out of the upwork pit

It will soon be one year since when i started the Opwer project, more or less one month ago i was getting good results from using it, but in the new year i have been reluctant in using it again. I feel like using Upwork put me in a corner, a pit i want to get out of.

I invested a lot of time in Upwork. I really believed that it was going to work, for me and for many others. I saw some principles i liked into the platform: transparency, no discrimination, no exclusivity, no pigeonholes, and a few other ideas i liked.

Now, while there can be some truth into this, i feel that Upwork has costed me too much, considering what i can get in return. The amount of hours spent in the development of Opwer is rather low, and also the time spent using Opwer on Upwork is rather small, so Opwer was a very effective project, but it also showed me the limits of Upwork in a rather final way.

Before Opwer, i spent months looking for jobs on Upwork, and now the platform limits have become also my limits, and the service feels like a bottleneck i want to get rid of.

The first and hardest step is in the attitude. I need not to refer to Upwork anymore, when it comes to job search. I should not refer to any single platform. I also need be systematic in my research though, organised. It might be limiting, but i feel the need to have a single reference point to unify my efforts. I am thinking of creating some new software, a new repo.

The idea is to use the tool to have a central reference, but the tool should be the opposite of a bottleneck, the opposite of a funnel. I want to use a name that suggest an expanding movement which allows the user to see a palette of possibilities. Like a fan. My research can be as fragmented and dispersive as i like it to be, this project’s goal will be to be the unifying thread.