My Worst Experience At Fiverr

Imagine this: You have completed 3 projects on Upwork worth over USD 3000, where you had to use the tools Next.js, React, Astro, Apollo GraphQL, all of MERN, and Python for web scraping. All of your efforts led to the creation of an MVP that began an entire startup, founded by one of the founding members of SPEEDHOME. You worked so well that you got invited to the head office, did meetings with senior developers, and even with folks at Alicloud. You were the youngest and first employee at the startup and had to manage a team while working on 3 projects at the same time and meeting deadlines.

All of this happened 3 months after my father passed away. I found hope and was able to finally live on my own. I was paying for my living costs, invested in my sister's online business to bring new products, and could finally see a smile on my mother's face after a long time. After the contracts ended, I had to take a long break as I was completely burned out. I bought an electric guitar, and to this date, I believe it is the best investment I ever made. It helped me get back on track, and I started to focus on my studies.

In the past 5 months, I worked on stuff I didn't know about enough: headless CMSes, Tensorflow, and Hydrogen. I was surprised at how fast you can make graphql and rest APIs with CMS. I spent an entire week fully understanding authentication and authorization with popular tools like NextAuth, Clerk, Firebase and made this sequence diagram while learning Auth0 implementation with Prisma and Graphql. You can learn more here. Then my mind shifted to a completely different sector: machine learning. As of today, I am still learning it with Tensorflow and making a smart webcam with a pre-trained model.

I am not afraid of using tools where I have more room to learn, unless it doesn't run on my machine due to hardware limitations or poor documentation. Both happened today for a project I got at Fiverr. This morning, I was asked several questions about what I know. I was asked to setup nestjs with React Native and did so as it is necessary to make sure the developer can setup the environment on their machine. Keep in mind that nowhere in this conversation was Docker mentioned. I joined an interview and displayed the code to prove that I am able to setup the environment according to the specifications.

Let's assume that the clown we are talking about is named Jeff. So Jeff begins to tell that the code I am displaying is too simple. SIMPLE FOR A TASK THAT WAS UNPAID! Then I was asked to show a more complex project, and I showed it. It was a React Native project with GraphQL that was set up with Typescript and Codegen, enough to get the job done. It still wasn't enough, according to him. His pronunciation was so bad that I was confusing 'Docker' with 'Pothos'. I finally understood it and then got access to the source code.

It was a disaster. There were .sh files, but no instructions were provided to set it up, not even on a README.md. The accent was so confusing that I felt like I was listening to two rocks hitting each other. Somehow I understood what he wanted me to do: create a database image, then a container, and then run it. Simple, right? NO. I had to run another .sh file that I wasn't informed of or written on any piece of text provided by him. When I asked for another meeting, he replied, "You are supposed to configure it yourself," and he was busy. I understand that you are busy, but leaving a new developer regardless of experience with poor documentation is one of the worst experiences in this field.

I described the root cause, which was the container stopping after starting it. Instead of a consise soultion, he started to question my experience and started to belittle me. The amount of unprofessionalism and rude behaviour baffled me. Right at that point, I knew this was a red flag and left the project immediately. Although he tried to convince me to stay, I finalised my decision and left.

I have successfully completed my previous contracts simply because the project managers and the CEO himself provided requirements and setup instructions such as deployment guidelines, publishing app to play store etc that was clear to read and to the point.

I sat next to the CEO of Furtory, the company whose MVP I made, and he told me, "It is always 80% planning and 20% coding. Every single step must be well documented and code reviewed." I took his piece of advice to the deepest part of my brain and have always practised this. Since that day, I have promised myself to always think about how the future developer will adapt and maintain my code when I leave an organization.

This experience made me see the dark side of freelancing. I hope no one has to experience this.