The first freelancer i hired on @upwork actually copied code from their other projects into mine. I could tell because every PR had a new coding style, naming conventions and massive amounts of unused css.
Knocking out 2 birds with one stone.

You could confront the dev about it, you know. As a client you have the right to get justification about the quality of work you're paying for.

@Sid2006 he was adding a ton of extra features and I really liked it. But when I eventually really looked at the code, I realized it was a complete mess. By that time it was too big and too messy to add new features or continue.

Redoing it showed me how much of the code was actually trash.

Well if you want to pay $20/h you get what you get

@msdsk you're 100% right. But I didn't have much choice being a college grad with barely any income to support myself and my dreams. And it's taught me so much about how to properly architect a project.

I do that too but I document, test (to the extent that it's convenient) and package the reused fragments on NPM. Does this make it acceptable?

@lorentz I think that's amazing. Reusing code is the core of software development (when done properly like you have). But bloating a project with garbage code is bonkers. Devs need to take pride in their work. Otherwise you're just building bad habits just to get by.

@swifterresort by the time I found out, I just decided to move on. Removing excess code in the entire codebase and retesting to see if anything broke is just a pain. I personally enjoyed rewriting it because I was able to choose better technologies and I learned better ways to architect it.

Did you specify a code style guide or any code quality metrics, or just want something that worked?

If the latter, then you can't really complain - you're talking about bottom of the barrel scraping on sites like that, you'll be lucky if most of them ever produce something vaguely functional.

@AlmondSauce I think that was the other main issue. There was no linter or prettier set. And being new to most of these technologies didn't help. So I was at the mercy of what the freelancer was capable of because i didn't know myself.

@gagan-suie Yeah, that's a tough gig in that case.

Then again, if you knew it inside out yourself it'd probably be quicker and easier to do it yourself - so it's a bit of a catch 22.