[willstepp]

I interviewed to be a Gigster about a year and a half ago, and was accepted, but the more I considered it and saw how gigs were distributed (at that time mostly via Slack messages) I got a bad feeling, like I was a dog in a pack, fighting over meat scraps. It was then I realized the gig economy is not all sunshine and roses. All that to say, this doesn't surprise me, that Gigster doesn't have its workers best interest at heart, anymore than Uber has its drivers best interest at heart.

[throwaway212017]

It hasn't changed. Gigster PMs seem to be in charge of staffing projects, but the strategy for connecting developers with projects is vague. They seem to look for either people they have worked with before, or people who are active on Slack (so if you are, for example, an Android dev, the advice is to be active on the Android Slack channel). PMs as a group hoard information on projects: devs have almost no visibility into the current set of available, unstaffed gigs.

Another issue I feel I should bring up: Gigster has problems paying out on time. The contract specifies net-15 terms for payout, but I've personally had a payment delayed for a month beyond that, with no visibility into why or what was going on. I often see complaints on Slack from others of payouts delayed that long, or longer.

[throwaway49857]

I'm another current gigster, using a throwaway because I want to avoid retaliation. I'm posting this because Im really frustrated and about to leave gigster.

I just want to confirm everything you wrote there. Gigs dried up around october, meaning devs/designers that didnt have tons of PM contacts simply havent had any gigs for the past few months. This was raised multiple times, and HQ always promises to do something -but nothing ever comes of it, there's absolutely no info on how much work is in the pipeline, no transparency, nothing.

Then, as you say, everyone outside of HQ and pms has no way to apply for gigs. PMs guard this furiously and this leads to some pretty nasty interactions, completely unprofessional ones - pms being rude, brusque, dismissing, or keeping info from a dev.

One time I signed on a gig and only then did the pm tell me that I was going to be doing on-call duty. This wasnt factored in the payout, so I would make essentially 20$/h over the course of the gig. I tried to raise this issue with the Delight Team (internal customer service) but apart from taking 2 weeks to even get back to me - nothing was done, I was just removed from the gig.

Also, ditto on late payouts. A lot of people have had issues like this, payouts not going out for weeks. It's been a work in progress since early last year and HQ kept on promising stuff "yeah, we fixed this, itll be good now". At least theyve fixed their contractor-facing site, which was experiencing problems all throughout 2016.

Finally, the cherry on top - gigster, like other shops that hire contractors, is required to send a 1099 to the contractor and to the IRS by January 31st. As you can imagine, they've kinda failed here too. A lot of people didn't get their 1099s and a lot of people are reporting errors on their 1099s. It looks like they outsourced this out and whoever did it messed up transferring data from contractors' W9 into the 1099.

[toomuchtodo]

> Finally, the cherry on top - gigster, like other shops that hire contractors, is required to send a 1099 to the contractor and to the IRS by January 31st. As you can imagine, they've kinda failed here too. A lot of people didn't get their 1099s and a lot of people are reporting errors on their 1099s. It looks like they outsourced this out and whoever did it messed up transferring data from contractors' W9 into the 1099.

> For example, if you received miscellaneous income in 2016 that is non-employee compensation, the paying institution or individual must issue Form 1099-MISC by January 31, 2017. If the institution fails to do so, the penalty against the company varies from $30 to $100 per form ($500,000 maximum per year), depending on how long past the deadline the company issues the form. If a company intentionally disregards the requirement to provide a correct payee statement, it is subject to a minimum penalty of $250 per statement, with no maximum.

https://www.irs.gov/government-entities/federal-state-local-...

[omouse]

PMs as a group hoard information on projects: devs have almost no visibility into the current set of available, unstaffed gigs.

Their goal is to be remain necessary and collect a paycheck. They're middle-men and this is why I encourage devs to talk directly to clients and get used to solving client/customer/user problems through direct feedback rather than relying on the broken telephone system.

Also this is when unions and co-operatives start to look like a good idea. If Gigster and other sites like it were operated as co-operatives, where every freelancer is also a member of the organization, they wouldn't be so inclined to hire middle-men and to rip people off.

[throwaway49857]

Just remembered - Gigster did a big press thing about the Gigster Fund - was meant to give contractors a piece of the pie (I think in equity), but there's no available written info on this internally and HQ declines to answer any concrete questions, just states that it's a work in progress (see a pattern here?) and that it's awesome.

[timdaniel]

Yeah treat your supply like shit, this bullshit about the place to be for a developer, better meat scraps at Crew, Toptal, Hackerbay?

[skewart]

They're even trying to replace their workers with automation in a similar way. See, for example, https://jobs.lever.co/gigster/19fc3d07-ba71-47d9-a77d-654c96...

[st3v3r]

Same here. I worked on one project, that was a trash fire. I took a month away to kinda clear my head. I go back, and there really isn't anything available, except for React gigs.