Turbulent, High Stress, Low Returns, and Directionless Leadership - Anonymous employee Upwork Employee Review

Great people, very approachable, interesting problems

A lot of short term thinking and near future optimization

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

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.