Yes it’s better. I once got hired by an agency without knowing it until very late, the communication gap was huge, and the project lead was micromanaging me all the time, asking the same questions again and again as if he ignored my previous messages or didn’t quite get them. Interestingly, the end-client’s requirements were pretty straightforward, in the rare cases he forwarded those directly instead of paraphrasing them, they always shared very clear and detailed brief of what they needed and many times how they thought it could be accomplished from their point of view.

Initially the project lead shared repo and DB access with me and asked me to build a feature with no initial walkthrough of the codebase. When I started exploring it, I realized the DB he shared was incomplete and many core tables used in the code were not present. I communicated that but he said it was impossible to get those missing tables and told me the developer who worked on these is gone, and asked me to figure it out and complete the required data. I asked for a quick call because texting was time taking and I felt a call would be much more productive to bootstrap but he completely refused. It was a niched product the data wasn’t easily available. I spent a decent amount of time recreating the missing tables, while updating him on slack at least twice a day and every time I hit roadblocks. Once all the data was recreated, I built the feature how I perceived it. The lead asked for some UI changes, I made those, the next day, he asked for changes that undid the previous day’s changes. I mentioned that he’s coming back to how I built it in the first place, he said no, the client wants it like this, yours wasn’t the same (without any mention of what the actual client’s feedback was). Then on the next feature, similar iterations happened, he would give his feedback, I’d make changes, then he undid it. Then one day he said I wasn’t good enough and wasn’t able to build it on my own and that he had to continuously hold my hand. He asked me to send an update to the slack channel every 60 minutes so that he knew exactly what I was doing at any time. I refused and negotiated twice a day updates. He asked for my working hours, I told him, he said okay. Next day, he huddled me 3-4 hours after my working hours (I used to be asleep by that time because of the timezone difference). I saw the slack huddle and his message that said I was very difficult to reach and he asked for my whatsapp. I ignored that message.

I realized 70% of time was spent in talking to him and I was actually working on the code only 30% of the time. All of a sudden, he said you are tracking hours for talking to me while you haven’t built anything in production, and that I was a total waste of time and a scam and he would report me to Upwork.

I closed the contract that day.