Show IH: Microtasks (uTask.org)

Like the idea and will keep it in mind for future tasks. I think it provides some benefit over hiring on upwork myself like I usually do.

The signup page feels odd on mobile coming from a beautiful landingpage to a blank non responsive form. Maybe you can add responsiveness and some additional reason to sign up and show what the next steps will be. I was expecting some kind of wizard or task description form behind the button "take the next step".

• Do I get a feedback if you cant find a Dev to do it in 24hrs?
• how do I know I set a reasonable price so your devs take the gig?
• Do I get direct communication trough Skype to the dev to clarify things?

This is a cool idea. This is something that appeals to me because, as you know, I don't like to spend that much time interviewing candidates. I'd rather screen based on resume/ratings and hire for a trial job. That's typically how I use Upwork.

Value Proposition

My biggest reaction is that the site copy focuses too much on low cost, which makes me too fearful that I'd be getting low-quality developers. Especially lines like, "We have a network of hungry developers in our network." I read "hungry" as "third-rate" (or less polite adjectives).

The copy that most spoke to me is at the very end, where it says "prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure." (although I'd prefer a more authoritative source than an HN comment). I also like that I'm not forever bound to uTask the way I am with Upwork. For me, it's not as important that I save money up front. I'd much rather save time by using a platform that gives me a high-quality pool of developers and gives me the tools to get up and running with them quickly.

Acceptance Criteria

In the "New Microtask" form, I recommend giving the user more guidance about how to describe their task.

If I write a task like, "I want you to scrape the headlines from CNN," I'm burying a lot of hidden assumptions in that statement. Does it need to have a command-line frontend or am I just talking about a library? Does the code have to adhere to a particular style guide? How much documentation do I require?

From my experience, the success of these types of jobs depends on defining good acceptance criteria. The client is responsible for specifying in objective terms what qualifies as successful completion of the contract.

Going back to the CNN example, the acceptance criteria might be:

• User can execute the scrape operation by running scrapy crawl cnn from the command line.
• Freelancer can assume scrapy and Python 2.7 are installed, but should not depend on any other libraries.
• Scrape operation produces a text file called headlines.txt that contains one CNN headline per line in the file.
• Code matches PEP8 style.
• User can execute all unit tests by running coverage run --source cnn -m unittest discover.
• Code coverage is >= 80%.
• All nontrivial functions have docstrings.

Consider adding a text section dedicated to "Acceptance criteria" with guidance about how to define it well.

Minor Thoughts

• The examples of successful microtasks don't really make sense to me. I don't understand what I'm looking at in the screenshots they link to.
• The term "microtasks" makes me think of Mechanical Turk, like jobs that require <20 mins of unskilled work.

Really interesting!

I'd be a potential user (on both sides of the marketplace if I ever get a free minute) - am turned off by the 'hard' login/signup flow though - would prefer a little more information about payment guarantees etc and to see some more examples of what a $50 and $250 task looks like...

Keep up the good work, the site looks great!

In order to freelance on the microtasks do you have to signup on code for cash or is there a way to signup through microtasks?

Seemed a bit confusing on the site but everything else looks super clean. Great work.