor) while the company takes a hefty share via predatory fees, which are the majority of record company profits. Unfortunately, AI will cannibalize many freelancer jobs on the platform. Although the company is delusional in its own “native AI” progress—their models are unusable slop despite huge investments—other companies will likely provide useful tech in the near future, particularly agentic AI. I could go on, but the bottom line is that this is a grossly unethical company you should avoid if you can. I’ll also add that many of the positive reviews here are from USERS of Upwork, not EMPLOYEES. This results in a falsely positive, rosy view of a toxic company. I wish Glassdoor had a filter that could address this for people considering employment at Upwork. Their rating is likely closer to a 2.7 if those irrelevant reviews could be excluded from the data set.

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