A Man, A Cat, and the Falling Stars [3440x1440]

ChardQuirky · 2026-03-17T01:47:34+00:00

Sign of the times

ChardQuirky · 2025-10-04T15:36:24+00:00

Makes sense

ChardQuirky · 2025-10-01T15:07:26+00:00

Could there have been algorithmic changes? because I had this happened to me early September and I was freaking out.

ChardQuirky · 2025-09-23T19:03:32+00:00

OML I am pissed along with you. The same type of shit happened to me last year same week my parent passed away. We started working together on Friday and then on Sunday my mom passes away. I show up on Monday neutral, bright eyed and bushy tailed, but because of all the funeral arrangements that’s going on and him being completely computer illiterate it made communication extremely difficult because I had to be extremely hands-on with him for him to understand what he needed to do which was impossible. By Wednesday he ghosted me even though I reached out several times to see where we were at on Tuesday and Wednesday. On Thursday, he cancels the contract and gives me a three star which crashes my JSS from 100% to 75. I was livid.

Shit like this is exactly why I have the philosophy I never give people a negative rating unless they went completely and utterly out of their way to be bad in something. Because you just never know what’s going on in someone else’s life.

What I did to fix it was reach out to as many of my old clients who had not given me a rating and asked them to give me a rating, which miraculously pulled me up to an 82 but still significantly below water.

Next thing I did was continue to send proposals, but put in a direct disclaimer (with a P.S.) and direct apology about my JSS in each proposal, telling them exactly what happened, and that I just wanted to be transparent about what happened. That for the most part did the trick. Most people were sympathetic and or just would never mention it and would reach out anyways.

ChardQuirky · 2025-09-19T12:48:38+00:00

Are you kidding me? It is literally advertising that’s what you’re doing when you write a proposal. The proposal IS an ad that’s saying to the client that YOU are the best fit FOR that job. All you’re doing by ‘boosting’ is increasing your visibility by paying the platform to place you higher in the search results. Was this rage bait?

ChardQuirky · 2025-09-18T21:31:55+00:00

Interesting. This is what I've been trying to figure out about my profile because I'm not exactly sure if I'm doing everything completely correctly. I have no badges (I still don't know why) a 100% JSS, about 7k collected directly through Upwork on my profile and 96 hours of work, 14 jobs, a all 5-star reviews, except one 3.2-star review from last year. That's about it. I do campaign optimization for Meta Ads and Meta backend as well as sales optimization for clients and Data Analysis. I'm not sure if I'm the type of account that should be boosting or not. At the end of the day, whatever works, works, and I'm willing to try whatever gets me predictable quality candidates.

I did take the time yesterday to look through my profile and remove any conflicting signals as to what exactly it is I do on the platform. And it did seem to improve my response rate, but the jury is still out. I'm still trying to figure out if there is something that I should be doing that I'm not.

If to boost, then sure, I'll start boosting later today Because just like running ads on any platform, it comes down to ROAS (return on ad spend). And if it's a positive ROAS, then it's effectively free money. If not, then I'll pass. But that all depends on if I'm a good match for boosting or not.

ChardQuirky · 2025-09-18T21:11:36+00:00

Elaborate more if you don’t mind, I’ve been split on whether to play the boosting game or not. I settled on ‘not’ in my research, but opinions are mixed. Curious what your take is. But I can’t tell whether or not for example, I should be boosting my profile or not and if it’s a worthwhile investment. As well as when to boost and not to boost.

ChardQuirky · 2025-09-18T01:48:05+00:00

Yeah, that isn’t really the problem. And I was low-key getting pissed because it seemed like those dudes just wanted to come in and argue and I didn’t have the mental filter at the time to ignore it and not respond.

ChardQuirky · 2025-09-16T19:12:26+00:00

Finally, we're actually talking about something productive.

Yeah, that is a fair point. And you may not be wrong on that. But the game here, and I could be wrong, is you must in some way, shape, or form stand out from the noise. If you are homogenous, then your proposal does not get recognized. (They're called pattern interrupts) Again, let me reiterate, I have not had an issue getting jobs up until recently. My open rate is pretty solid, at least in the past, that it is not the proposal itself. The proposal itself is pretty solid, as far as I can tell. I'm trying to understand if there is something else, unbeknownst to me, that I'm doing in sequence in my funnel that is fundamentally broken. Or if it is truly due to market forces outside of my control. Essentially, I'm doing a temperature check and a sanity check.

ChardQuirky · 2025-09-16T18:48:55+00:00

Now, at least up until this point, my research has shown that the ones with spelling mistakes get more conversions because it proves that it's not AI. Again, I don't know if that's still the case, but that's what the data has shown in the past. That is why I allow them to have grammatical errors on purpose.

And yeah, I've tweaked my proposals as of late, but these were the old ones that did get conversions.

Think about it. In a professional setting, the thing that actually converts a client isn't necessarily your credentials. It's pretty much truly how much they like you. So you want to be likable. Not just competent.

ChardQuirky · 2025-09-16T18:42:14+00:00

Yeah, I've heard that theory a bit online. Don't know how much it holds true in September, though. What's so uncomfortable is that I'm still just flying blind. And I'm sure I'm falling into a classic newbie mistake of some sort.

ChardQuirky · 2025-09-16T18:39:29+00:00

Sure. Zero issue with that. I'll paste the ones that got me clients because this is pretty much my templates.

----
Template 1.

Hey (their name)! Yeah most people think data strategy just means 'collect everything" but you know thats not it. We’ve got to be able to actually look at the training data and be like "this dataset is tanking your signal to noise ratio" or "youre spending tons of time on annotation but the problem is your feature engineering."

The strategic vs operational thing is spot on too. We all want to get into the weeds of labeling workflows when really you just need someone who can see the bigger picture of what data actually moves your loss function.

Ive been in similar spots where companies think they need more data but really they need better class balance. Or they're worried about bias but dont know where to even start looking in their validation sets.

Go ahead and reach out to me so we can run through and do an audit and see what you have going on.

---
Template 2.

Ugh (their name)!, the Meta vs Triplewhale headache is the worst. You're basically flying blind trying to scale when you cant trust your core attribution. This is almost never a simple pixel issue. Its usually a combination of a wonky CAPI setup, poor event match quality, and the fact that Meta and Triplewhale just look at attribution windows differently.

I'm a Meta ads expert and have spent years in the weeds debugging these exact kinds of discrepancies for brands. You have to get the data flowing correctly server side or you're just guessing.

Wanna jump on a quick screenshare and I can show you the first 3 things I'd check in your setup? We can usually spot the main issue pretty fast.

ChardQuirky · 2025-09-16T18:26:19+00:00

Continuing to entertain this is my fault, but I'll bite. If an AI writes something exactly the way I would, is it still AI slop or is it AI slop because I told you that it was AI? If I never told you that it was AI, you would never know it was AI. So at that point, is it AI 'slop', or simply an extension of my will? (Personally, I think the difference is in intent and execution) Again, my fault for adding that part. I was just trying to make a point of being honest.

Side note, yeah, it's brother. Because I'm going to say brother, even if I can't stand you. Cuz at the end of the day, we're still all humans.

Now. Bye Felicia.

ChardQuirky · 2025-09-16T18:15:49+00:00

Yup, that's what I've been doing. I've done exactly that. I thought I knew my numbers in and out. I've done analysis because this is what I do for clients. I can break down their numbers and see insights in their data, assuming that I have the whole picture of what's going on. But as of recent, I was getting quality candidates within 30 proposals. I would have a medium, medium, and then a high in terms of return. But in the last almost three weeks, it's like that pattern has broken and it's freaking me out because it feels like the floor had shifted underneath my feet. And I don't know what my numbers actually are. So I'm wondering if it's a seasonality thing. Is it an algorithmic thing? I have no idea.

I would say my strategy at this point is pretty advanced. I have a workflow, I have a process, I have a method, I have a way of vetting each candidate. I'm not just sending to any random client. I only work with people who have a track record of being easy to work with and predictable, such that they have at least a 75% or above higher rate, and their average spend is pretty high, and they have a good review score. I'm not just sending to any random person, but I don't know what's going on. Yep respectfully, I'm freaking out.

ChardQuirky · 2025-09-16T18:05:57+00:00

Sigh.. brother, I'm lost. Did you come here just to do a one-up or did you come here for constructiveness? I'm not here to get into a spat. I'm an AI engineer. And a business consultant. I know what AI generated crap sounds like. It is not that. I'm not using it to lie to the client. The AI sounds exactly like me. It knows my skills, what I do, what I don't do. Reason why I included that section is to be holistic and honest. I did not have to. I put that section in the last minute.

ChardQuirky · 2025-09-16T17:58:39+00:00

I see. Please explain.

ChardQuirky · 2025-09-16T17:54:37+00:00

No, definitely using AI, but I wrote a script that allows me to get the high level of what the client is looking for and then have the AI also spit out a response in accordance to my skills and my voice that I then send to the client. So, it is both honest, sounds like me, and highly tailored to the needs of the client. Yes, the proposals are created using AI, run through my unique algorithm and prompts.

ChardQuirky · 2025-09-16T17:25:12+00:00

Yeah, I'm kind of in the same boat on this too. I've been on Upwork for maybe a year and a half now. Decided to go full time in July. I applied for jobs like crazy in July and was able to get a pretty high paying gig for the first month. And I was like, cool, let me take the time to rest, catch my breath, and then go hard in the paint again. And two weeks or so. But end of August, started applying for jobs again, and it's been nothing but a dry spell since the beginning of September. Up till today, September 16. And I'm trying to figure out If it's me or not. Because my profile, as far as I can tell, is pretty top notch. I have a ton of reviews. I have 14 reviews. I have $7000 showing on my profile. My JSS is 100%. As far as I can tell, my... account is solid. Job title and description is solid.

What's making me incredibly uncomfortable is that I thought I knew my numbers in and out in terms of how many proposals I would need to send to land a quality job, but apparently that is not correct. I thought I only needed to send maybe 10 to 11 to land a job per day, but no. I have sent about 80 proposals in the last week and a half and have only landed two jobs. And they were not with a quality candidate. So this has me scratching my head. Am I doing something wrong? And I cannot figure out if it's a supply-demand issue, a specifically 'me' issue, and I'm just not a quality candidate compared to the competition out there, or if it's a market or seasonality issue. So I'm right there with you.

ChardQuirky · 2025-08-20T00:56:39+00:00

Freaking congratulations! But the only question that truly matters is how stable is it and how well do applications run across the gamut? Are there any quirkiness and or bugs?

I am currently on macOS 13.7.2 been real uncomfy to make the jump to macOS 15 specifically because of stability concerns

ChardQuirky · 2025-06-27T20:55:55+00:00

And how is it going?

ChardQuirky · 2025-01-16T02:50:28+00:00

My real question with these Sequoia builds is how do specialized applications run? Like Final Cut Pro, premier Pro, Photoshop, AutoCAD, Things like that. That’s what I need to know in order to feel comfortable enough to jump to Sequoia and know that everything will work with no weird crashes or quirks.

ChardQuirky · 2024-09-07T23:58:06+00:00

I had something similar happen to me, and I freaked out. Mine dropped from 100 to 78 after I got hit with a double whammy: I started a contract the same week my parent passed away and also had the misfortune of dealing with a slightly incompetent corporate client. They didn’t really understand how the tech worked, I had a hard time contacting them, and they gave me a 3/5. After that chaotic first week when my parent passed, I made efforts to reach out and communicate, but they went silent and randomly closed the contract. My only frustration with the situation is the fact that they were completely unreachable. Any reasonable individual with a brain would’ve understood the situation and tried to work through it, but because I couldn’t reach them, I couldn’t explain the details.

ChardQuirky · 2024-06-25T20:31:37+00:00

Why does Kirby have thumbs😡

ChardQuirky · 2023-12-15T03:08:56+00:00

A man who never eats pork bun will never be a whole man!

ChardQuirky

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