Great talk but horrible plan - Enterprise Account Executive Upwork Employee Review

2.0
May 11, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Overall: Nice people Sales specific: great product concept Environment: remote friendly

Cons

Upper management is not dialed in and mid-managers are worse. The ones I did respect kept leaving and the not so sharp ones were promoted after I left. Upwork's model is NOT compliant with most enterprise organizations, who will never want to hire people to work on their product outside of the country for a variety of issues (sensitivity of info, accountability, communication gaps) They are really only good for low level grunt work which is not a sustainable model. The Sales org points to Fortune 500 clients but honestly those are mainly one-off siloed departments (the logo team at X company and no one else) and typically no penetration at the HR level which would help with organization wide adoption. Their big wins were not templated which is a head scratcher, because the few big deals they did win addressed required logistical issues. If you are offered an interview here, definitely go for "Account Managment" and not the "Executive" role. They did a mass layoff of hundreds of newly hired employees so ethics and smarts not at the top of the list here.

Explore other reviews about Upwork

5.0
Feb 25, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great people, very approachable, interesting problems

Cons

A lot of short term thinking and near future optimization

1.0
Nov 7, 2025
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

It's remote, and most ICs are talented and kind.

Cons

Oh my, there are so many clowns at this company—nearly all of them in leadership. Mostly executive cronies from dinosaur companies like CareerBuilder and Yahoo, who are out of touch with the tech industry at large. This hysterical leadership shifts strategy every 3 months or so, resulting in whiplash for their poor staff as well as frequent layoffs and reorgs. In my time at this company, I’ve seen nearly every -ism you can imagine, frequently and repeatedly: racism, cronyism, sexism, and nepotism. The business model exploits freelancers, essentially offshoring work for clients (cheap global labor) while the company takes a hefty share via predatory fees, which are the majority of record company profits. Unfortunately, AI will cannibalize many freelancer jobs on the platform. Although the company is delusional in its own “native AI” progress—their models are unusable slop despite huge investments—other companies will likely provide useful tech in the near future, particularly agentic AI. I could go on, but the bottom line is that this is a grossly unethical company you should avoid if you can. I’ll also add that many of the positive reviews here are from USERS of Upwork, not EMPLOYEES. This results in a falsely positive, rosy view of a toxic company. I wish Glassdoor had a filter that could address this for people considering employment at Upwork. Their rating is likely closer to a 2.7 if those irrelevant reviews could be excluded from the data set.

10
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