Upwork reviews

There is one major problem that most of the other problems I see at the company stem from. The leadership critically overestimated the growth the company would see in the near future. They went into overdrive in hiring based on that belief. What happened from there is AEs were pushing hard to oversell to a market that wasn't there. AMs got accounts that didn't have the room to expand. All parts of the sales org had trouble meeting their goals and the pressure of failure spread throughout the company. That failure weighs on everyone and makes the job a heavy grind. Eventually it caught up with the company in forcing them to layoff a huge portion of the sales team. And let's talk about that leadership. There is a lack of a people-first leaders, particularly as you move up the ladder. Many of them were successful ICs, but I think they lack the innate ability to reach people that allows for them to successfully lead and coach them. There are some that are good people leaders, but there are more that aren't than are.

Got hired late 2022 under the pretense that 80% of Enterprise AM's had hit quota in 2021 and 90% were on track to hit quota for 2022. Total BS. People were hitting their revenue targets because they lucked into how many accounts they got and the size of the accounts, and maybe 1-2 reps were hitting non-revenue goals a month. The product is not an enterprise product and customers did not view Upwork as an essential part of their hiring strategy, they viewed it as a nice to have when they need short-term work for a project. We touted to all our customers that Upwork is great so help prevent overhiring and layoffs, yet that's exactly what Upwork did, more than once. They were never able to give us full books which set us up for total failure. As some of us were finally starting to get new, promising accounts, we get a last minute meeting put on our calendars and we immediately knew what was about to go down. Pretty much every AM/AE that was hired since September got let go, along with many others who had been there for longer (some more than 3-4 years). Then there was all the drama with severance getting cut in half that is mentioned in a ton of other reviews. You would think with Upwork being a literal work marketplace, they would have a little more empathy in this scenario. So much for their mission statement.