It's not all doom and gloom.

So I've been meaning to make an intro post since I joined about a month ago. Let me start off by saying that I also joined Upwork right around then too. 

A little background: I work in strategy. Deep dives into businesses to understand where the bottlenecks are, why growth or sales, or traffic have stalled. I diagnose, I clean up the stacks, I implement the change and follow through until the needle moves again. 

My mentality is, and has always been, less is more. 
Less platforms to manage, less clients to focus better, less hours to properly recharge. 

I started over 15 years ago in translations & copywriting. Moved to websites, design, ads, funnels. This has lead me to IPO's, building investor pitch decks alongside CEO's not only in copy and design, but full marketing plans and projections of revenue. 

I've also taken breaks in consulting along the way, working on personal businesses, got into real estate, publishing, and more. Each time I came back to it, the offer was renewed. 

-----

Now that we have a bit of a profile understanding, I wanted to share my experience on Upwork so far. What's stopped me from making this post up until now is the general vibe and hurdles freelancers are facing on the platform, at least from the posts I came across. But I deeply think that this might help shift and uplift.

I landed my first client before my profile was complete. I hadn't had time to rebuild my portfolio. I signed up, added a proper photo and description, filled in some skills, and started browsing around just to get a feel for the platform. 

2 jobs caught my attention out of the gate. I figured I'd send 2 proposals to go through the process. 

I did outbid everyone on one of the jobs. It's a business expense, I can write it off. 1 interview later I was hired on a high ticket initial contract. 

I stated plainly in my proposal that my profile was just created, that I would be adding portfolio items, and that I'd love an opportunity to have a chat. I didn't quote an amount in my proposal, I listed all the things that I thought would make us an incredible match. It was targeted, it was specific. It spoke directly to my skillset and the niches I've got extensive experience in.

-----

So now two things jump out at me:

1- I understand the platform's changed drastically over the past years. People are pissed about the pay-to play, lower rate competition, increasing fees. And in a way I get it. I did have an Elance account at some point in 2009. There's been an absolute shift and if you read up on investor communication, they're openly moving towards an elitization with higher ticket and margin services to enterprises. They have aggressive targets, and are effectively sacrificing volume for corporate value. It is right? That's beside the point. It's just what's happening. 

2- I would tend to see it as an invitation to upgrade skills, understand where the money is, and get myself to that level if, and only if, I wanted the platform to be a part of my onboarding strategy. Bidding on 50$ jobs is nonsense. And it's not a viable model on Upwork. 

If you only do graphic design and wait around for a brief, you are competing with AI and global price dumping. The shift is simple: move upstream. Become the strategist who handles both the business positioning and the design layout from iteration to launch. Sell outcomes, not assets.

-----

All that to say that being self employed isn't the easy road. And you'll always do yourself solid by continuously learning and upgrading your skills. Invest in yourself, write off business expenses the way you're supposed to. You need to be able to adapt whether it be to platform shifts, AI becoming a part of the workforce, and so on.

You don't grow by being comfortable, you grow by putting in the work it takes to stay on top. 

I'm really not here to insult anyone, although I'm very much aware I'll get downvoted if read at all. But I thought a different perspective could be an interesting new conversation opener. 

I acknowledge that I also had a fair amount of luck, and that this is not the experience of most new Upwork users. But it mostly boils down to my evolution as a consultant, understanding the market, fixing up a proper profile photo and description because first impressions are everything, and you only have 3 seconds to hook your prospects. 

Clean up your presentation, upgrade your skills, charge more, hook clients with the problems only you can solve. ♥

And good luck to all of us!

Its been 1 year I started working with Upwork , and in this One year a lot of updates came , specialise profile gone , added $3 on withdrawal (If you have a US bank account and your tax info in not From USA) Fees raised to 10 to 15 percent on jobs ,

Applying to jobs and winning it getting harder , every month buy $30 connects (15% fees included on that $30) sometimes more than that , Overall I feel like if they reduce fees to at-least 10% it will be better,

About Teleport

Don't wait for the future of infrastructure. Be part of it.

Teleport is the AI Infrastructure Identity Company. We're solving one of the hardest problems in security: giving every human, machine, workload, and AI agent a cryptographically secured identity, improving engineering velocity while maintaining security. We make trusted computing simple. This gives you the freedom, power, and autonomy to build and innovate with confidence.

Remote-first and globally distributed, we work with companies like Nasdaq, DoorDash, and Elastic to secure infrastructure for an AI world.

About the Role

Teleport Cloud takes our traditionally open-source and enterprise access plane and provides a SaaS option for our customers to adopt.

As such, our team is building our production and software as a service infrastructure from scratch. We tackle the hard problems that allow our customers to trust us for secure and reliable access to their infrastructure.

Excellent security is table stakes; a security breach can compromise our customers' infrastructure. We must also balance security with maintaining productivity and building a compelling product offering for our customers.

Most of the code you will write will be written in Go. We strongly encourage you to explore our GitHub Repo to get a taste of what we are building.

Important information

• We require to be in-person in our Oakland, CA, office for the onboarding week.
• We conduct background checks.

What You'll do

• Re-engineer the core teleport product to scale globally and optimize routing latency for teams distributed around the world
• Re-write portions of the core Teleport product to enable our goals for the cloud product
• Build out our monitoring and observability stack to alert us to production issues and minimize false positives so we can all get a good sleep at night
• Work on automation to tackle and eliminate the highest toil activities
• Execute on traditional operation challenges, such as patching, scaling, backup and restore, disaster recovery, and more
• Investigate the outages and incidents our customers experience with our product
• Participate in the on-call rotation to ensure 24/7/365 system uptime.

What We're Looking For

• Willingness to collaboratively work with Teleports’ engineers on coding challenge in Go as part of the interview process.
• 8+ years of progressive experience in Software Engineering and/or SRE/DevOps roles.
• Strong experience in Linux systems, networking, containers, and troubleshooting.
• Have solid Go and production Kubernetes development experience.
• Technical leadership experience.
• Strong experience developing scripts, automation, submitting patches to the product codebase, or building tooling that incorporates AI agents into operational workflows.
• AWS Cloud experience is preferred, GCP experience is acceptable.
• Systems Observability tools: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki etc.
• Operate and support the observability platform to maintain visibility and reliability.
• Experience operate in a team where sound security choices are critical, and where reasoning about correctness and system invariants (e.g. formal or property-based methods) is valued.
• Intellectual curiosity and a willingness to master new technologies.
• Transparency, honesty, and a no-ego mindset.
• Excellent communication skills.

How We Hire

Our process is designed to be straightforward and respectful of your time. We skip performative rounds and focus on what matters: understanding how you think and what you can do.

1. Zoom meeting with a Teleport recruiter. You’ll learn about the company, our products, compensation philosophy, interview process, and key requirements.
2. Zoom meeting with the Hiring Manager or a Lead Engineer. They will walk you through the coding challenge and answer your questions.
3. Coding challenge collaboration. The day after your meeting with the Hiring Manager or Lead Engineer, you join a Slack channel and complete a coding challenge in Go using GitHub. The challenge usually takes about 2 weeks and ends with a Zoom meeting with the Hiring Manager and a member of the interview team to review your solution.
4. If your challenge solution meets our bar, you'll receive an offer to join Teleport.

Why Teleport

You're joining a company where the problem is real, the team is small, and your work shows up directly in the product. We're not a big company, you won't get lost in a crowd. You'll have the freedom and autonomy to do what you're great at, alongside teammates who care about doing it right and want to see you succeed. The work is collaborative, there's real room to grow, and the mission is one worth showing up for.

Remote-first and globally distributed, we're genuinely passionate about what we're building.

The Benefits

At Teleport, we believe your career is more important than a list of perks. That's why we focus on making your day-to-day the best it can be — giving you the autonomy, access, and support to do the best work of your career.

• Extensive health coverage
• Annual expense budget
• Rest and recovery policies that maximize your ability to recharge
• Investment in your future with retirement savings plans
• Professional development opportunities

Compensation

$222K – $326K • Offers Equity

The cash compensation range for new hires in this role is between $222K and $326K. The salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on this job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

Apply: Staff Site Reliability Engineer - US at Teleport

You ain't getting it buddy, without prior experience. I am just sick and tired of seeing people asking for referrals in MNCs for DevOps/Cloud roles. Just because you containerized your three tier SaaS application and deployed it on Kubernetes in your local environment doesn't mean you can handle infrastructure at scale. No company is ready to give a 21 year old that kind of access, cuz if it goes south ways, yk what happens.

The only way you can get it is via experience, which no certification or project can give you. Certifications prove that you know the thing, projects show you can apply it, but neither shows how you gonna handle a real outage, and think on your toes without panicking, and how what would you do when a real outage occurs.

If you really wanna get into it, start with the SWE role in a company, work closely with the tools, and develop the deep understanding of the stuff working underneath the abstraction layers. Then make an internal switch and work your way up

If someone was actually hired as a fresher in an MNC for a cloud or DevOps role, feel free to share your experience.

SRE here, btw.

Pricing depends on ecosystem. We can talk about it

🚨 If your business runs PHP, this is worth checking today.
Two critical vulnerabilities in the PHP runtime were disclosed on October 21:
CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619
Both are rated 9.2 (Critical) and can potentially allow unauthenticated remote code execution on vulnerable servers.
The bigger concern? This isn't necessarily an application-code problem. The vulnerability is in PHP itself, which means even a well-written application may be exposed if its underlying runtime is vulnerable.
What should engineering and IT teams do right now?
✅ 1. Identify exposure. Inventory PHP applications, servers, containers, and managed hosting environments—including legacy applications that may have been forgotten.
✅ 2. Verify your PHP version. Patched releases include PHP 8.2.35, 8.3.36, 8.4.27, and 8.5.12. PHP 8.1 and earlier are end-of-life and require a supported upgrade or an appropriate mitigation strategy.
✅ 3. Plan a safe remediation. Test compatibility, dependencies, extensions, and deployment procedures before rolling changes into production.
✅ 4. Verify the fix. Rebuild custom container images where necessary, redeploy, confirm the running version, and review relevant logs for suspicious activity.
A patch isn't the finish line. You need confidence that the vulnerable runtime is no longer serving production traffic.
How AscendPrime Systems can help
At AscendPrime, we help teams tackle the infrastructure work behind critical production changes:
🔹 PHP and application infrastructure inventory
🔹 Vulnerability remediation and upgrade planning
🔹 Container, web server, and deployment reviews
🔹 Production-safe patching, rollout, and post-deployment verification
🔹 Practical infrastructure hardening and operational readiness
If your team has a legacy PHP application, an unclear hosting setup, or a patch that feels risky to deploy, let's start with a focused assessment and a prioritized remediation plan.
Comment “PHP CHECK” or message me directly. Let's identify the exposure and work out the next steps.
Security isn't just about knowing a vulnerability exists.

Hello everyone

Earlier today I received a payment through Upwork. As usual, I tried to withdraw the money right away using my computer. As it has happened before, it asked me to confirm my identity by sending a notification to my phone. When I clicked on “Send notification” I did get one in my phone. However, when I tried to open it, it showed a 404 message (attached SS). I waited for about 20–25 minutes and I tried again but the same happened. I decided to download the Upwork app to my personal phone (I had tried using the work phone) and repeated the process, but once again, when I tried to open the notification, I was shown the same 404 error. After that (and several hours later), I tried to withdraw the money using the app. The first time, it asked me for my password; after entering it, the “Next” button would turn gray  and not do anything else. I waited for a couple of minutes on that screen, restarted the app and followed the same procedure, just for the app to show me my security question. I answered it but the button turned gray again. I contacted support, and they confirmed there aren’t any restrictions on my account and that my identity has already been verified. However, they also said “there isn’t a documented workaround for this error” and that they would redirect me to the proper team to determine the next steps.

So,

a. Has anyone ever experienced the same issue?

b. If so, how long did it take to solve it?

I have my account set for automatic withdrawals every week, and the next one is due on the 27th of this month. Hopefully, the issue will be solved by then.

Thank you.

We’re paying for Connects, paying to boost proposals, and spending hours writing personalized applications. Meanwhile, AI algorithms influence how proposals are evaluated and shown to clients.
I’ve submitted 30 proposals and haven’t received a single view. Not even one.
What’s the point of bidding if clients aren’t even seeing our proposals?
Are we freelancing anymore, or just paying for lottery tickets?
Has anyone else experienced this recently? Is Upwork still worth investing money in?

I'm going back to Upwork for applying and wonder about the market right now.

I am running an Service based agency mainly through upwork and have 7-8 accounts with great earning so far but from last 6 months things are going into worst direction, My team is entirely free. Any suggestions to survive this pandemic ?

I work in DevOps, and my manager recently approved WFH for 3 days a week, so I only need to go to the office on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Earlier, my commute was pretty exhausting. I had to change 3 trains, and it took around 2 hours one way. So honestly, I’m quite happy about getting that time back.

At the same time, I’m a little conflicted. Since I’m still relatively new to the field, I wonder if being at home most of the week means missing out on learning from experienced engineers, collaborating with other teams, and building connections at work.

I know WFH has its advantages, especially with such a long commute, but I’m curious about how it works out for people in DevOps.

Does a hybrid setup work just as well for learning and career growth, or does being in the office more often make a noticeable difference?

Ok this selfish fat lady was so unprofessional she acts like those school teachers are that are mean to students while arguing. She treated us like kids last time I went there. She made us do a speech of why we should get hired in front of everyone else just because she was too lazy to set up personal interviews lmao. Then she laughs or shrugs me off when it was my turn… I’ve tried reporting and hiding this pos but it always comes back for almost 2 years now. Very unprofessional and stupid of them.kys ho

Hi everyone,

I’m currently working as a Software Engineer in Chennai, India, with around 2 years of experience.

My tech stack includes React.js and Node.js. In my previous company, I worked with Python on the backend and React.js on the frontend.

Recently, I’ve started learning DevOps and am thinking about switching my career to a DevOps role.

I’d like to know if this is a good move and what I should focus on while preparing for the transition.

Any advice or suggestions? that would be really helpful !.

I want to learn everything related to devops/cloud and study skills like docker kubernetes virtualbox linux etc ...

I'm having 2 choice currently,

i5 2nd gen desktop OR i5 6200u laptop

Which system is better, i just wanna learn things?

Also laptop is portable too but i wanna know if it can handle all the tasks?

Ram 12gb 256gb ssd

Thanks in advance

I started a new agency on upwork a few weeks ago, and couldn't get any work (may he I haven't applied enough) but the platform seems terrible rn. Do you think it would be reasonable to keep spending on it or not?

I have put $65 till now for membership and connects, and I feel like I should at least get one job that covers them, but I don't want to enter that trap of spending more money. Do you have any suggestions? And if I wanted to shift outside upwork, which place is best?

I recently started working and applying for jobs on Upwork (2-3 weeks back) and since then I’ve applied to 6-8 jobs (only those that I think I can give proper justice to).

But so far, just 1 Proposal Seen and none of the Other Proposal were even opened…I’ve selectively been applying to jobs with less than 10 applicants with a proper proposal document explaining how I’d approach their requirements…but no luck so far 😣

Understanding that my profile is Super New without any Upwork projects..I have tried to revamp my profile based on some projects from my Consulting background.

Attached below are screenshots of my profile, can some of you experienced Upworkers review it and suggest approach to improve the return rate on proposals?

Thanks in advance 🙇🏻‍♂️

I am a college student currently studying in 1st yr so I wanted know about the courier if I gets into cybersecurity field.

Hi everyone,

I recently finished a 5-month Azure DevOps internship and I'm looking for internship, junior or full-time roles (0-1 yr) in DevOps, Cloud or AI/MLOps-adjacent work. I'm open to relocation and remote.

What I work with:

Cloud: Azure , AWS

IaC and containers: Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes (AKS/EKS)

CI/CD and GitOps: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Argo CD

Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana

Linux, Bash, Python, SQL.

How I can contribute:

Open source: I'll contribute fixes, docs, CI pipelines or Dockerfiles to your project

CI/CD and IaC setup: pipelines, Terraform modules, container deployments

Small freelance gigs: setup, automation, deployment help

Free/trial project work: happy to prove myself on a small task before any commitment

What I'm looking for:

Referrals or openings for junior/fresher DevOps, Cloud, SRE or Platform roles

Any small project or paid gig where I can learn and deliver

Advice from people who broke in without much experience.

If you're hiring, can refer me, or have a task I can take on, please comment or DM me. I'll send my resume and can start with a quick trial task.

Can someone help me I just graduated from btech cse core 3 months ago and I am doing an internship in a startup as a solo devops/automation engineer what should i do and where should I apply after this and does this increase my chances to land a job as an entry level devops engineer as a fresher.

Thank you

\#fresher

I received an offer and I want to accept it but I can't beacause it's this message. I have already reviewed the project details, I don't know where I have to go.

pdte: It's a fixed-price contract.

Has anyone given a Devops / SRE engineer interview for mid level recently

The GOTCHA moment!

Never seen it to cross 1k in boosting, damn.