I want this platform; fellow devs, what are your thoughts?
To give you some background, I’m a developer and somewhat limited on funds right now as I am trying to get indie hacking things going.
That all said it doesn’t negate the fact that I have spent the past decade learning tons of dev skills which I know are in high demand and useful to many.
Before you respond “well just get a 9-5”, without getting into explaining why, I am going to say that is not what I am looking for.
I want to pick and choose random dev tasks here and there based on availability.
Before you suggest some freelance platform (as I realize it sounds very similar), I have to say I tried those and the amount of effort spent on just trying to land work was overwhelming and very unproductive. The underbidding by clients is another problem. So what I am talking about is different.
What I want is the following: a board of tasks (similar to what you would have at a regular dev job) where you can pick work. Not compete for a contract, but actually pick it up if it seems doable to you. Another dev could review the deliverable for quality, and customer who needs this done would pay on delivery.
Basically need to eliminate the whole bidding system that is part of freelance boards and focus exclusively on dev tasks. 🤣
The motivation being that this would allow legitimate earning while still devoting time to build own projects that may take a while to be profitable.
I would love to hear everyone’s thoughts.
Immediate thought - this is a lot of disclosure for clients.
I have 35+ years of dev, much of it remote for US and European clients, from Australia.
I still have projects I'm unable to talk about because of NDA.
At one point because of my specialist low-level Mac skills I was hired nearly simultaneously for what was effectively the same job, by two separate companies. (One was a supplier to the other).
The idea is technically appealing. Hey, I would make my wife happier by picking up occasional consulting work and I'd probably use it.
I think you have two massive problems in how to have granular tasks up there without them
1 giving away too much about the project
2 imposing too much overhead on the dev team to integrate those tasks into their workflow.
The 2nd point occurred to me as I was writing - posting tasks on a job board introduces lag. However, to break things down to the level you're suggesting seems to need to be a lot closer to the bleeding edge of actually implementing code, than normal outsourcing. If someone is doing a fairly agile process, those task descriptions would be within a couple of weeks of being needed as shipping code.
OR — if you can point me to a platform like this that would be highly appreciated in my current situation 👍 😉
I’ve often wondered whether a system for paying/getting paid for pull requests (on GitHub, etc) is feasible. Both sides of the market exist on the platform so that’s the logical location. I’ve seen Bountysource and a few others try, not sure how successful they’ve been.
The trouble is that the effort required to describe the problem is non-trivial, and the effort for the dev to get up to speed is equally non trivial, making it not cost effective over just hiring a full time/contract dev.
I’m not sure you can apply the gig economy processes to development (in most cases).
This is similar to Field Service Management for Engineers. Salesforce Lightning Bolt uses the same principle.
Love it. I would use this.
... I'm listening.. it sound interesting, a contract bidding system between those who can do the work and who need the work done and are willing to pay. It would be tricky to construct at the outset because you have to manage two target customer groups with conflicting demands, and a lack of either group and the system collapses...
Say you have developers on one side and "the business" on the other - seems you have a good handle on the developer persona (since you are a developer yourself), if you can identify the other side of the market, "businesses" or individuals willing to post contracts and bounties for developers to fulfill, you might be onto something :)
p.s.
I just wonder, putting on my enterprise hat for a second - how would you guarantee:
These are good questions to start with. I honestly just thought of this yesterday, so I have no clue if this is a pursue-able idea.
It occurred to me because I am also in this FB group with non-technical business owners who regularly post random technical needs, which are such that many developers could solve.
To being to answer these, I would probably leverage github activities in some way to establish an idea of skill level, and a second independent dev to verify the quality before delivery. Perhaps have some type of time tracking where you get penalized for being late, within reasonable terms. We know how these things are.
I once built something similar to this, but it was for lawyers. Customer would submit a request to talk to a lawyer per speciality, and each lawyer in that specialty group was notified. Whoever responded first, picked it up and completed the work. If they didn't complete within reasonable time (for whatever reason) the customer would be bumped back into the queue and another lawyer could pick them up from there, until the work was completed. Usually this requeue was not necessary though, it mainly had to do with technical issues.
while a job isn't that sexy and usually you degenerate in any job it's better than a race to the bottom on freelancer platforms...
did you try to apply already? if yes, how to did you apply?
what's your stack and where're you from?
re random jobs: whatever you do you learn and doing random jobs for us is better than nothing but it's a bit like aiming for nothing. you must have some passion, just try to work on this and create something out of this or so...
I'm in small town (Georgia) and I got fired LOL. Apparently I wasn't sufficiently happy and enthusiastic about the company 🤷which is fine, because I wasn't happy working there. This happened after 5 years on the job and without notice. This experience left me extremely wary of all employers and how quick they can flip on you and, if I had trusted them for my income, would have left me high and dry. I never got it until I went from ~$80K to $0 overnight. It is a scary experience and makes me not want to work for other people in a fully committed capacity.
I currently work as a teacher at a university. It's only a few days out of the week but it pays my bills. Rest of the time I build other projects. I am very happy doing what I am doing now, just realize it will take me a moment to get things to scale, which is why I posted this.
My stacks are reactjs, python, firebase, node, express, native android. Also many years of enterprise .NET and all that jazz.
My passion is to get my own business going and work on that :)