New system aimed primarily at matching newer sellers with buyers
So now it seems I have to wait two hours before I can bid for a job. This is extremely unfair. Not only do experienced creatives/designers have to compete with an unfair playing field, ie people offered to do a job for £10 when it is clearly worth £100, we are now not allowed to bid for jobs as soon as they appear on PPH. What kind of system is this?!
Awful. Unfair. Unprofessional. Discriminatory.
Regards
C. Howe
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@Paul - checked out your link and my jaw dropped too. If it's what I suspect it to be, I just hope that the person who has put in a bid either withdraws when he realises what's actually being asked of him, or he blows the gaffe when he gets to the interview. I'm glad someone has put a comment in the clarification board underneath.
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@Paul your Indian buyer with the reasonable budget probably knows that he has to pay for skills; much of the problem is that many British buyers seem to suffer from the delusion that you can get things done in India dirt cheap. It may be significantly cheaper than the UK, but its nowhere as cheap as many buyers expect.
English is a commercially valuable skill in the subcontinent, and the people with the best English (often native speakers) are those from affluent families and have had the best educational opportunities. You can be almost certain that anyone working really cheap speaks bad English.
I hope the bidder on the "actor" JOB is just naive and that he either sees the comment or realises what is going on for himself. You can report the job to PPH.
@Gillian, I suspect that by threatening you with bad feedback the buyer has simply strengthened your position. I would not have the slightest hesitation about lodging a dispute if I were in your shoes.
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I've just noticed that I've got a job in my favourites that appears to have Excel as a keyword, and I've checked my profile and it appears to have excel listed as one of the keywords, yet the proposal form says, 'You can't send a Proposal to a job that's not relevant to your skills. Browse other jobs'. Is this another bug, one asks oneself???? Or am I missing something?
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@Paul - I did wonder if it might have been someone not too far from this board who made the comment ;-)
@Graeme - thanks for that. I'll do some digging in a while.
In general - I'm getting VERY irritated now by the "you have been selected" thing. When I'm logged into PPH, the messages say "you have been invited" whereas the email message says "you have been selected". Sigh. It's only when I'm in PPH and check out the "you have been invited" that I realise it's not an invitation at all, because there's nowhere for me to decline or accept the invitation. Such a waste of time, and means I'm checking every darn message so as not to miss a genuine invitation.
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@ Suzanne, that's exactly the point I was making yesterday, the sorting through of them all to find the odd decent one amongst all the pap. 32 emails I logged onto this morning, and in amongst the Joomla and other crap there was one invite for something I could do. Good tip that for checking PPH instead, that's usually the last thing I log into lol.
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I think I have the most inappropriate selection so far. I got selected for a job because of my skills in "QOS". Not only does my profile make no mention of QOS (or any related term), but neither does the job. This is the job:
http://www.peopleperhour.com/job/arm-cortex-software-development-559457
I am a Python web developer! I have no experience of ARM processors, or embedded hardware at all, and have never in my life suggested to anyone anywhere that I have. I withdraw my previous suggestion that PPH are doing data mining and getting it wrong - I know think that when they cannot find a suitable match for a job they pick someone at random.
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@Graeme I think I can beat you on the crazy job offers, hows this for a writer without not an iota of technical skills mentioned in her profile; http://www.peopleperhour.com/job/purpose-built-raspberry-pi-or-equal-water-quality-monitorin-557945 . This is what I was going on about the other day, this came to me because of my skills in Prepress which I have heard of and isn't mentioned anywhere in the job description. Well done for getting some decent offers, I've had one I could do, or would do, in the past 10 days :(
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Ahh... PPH, the land of blackmail! I've now got a buyer blackmailing me over £9!!! After a successful hourlie the buyer asked me to do more work. I reminded him that he needed to purchase another hourlie. He said that he would do but never did. Stupidly I did the work and never heard from him until he asked for the work. I then even more stupidly sent him the completed work. He then replied and said that he'd received it past his deadline so wasn't going to purchase my hourlie and pay. I informed him that I would speak to PPH so his reply was "would you rather me pay you for the hour and leave negative feedback?" Pathetic! All for £9 worth of admin
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@Gillian, did you get a chance to reject the refund request? Have they informed you that they have made a decision on the dispute?
Also, if he has not paid you, then you retain the copyright. It can be useful: I once got a few hundred euros (I cannot remember exactly how much) because a textbook had about two pages copied from my website. If it is used on the web you can send the major search engines DMCA notices, if it is used elsewhere it may be more complicated.
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@Gillian, words fail me at this point as once again a decision comes down on the side of the buyer when all they have to do is compare the two to see who has the correct grammar, He hasn't paid you so that work is still yours and this may be worth pointing out to him. That's what I did to get my money, blatantly told him that if he tried to publish this anywhere on the net I would find it via Copyscape and sue him. I know this is dramatic but its the principle of the thing, I've had my fingers burnt too many times now in this game and trust nobody now. I was lucky and got paid but this is happening all too frequently now and it's true what the say, you get the most shit from the buyers who pay the least :( I'm getting hassle from one now who I declined an invitation from due to the budget, he came back and offered me double but wants me to start work without accepting a proposal or make a deposit. I've reported him for harassment but nothing will come of it, I'll just have to keep deleting the emails until he gets the message......
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@ Moira sorry I hit send before answering your question. As you can see from above yes I did report it but had to take matters into my own hands. This is a scam that has been going for years, Freelancer is renowned for it and its on here now. Last year, on here, I was invited to apply for a job rewriting an e-book of 60,000 words. The budget was good so I put in a bid and he came back asking me to do a trial of 15,000 words :O I declined obviously as all he had to do was get 4 people to do this and there's his book done. I reported this as well, nothing happened. The job stayed active for 30 days without it being awarded. I've no doubt people will have done his trial as a £1000 carrot dangling there would make many people's common sense go out the window :(
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I've just logged into PPH this morning, and received two notifications. I haven't checked out the second one yet, but the first one is dated the 20th Aug "You have been invited to send a proposal for.....". I received an email about this SAME job 10 DAYS PREVIOUSLY (i.e. on the 20th Aug), so for some reason, there appears to have been a 10 day delay in the system. Not only that though, but in the job itself, the keywords related to the job (I assume they are) are on the RHS of the page, and I couldn't remember any of those keywords being in my profile, so...... I went back and checked. NONE of them are. However, the job itself is a database type of job, and I do have "database" keywords in my profile, so.... is it possible that there are hidden 'links' between the keywords on the PPH system? Could this also explain, in some way, why some people are receiving jobs that aren't relevant to them? (does that make any sense?)
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@Malcolm, in the real world it wouldn't but it does on here where they would have to look up the meanings of sense and logic. So it's like we said a few days ago, this crap has nothing to do with our actual listed skills they are using algorithms that pick up on anything in anyway related. Even to the extent, in writers cases at least, they are picking up on past work and making nonsensical connections.
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If you choose a single skill keyword (wherever it comes from - listed skills or content), I wonder how many skill areas a single word can fit? In many cases it will be many. This is how people get selected for jobs they are not appropriate for.
For example, how many kinds of 'Designer' or 'Writer' are there? Can the painter that loves magnolia, also do oil portraits I wonder? Possibly..
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@Deb, on the jobs we got, they are picking all kinds of things. I got a whole lot of jobs because I asked a question about a job with the listed skill (bookkeeping). The job was about developing bookkeeping software, I did not even send a proposal for the job (its was the buyer mentioned by me and two others earlier in the thread) and it was still enough for PPH to select me for lots of bookkeeping jobs.
I still have no idea where they got "legal", "QOS" and all the other skills they are attributing to me from.
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Hi Guys/Gals, just thought you might be interested (or maybe not?). Yesterday I posted in the 'Primary skills not matching thread', about a suggestion as to how to get round the keywords/skills problem. Well, just gone into my Favourites this morning, and opened a particular job that appears to only have one keyword associated with it (a keyword which I swear blind I have in my profile, and that job is saying 'You can't apply cos skills don't match' usual message. So... went into my profile and checked.... the keyword is definitely there. So me was wondering if my suggestion yesterday is for some reason only working for certain jobs somehow? Anyway, out of curiosity, went into my profile and clicked into the skills section, and started typing that skill again at the end of the list. Guess what.... no matter how I try to type that skill, it doesn't seem to be appearing in their skills list, yet that skill IS in my profile. So, I can only assume that they are/have been changing/removing some of the key skills? Unless it's a software glitch?
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Ok, folks, I give up, there's some interesting stuff going on here. I've come across one job that doesn't appear to have any keywords associated against it (unless they're hidden). I've also come across two jobs, both of which appear to have only one keyword against them, one of them that will allow me in and the other... well.... you guessed it. I admit defeat LOL.
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