[HN Gopher] Show HN: Call a Dev - Pay Stack Overflow users $1/mi...
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Show HN: Call a Dev - Pay Stack Overflow users $1/min for live
programming help
Author : mcadenhe
Score : 155 points
Date : 2021-02-22 16:59 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (calladev.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (calladev.com)
| bcoughlan wrote:
| Cool idea. Where I work it would be much more useful to use it to
| find someone who can consult on specialised knowledge rather than
| programming problems. For example we are working on a disaster
| recovery architecture at the moment. This whole area is new to us
| so I'm reading a lot about it, but I know that an hour long
| discussion with someone with expertise in that area could save us
| months of time and tens of thousands in costs. It would be great
| if the platform could hook me up with those kinds of people.
| wwww4all wrote:
| My current hourly rate breaks down like this. I make adjustments
| every 6 months.
|
| 15 years professional experience + 5 years experience in latest
| specialized tech stack + 1 hour = $200 dollars/hour for contracts
| longer than 6 months. Hourly rate is higher for shorter term
| contracts.
|
| My rate is more cost effective than not delivering the solution.
| atleta wrote:
| How/where do you manage to charge this kind of rate? Are you
| contracting clients directly or through some agency? Also, is
| this for on premise or remote work? You take on full projects
| or augment existing teams?
| A12-B wrote:
| "Work from home Be your own boss Set your own schedule"
|
| I've heard this one before. Next you'll get the state of
| california to classify me as an employee.
| zoba wrote:
| Relatedly, if you would like help fighting procrastination you
| may benefit from me as an accountability coach. It's just me
| personally helping folks stay accountable to their goals with a
| couple of calls for a couple of hours every week. I'd be
| delighted for you to sign up. More info here: https://coding-
| pal.com/
| armadsen wrote:
| This interesting to me. I spent the last 4 years teaching
| programming full time, and also have a decently high SO
| reputation. I've recently gone back to full time software
| development, and miss teaching. The main problem is that at $0.75
| / min, it's not worth my time. I generally have at least one
| contract side job making several times that much, and I'm not
| unusual in that respect.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It costs $1/minute, and pays $0.75/minute. What is this site
| charging 25% for supplying?
| sjburt wrote:
| Matchmaking, promotion.
| m00dy wrote:
| Do I need to install software in my computer to use this platform
| ?
| dlevine wrote:
| This sort of reminds me of Airpair. Does anyone know what
| happened to them? Any learnings there?
| atleta wrote:
| Not unlike codementor, though the landing page maybe has a bit
| different value proposition. There they offer mentoring, this one
| looks more like specialized problem solving. But, of course, the
| two overlap strongly. E.g. on codementor quite a few of my
| sesssions were about looking into and helping to solve specific
| issues.
|
| Those are actually pretty high adrenaline situations, at least in
| the beginning, because you only have a few minutes to grasp
| what's going. Or at least it feels like so and at least you need
| to start showing signs of understanding the problem. It was
| pretty fun (and stressful, in a positive way) in the beginning.
| whobar wrote:
| Reminds me of "The Knowledge", pitched on Dragon's Den (UK's
| shark tank) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf4zNLxJZnY
| lettergram wrote:
| I used to offer tutoring for C, Go and Python programming for
| $50/hr.
|
| I can't tell you the number of people who asked me to do work on
| for their day job... I would always accept at $100/hr.
|
| Almost every week I'd max out my 15 hours I'd set aside for
| "tutoring". So beyond that I'd charge $200/hr, and I'd still get
| people for both tutoring and day job style work lol
|
| $1/min is a fair price, but if you're good you can make a lot
| more
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| What did they ask you?
|
| Did you get to clone their entire code repository?
| padthai wrote:
| This is fascinating to me. Is there any particular kind of
| profile that hired you as a ghostwriter? Do these people know
| how to do their work and decide to outsource it or they have no
| clue and just got lucky in the interviews?
| daniellarusso wrote:
| There was a story about a developer from IBM that hired
| somebody, and was only discovered because the inbound VPN IP
| was from a different country.
| branon wrote:
| I would like to read this story!
| MattGaiser wrote:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693
|
| Not the same one in all likelihood though.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| That's a failure from the dev and management.
|
| Being able to find and get repeatable good results from
| contractors across the globe and manage them is a skill
| in itself.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| nice, I use codementor, so I'm in your target market. Do you have
| devs signed up?
| mcadenhe wrote:
| Thanks for taking a look! A couple have connected their S/O
| accounts so far. Launched it today so not much action yet.
|
| Do you use codementor as a mentor or as a mentee?
| scrollaway wrote:
| I use codementor as well, as a mentor primarily. Got a lot of
| clients through them, including longer-term clients for my
| consultancy.
|
| Immediate feedback: If you want me to sign up, 75C//min is
| too low, and you do need a mechanism to raise rates. My
| standard codementor rate is $2.25/min (and goes up to $3/min
| on some specialized skills).
|
| Feel free to email me if you want some feedback/video chat. I
| was on hackhands back when it still existed. I'm a sucker for
| these types of platform. I especially love getting clients
| looking for actual coaching/mentoring, not just debugging.
| mcadenhe wrote:
| Awesome! Thanks for the feedback and the offer!
| mritchie712 wrote:
| I've done both, but mostly I use it to speed up the debugging
| of JS issues.
|
| I'd consider adding a GIF or video of the flow to connect
| with a dev.
| mcadenhe wrote:
| Yea things are always a lot faster when you have someone
| who can tell you exactly what you don't know.
|
| The main difference with Call a Dev is the lack of friction
| for the devs who need help, and the devs who need work. You
| just post your question and if someone can help, you'll get
| a ping with a link to their S/O profile. If you like what
| you see, you accept the ping and the call starts.
|
| A video is a good idea, I'm putting one together now.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Good luck!
|
| DevOps is another area you could focus on. A lot of
| people think it's fun to learn programming, but very few
| want to learn devops (e.g. why does this work locally,
| but not on AWS?). People will def pay to solve devops
| problems quickly (source: I've done it many times).
| paulie_a wrote:
| So pay someone else to use google?
| blackbear_ wrote:
| No, pay someone to read the first google result to you. A large
| part of stackoverflow questions are like this honestly.
| the_jeremy wrote:
| Interesting idea, but doesn't seem competitive for Americans to
| ever respond, if you only pay them $0.75/min after the first
| minute and the experts have to search for questions they want to
| answer, meaning there is guaranteed unpaid time between calls.
|
| A potentially interesting option would be to offer tiers based on
| stack overflow reputation, and to ensure that a developer has
| reputation from the desired tags.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| hntrader wrote:
| Interesting idea.
|
| When I use Fiverr to hire a dev, I often have to contact multiple
| prospective devs to figure out that their skills are a match for
| the problem I'm trying to solve. I'll chat to 5 (all who
| advertise python) and give a one line intro about the problem,
| and it's immediately clear than only 2 can or wish to do it. E.g
| if I need someone who specifically knows the Selenium package.
|
| Do you have a similar mechanism that can help to match the right
| dev with the right customers?
|
| Also, $1/minute is more expensive than Fiverr. For my quick
| projects I would still use Fiverr due to the cost savings. I'd
| expect to fork out $60 for a two hour project there. On the other
| hand, others here are saying that it's too low for their hourly
| rate. Some price flexibility might be a good idea?
| mcadenhe wrote:
| Devs ping any problems they feel capable of solving. They can
| ping with 2 messages, either they KNOW they can help, or they
| THINK they can help.
|
| Once you receive a ping you can vet their S/O profile and if
| you like what you see you can start the call.
|
| It's not so much for contract work or to complete tasks or
| projects like fiverr is. It's about getting personalized help
| with code your struggling with.
| jtth wrote:
| what are you building that you are soliciting development labor
| from fiverr and think $30/h is appropriate for anyone on earth
| involved in programming
| hntrader wrote:
| Ad hoc scraping tool for something experimental that I didn't
| want to do myself. Would've taken me 2x as long as the dev I
| hired since I haven't done that before. Quality wasn't so
| important, I just wanted the output of the scraper on a
| specific site for a one off thing.
|
| $30/h is a typical rate for a dev on Fiverr, I've been very
| happy with the value I've gotten from it.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Why are you dictating the language they use, then? It just
| shrinks the pool and increases the odds you're missing out
| on a simpler way to do it.
|
| If they delivered a working scraper using Ruby or
| JavaScript or even a 3rd party service, the output would
| have been the same.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| I am guessing scraping, if using Selenium, Python, and hiring
| folks via fiverr.
| new_guy wrote:
| This is a fundamentally broken model.
|
| You get a good developer they fix the issue in a minute get $1.
|
| You get a not-so-good one they take all day and bankrupt you.
|
| You have an expectation mismatch, you pay the developers for
| their _value_ not their _time_.
|
| Better to have a model like Quirky did, $80 flat rate or
| something and obviously filter out the bad developers on sign up.
| atleta wrote:
| The problem is, that no one can give you (or themselves) a
| reasonable estimate on how much it will take (and thus how much
| it should cost) to fix an issue in an unknown codebase.
|
| The mismatch is easily done away with by adding ratings to the
| system. So much so, than on similar platforms, if you are
| unlucky and run into a hard issue/prick customer (or some
| combination of this) too early then it can ruin your chances
| forever. (It does matter a lot whether you get your 1 out of
| 100 3* ratings as the first one or the 100th one.)
| naebother wrote:
| Yeah, no.
| munk-a wrote:
| Do you have any guarantees about how quickly a response will come
| in? I'm a bit concerned that the low payrate to the dev means
| that you're likely to miss higher skilled respondants. The payout
| isn't high enough to justify going FT on it and it feels like
| it'd be unreliable to try and pickup questions here and there
| when you happen to be available.
| mcadenhe wrote:
| Thanks for the question! Your concern is justified. There are
| no guarantees. The only thing for certain is that if you don't
| get a ping within 60 minutes then your question will be
| deleted.
|
| It's kind of a chicken/egg problem where there aren't enough
| questions because I don't have enough people to answer them,
| and there aren't enough enough people to answer them without a
| steady supply of questions to keep them busy.
|
| I'm reconsidering the pay rate after reading a few of the
| comments here.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| I'm sure there are people that will do this, but I view it as
| particularly grueling work. If I want to work an 8 hour day to
| pay the bills, I need to work 8 hours at top efficiency since I'm
| always being watched, and on top of it, be social in different
| calls all day.
|
| Some of my best problem solving us while I'm out for a walk
| letting my mind wander. This is very much not for me.
|
| Oh, on top of this, I'm sure the dispute process after spending
| say two hours trying to do something and failing for whatever
| reason is going to be _fun_.
| sscarduzio wrote:
| I like the concept, but you can't pay the same proce for all
| developers.
| terse_malvolio wrote:
| Or for all problems!
| robertlagrant wrote:
| You don't - with this model you pay less for better developers.
| Ragnarork wrote:
| The idea looks interesting, but a couple things of note that make
| me kinda wary:
|
| - $0.75/min is $45/h and it's awfully cheap for what's ultimately
| consulting work
|
| - 1 free minute in each call, call ends if no payment source is
| connected: what about people that would keep getting those one
| minutes? I know it's not much, but for some problem it might be
| enough if not to solve it, at least to get input that could lead
| to resolution.
|
| I still like the idea because I feel strongly about stackoverflow
| pushing for solving everyone's issue instead of someone's, which
| often end up solving barely anyone problem as solutions provided
| are way too generic. The added effect is also that the community
| has devolved into a hot mess that will close so many questions as
| dupes even when they're not.
| munk-a wrote:
| The free minute sounds like a really good idea to me - there
| might be twenty seconds or so of introduction which younger
| folks will tend to view as unnecessary time-wasting and older
| folks will tend to view as necessary pre-connection and the
| free minute allows these greetings to go uncharged and be
| mostly uncontroversial. I think it both counters the greeting
| time and also serves as a pretty good PR move. Also, if I can
| answer your problem in less than a minute then you didn't even
| google it.
|
| I am sure a bunch of these sorts of questions will roll in and,
| if you're trying to continuously get answers within the free
| minute you're probably going to end up accidentally paying them
| a good portion of the time.
| unanswered wrote:
| > Also, if I can answer your problem in less than a minute
| then you didn't even google it.
|
| And so the person who has to field this call shouldn't get
| paid?
| munk-a wrote:
| Actually looking at the model setup by the site for
| contractors to grab questions on a voluntary basis - I
| sorta doubt anyone would actually take your question.
|
| The site design is pretty opaque so I imagined you had some
| SMEs out there that a call in would be automatically
| connected to but the contractors can view a list of
| questions and pick and choose ones they think they're a
| good match for.
|
| I think that makes it a valid question to the site
| designers if there should be either:
|
| 1. Some level of payment for the first minute of calls to
| make sure those dumb questions get answered
|
| 2. Some feedback mechanism for contractors to mark specific
| calls as googleable and for the site to send back a "Did
| you try googling it buddy?" response via email (though in
| much more diplomatic terms)
|
| It sounds like this service might actually struggle with
| questions that are too easy - I'm also really wondering
| about the unpaid research time potential. Will it be a faux
| pas on this service to call up the client at the point
| where you think you know the answer reasonably well but may
| need to do some on-the-phone research for their specific
| details or would the expectation be an expert ready to
| answer your question specifically for the Sun Sparc 8
| architecture?
| unanswered wrote:
| Presumably it works like the rest of the gig economy: if
| anything goes wrong, _caveat contractor_
| ryanSrich wrote:
| Why not use Upwork? I've found very good devs on Upwork to help
| me for an hour or two. They make $200-$400 for basically just
| talking me through something on zoom call.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| I worked on a startup that received seed funding to tackle this.
| I helped build the platform (using Twilio video) and then
| answered the first $5000 of calls. Things I learned:
|
| - Many entry level programmers at big companies (think Walmart
| Labs, Target, Goldman Sachs, etc) are too scared to ask
| managers/team for help. If you work for a large company, make
| sure new hires feel safe asking questions and seeking help or
| they will seek it elsewhere.
|
| - The really hard questions they're willing to pay $240 an hour
| for have too much context for you to grasp. They want you to
| replace their ORM layer or tell them why their 600 line test case
| is not working.
|
| - Getting customers is not too hard by poaching them from Stack
| Overflow, Reddit, CodeMentor.
|
| - Developers make good money working full time and idly sitting
| at their desk part of that time. Here you only get paid for
| active time and the idle time in-between will kill your salary.
| Your motivation has to come from helping other people and
| watching them grow, not from $$$.
| atleta wrote:
| Yeah, the idling thing, or looking from the other side, the on-
| demand expectation pretty much kills it. Or makes it hard to
| organize.
|
| I used to be active on CodeMentor a few years ago, and the bad
| thing for these problem solving kind of requests is that they
| are usually prompt requests. Now working remotely, in theory,
| you can be available almost any time, the problem is, that
| after a while you just feel like not wanting to leave what you
| do. At least not on a short notice.
|
| Agreed upon mentoring sessions that can be scheduled work a lot
| better from this regard.
|
| Actually, when I joined codementor, I was working on a startup
| that offered psychology consulting in a similar way. (And one
| of the reasons me joinging codementor was to get first-hand
| experience of the dynamics of such a service.) Our
| psychologists didn't like either that they had to be around and
| that they had a lot of non-meaningful inquiries. (Similar to
| what you see on codementor.)
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| There's also the awkward feeling of not being able to solve
| the problem and still charging something. I actually
| preferred "tipping". I solve your problem and then you pay me
| instead of running a timer.
| atleta wrote:
| Well, on codementor you can give a refund. And that would
| erase the session (and the rating, if you received one)
| from your history. I think it's better than tipping.
| Tipping, at least to my European ears, sounds like this
| voluntary thing as opposed to paying for a service.
|
| BTW, what happened to your service? Or, probably better to
| ask, how far did you get and why did it fail?
| sidpatil wrote:
| This reminds me of the premium-rate 1-900 numbers back in the
| day. I specifically remember seeing one of them which offered
| tips and strategies if you were stuck in a video game.
|
| I would definitely love to try this out at least once. I could
| see it being helpful.
| easton wrote:
| Nintendo had something like this in the days of the NES:
| https://gamingbolt.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/nintendo-h...
| blackrock wrote:
| I recall seeing a video of the Nintendo support center, where
| people (kids) would call up for video game help. And these
| game wizards would help them step through the game.
|
| I would've never thought that was a thing, much less a little
| career while it lasted. But it provided some jobs to people,
| whose purpose was to just play a bunch of Nintendo video
| games.
|
| I don't have the link, but maybe someone can find it on
| YouTube somewhere.
| awad wrote:
| The Deja Vu feeling was bothering me. Luckily found it
| pretty quickly..."High Score" Episode 2 on Netflix has the
| most footage of what you're talking about.
|
| Not quite the video, but if you don't have Netflix, this is
| publicly available:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKAf8eXuh9s
| blackrock wrote:
| Ah yes, this was it. Good find!
|
| I'm surprised it grew up from 6 to 400 support staff
| working on this. This would've been a fun job as a
| teenager.
| artificial wrote:
| I worked at the Redmond WA Nintendo of America location.
| You'd get qualified to do the game support lines. The
| starting was on setup and installs. There was a 4 week
| onboarding program teaching you how to easily look up
| things inside of their custom help database. The database
| would have model numbers and give pointers on identifying
| the input select. Identifying the equipment usually
| involved the son/daughter since they could get behind the
| entertainment center.
|
| Super Agents were the ones who answered both support lines
| and used a different part of the same db program. There was
| some AS400 looking terminal for subscriptions, ticketing,
| and creating shipping labels for say Pokemon game carts
| that died. People naturally abused this and would send wood
| blocks. The desks had TVs and game systems and tons of
| issues of Nintendo Power magazines.
|
| The floor was huge, hundreds of people grouped in by
| "streets" named after characters. The cubes were in
| clusters of six. I recall the game testers, they were in a
| different area, playing and playing one part trying to
| replicate issues or discover them. Sounds soul crushing.
| The neat thing were the marketing displays, like the units
| that would be installed at stores or showing the old card
| games Nintendo started with. The employee store was neat,
| getting that gold controller or other games was a breeze.
| There was an indoor lounge full of arcade cabinets, usually
| the cheats listed on the sides and one of the corp guys
| would geek out on Robotron 2084 and get a score so high it
| would reboot. Good times.
| tomaszs wrote:
| 10/10. It is a bullet proof success. Congrats from a top 2% SO
| user who just joined
| crazypython wrote:
| Users with more than 2,000 reputation and/or at least one Gold
| badge can give higher-quality help. I would either restrict the
| site only to these users, or I would put them in a higher-quality
| section. They would also get paid more, at least $1 per minute.
| (It currently pays $0.75 per minute.)
|
| I am an expert in Python and a deep Generalist with experience
| across many domains and types of software.
| https://stackoverflow.com/users/1459669/no%c9%a5%ca%87%ca%8e...
| debarshri wrote:
| This is cool from a Dev who needs help. It feels more like a
| micro-consultancy or more like a call center model. It is really
| bad from the Dev who takes the call. If I put myself in the
| position of the Dev who takes the call, It is pretty crap. Let
| say average call duration is 3 minutes, that means I have to take
| 20 calls/hr. Thats 20 context-switches per hour. I have worked at
| call centers, after first few calls in a day, people are just not
| motivated enough to help. There is going to be mental fatigue for
| the developer who is helping.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I used to provide services like this, but at a much higher rate.
| $60/hr is not competitive at all, especially if you're charging
| by the minute without a minimum of at least one hour.
| atarighat wrote:
| It's a great idea. But this probably works best as a bounty.
| e-clinton wrote:
| I think it's a great idea, but it should cost at least $3/min or
| more to get real talent to join. I'd pay top dollar if you can
| also guarantee that they'll solve my issue.
| euph0ria wrote:
| +1
| mcadenhe wrote:
| Thanks for checking it out! I could never guarantee that tho as
| Call a Dev is mostly self-service from the standpoint of the
| question asker and the question answerer. I wanted to reduced
| friction as much as possible for both sides of the equation.
|
| If you're willing to pay more money for more guarantee you
| should check out codementor.io
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Is there a similar site where you can put a dollar bounty on a
| solution for faster service? There have been SO questions where I
| would have paid for faster attention.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| Google Answers tried this way back when for general search
| related questions.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I know Quora did as well.
| repartix wrote:
| Cool idea. I might work on this.
| munk-a wrote:
| A question here, it seems like the flow is:
|
| 1. I post a question.
|
| 2. Someone elects themselves as a candidate to answer that
| question.
|
| 3. I receive notification of the candidate and approve them
|
| 4. A call happens
|
| Do you have any idea around what sort of time lag would be
| inherent in each step? Do you expect steps 1-4 to happen within a
| half-hour window and thus be mostly instantaneous as far as phone
| interactions go or could it go longer?
|
| If you expect a quick response then I don't know if your rates
| are high enough to keep people actively watching the question
| board instead of checking in a few times a day - if not then I
| think the usability of the product may suffer since scheduling
| the call could become problematic. If I have a meeting in an hour
| should I bother trying to set up this call or do I need to wait
| until I have several free consecutive hours?
| mcadenhe wrote:
| Ideally you'd post a question and get a ping within the first
| few minutes. But there is a 1 hour max window for any question
| to receive a ping. Once the ping comes through, if you decide
| to accept it, then the dev has 60 seconds to answer the call.
|
| As it stands, there isn't much supply of questions or devs to
| answer them (just launched today with no early signups). I was
| thinking one way to get around this would be to let devs
| subscribe to email or text notifications when a questions is
| posted with a specific tag.
| munk-a wrote:
| A diverse notification setup seems wise - otherwise yea, I
| think solving the balancing problem is going to be an ongoing
| struggle. The one hour limit sounds pretty wise!
| ufmace wrote:
| Site is down right now. I'm wondering if there's any mechanism to
| verify the developer you're paying for help. If I'm going to be
| paying, how do I know this person is actually knowledgable about
| my problem domain and good at troubleshooting?
|
| On the helper's side, since it's by the minute, it's not much
| risk if the person is completely over their head and beyond any
| reasonable help, you're still getting paid while you try to
| figure that out. Except that the pay is somewhat low versus the
| going rates for consulting work in the western world.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| Would think a feature would be rating from confirmed payments
| by other users but that can be gamed too.
| np_tedious wrote:
| Stack Overflow rep/profile is probably a decent start
| exabrial wrote:
| Interestingly today, I was posting an answer, and I added some
| polite wordage to the bottom of what was a fairly dry post to
| offer the [clearly new] user some encouragement. I'm also a
| committer/developer on the project in question.
|
| I was edited several times by non-contributors removing my desire
| to be polite. What bothers me is that these words are being
| attributed to me without my usual polite demeanor.
|
| StackOverflow was pretty awesome at one point in time, but I'm
| not providing free answers on the site anymore.
| kjhughes wrote:
| You'll need some mechanism to raise rates to attract top
| developers.
|
| Even without the first free minute and time spent reading
| questions, the most a dev could hope to earn with this service is
| ($0.75/min)(60 min/hr) = $45/hr. Perhaps for students or devs who
| barely meet the 100 rep minimum requirement, that might be
| attractive, but for the experts who've written the best Stack
| Overflow answers, that's likely to be a (small) fraction of their
| bill rate.
|
| Free contribution is rewarding as a means of helping.
|
| Well-paid contribution is rewarding for the $$$.
|
| Poorly paid contribution often loses both incentives.
| dheera wrote:
| What if there were really good devs on StackOverflow in
| developing economies that were willing to take on $45/hr
| consulting because their day job pays them $20/hr?
|
| Just because Silicon Valley developers want $300/hr doesn't
| mean the whole world regards that as a standard.
| vsareto wrote:
| Agreed, plus the day to day answering developer questions is
| going to be a little more tame than if you were in a job
| constantly putting out fires or maintaining a tight and
| stressful schedule
| tyingq wrote:
| Seems like there's a good incentive not for the best
| developers, but for the most patient ones. Since patience in
| this case means more paid minutes.
| blackrock wrote:
| $45/hour is a good rate for Ukrainian developers, I think. Or
| Philippines developers.
|
| That's about USD $90,000/year.
|
| This is good money, if you live remotely in a lower cost of
| living, foreign country. But it's a mediocre salary in the
| United States. You can barely pay your expensive rent with
| $90k/year. Actually, you'd be at poverty level. And there is
| zero possibility of affording a house with this salary. But you
| might be able to eke by if you live in the less competitive
| Midwest.
| dstick wrote:
| The only issue is billable hours - will these be 100%? If the
| platform has that liquidity, then yes - if not, chasing
| assignments and lowering prices leads to a race to the
| bottom.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The poverty line for a family of 4 is $26,500 USD. [0] Median
| full time income in the USA is $35,977. [1]
|
| 90,000 is well away from poverty.
|
| [0] https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_Unit
| ed_....
| jcun4128 wrote:
| 4 people? That's nuts I was making that washing plates as a
| single person no dependents. I think maybe less actually
| after taxes.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| You were probably making that in California though, not
| WV or SC. Houses are less than a year of developer pay
| there.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| I was in KS and I was just paid "highly" eg. $12+/hr
| although I was multi-role
|
| edit: maybe less was making $11-12/hr and not full time,
| my math was off. I was freelancing on the side though
| before I got into the industry but yeah $20K range was my
| figure at that time eg. just over 3 years ago(it did
| suck, I was mad broke).
| hujo wrote:
| I'm sorry, but this is an absurd statement. You can live very
| comfortably the vast majority of places in the US on $90,000.
| If you can't you're in one of the most expensive cities, pay
| a huge amount of debt servicing, or simply have unreasonable
| standards of what you think "necessities" are.
| seabird wrote:
| Wow, sometimes this site really needs to exit the
| stratosphere and come back down to earth. I live in the
| Midwest and you can comfortably pay a mortgage on a sizable
| house, all utilities, all necessities, and still have a
| shitload left over to play with on a salary like that. By no
| means do you have to "eke by."
|
| I think the issue is a lot less that the Midwest is less
| competitive and a lot more that the cost of living in a West
| Coast tech bubble is exorbitant.
| drran wrote:
| $45/hour can be $0 per year on SO. Adjust your expectations.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| And to filter out who can answer questions.
|
| 45$/h will attract a LOT of attention online. And not from the
| folks who should be answering questions. Just look at what
| happened with Hacktoberfest [0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658052
| crazypython wrote:
| Exactly. My usual hourly rate is a minimum of $70/hour. (I only
| recently became a freelancer, and am still learning to maximize
| my rates- I suspect my current rate is a small fraction of what
| I could earn.) The only thing this provides for me is a more
| liquid/elastic way to earn money.
|
| I can and do regularly solve problems that save people hundreds
| of hours. I would gladly pay to have someone solve my technical
| challenges that cost me hundreds of hours.
|
| (I am an expert in Python and a deep Generalist with experience
| across many domains and types of software.)
| kop316 wrote:
| I would also argue that possibly doing it per time may be the
| wrong incentives.
|
| I have had issues that took me several hours to try to debug,
| only to have someone else show me how to fix it in under 2
| minutes. So that dev gets paid $1, but I would easily pay much
| more for the fix in that issue because of how much time I sunk
| in it.
| mlyle wrote:
| Like the old saw goes:
|
| The Graybeard engineer retired and a few weeks later the Big
| Machine broke down, which was essential to the company's
| revenue. The Manager couldn't get the machine to work again
| so the company called in Graybeard as an independent
| consultant.
|
| Graybeard agrees. He walks into the factory, takes a look at
| the Big Machine, grabs a sledge hammer, and whacks the
| machine once whereupon the machine starts right up. Graybeard
| leaves and the company is making money again.
|
| The next day Manager receives a bill from Graybeard for
| $5,000. Manager is furious at the price and refuses to pay.
| Graybeard assures him that it's a fair price. Manager retorts
| that if it's a fair price Graybeard won't mind itemizing the
| bill. Graybeard agrees that this is a fair request and
| complies.
|
| The new, itemized bill reads....
|
| Hammer: $5
|
| Knowing where to hit the machine with hammer: $4995
| slt2021 wrote:
| you know that some developers intentionally add "time bomb"
| bugs and introduce bugs that trigger after certain period
| of time - just so that they knock it off with the hammer in
| one minute an justify their "maintenance support" contract.
|
| there was a story about one european company and an Excel
| spreadsheet with VBA code that would stop working after 3
| months and a developer who would "unlock" it for another 3
| mo if he has a maintenance contract
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Well, don't get caught then I guess.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/contractor-
| admit...
|
| > On Monday, David A. Tinley, a 62-year-old from Harrison
| City, Pennsylvania, was sentenced to six months in prison
| and a fine of $7,500 in the scheme.
| erhk wrote:
| You sound like the manager in that story looking for a
| way to mark down the fee
| judge2020 wrote:
| The original PaaS!
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Except you have to bring your own platform too! BYOPaaS?
| [deleted]
| mcadenhe wrote:
| I liked what another commenter said about adding tiers for devs
| with higher S/O rep. So if the dev has a higher rep, they can
| make more $ per minute. Something I'll look into adding.
|
| I don't think anyone is going to make much money off of it
| starting out since I don't have a large supply of questions
| coming in yet, but there are a lot of underemployed devs out
| there who would be happy to make an easy $15 bucks an hour just
| googling answers for people and telling them what to do.
|
| I think a lot of poorly-received questions on S/O are the
| result of people not knowing where to look for their answer, or
| being intimidated by reading the docs or source code. So they
| post the questions hoping someone can guide them.
|
| Call a Dev isn't a competitor to S/O. S/O is a wiki. Call a Dev
| is basically Clippy in human form that you pay per minute.
| Solvitieg wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree.
|
| Stackoverflow pays $0/h and attracts great answers and OSS pays
| $0/h and attracts great developers.
| debaserab2 wrote:
| > Stackoverflow pays $0/h and attracts great answers
|
| Eh...
| armadsen wrote:
| Yep, and I happily spend a fair amount of my free time
| working on open source, as well as personal projects that I
| don't make any money from. I'm also currently helping a
| friend of mine learn to code just for fun and to give back.
| But when I do contract work, I expect to be paid well. If you
| said, "well, I'll pay you $10 / hour, and that's way better
| than what you get for this open source you work on!", I'd not
| only not do the job, I'd be insulted.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Covered
|
| > Free contribution is rewarding as a means of helping
| GVIrish wrote:
| This is true, but it illustrates a key dynamic. For most
| people, as soon as you put a dollar value on a task that
| someone may have done for free or for fun, you have now
| fundamentally changed that relationship.
|
| If someone is doing something for only the intrinsic
| motivation, putting a dollar value on it changes it to an
| economic calculation. The person may still do it for money,
| but they're more likely to only do a level of effort
| commensurate to the economic reward. Whereas if they're doing
| things for intrinsic reasons they may be willing to do _more_
| work.
|
| There are a couple of behavioral economics experiments that
| bear this out. The Soma Experiment from the 70's gave
| participants a puzzle game to solve, and measured how long
| they tried to solve it. One group of participants was paid
| for their time, the other wasn't. The paid group on average
| spent less time trying to solve the puzzle than the group
| that wasn't paid. There are a couple of other experiments in
| that vein, but the common thread is that intrinsic motivation
| can be more powerful than economic rewards in multiple
| contexts.
|
| So someone might be willing to contribute some code to OSS
| for free, but if you ask them to develop some code for $30/hr
| they might pass.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| > Free contribution is rewarding as a means of helping.
|
| > Well-paid contribution is rewarding for the $$$.
|
| This is crucial. Changing incentives changes the social
| contract and relationship and does that irrevocably.
|
| I recommend Dan Ariely's book Amazing Decisions on this topic.
|
| Example: You don't pay for the thanksgiving turkey dinner at
| your inlaws' and if you did that's be rude no matter the
| amount.
|
| If you give your neighbor some fruit from the tree in your yard
| that's one kind of relationship. If next year you try to sell
| it that's a very different one. Transitioning from one to the
| other is significant.
|
| Lastly, financial incentives kill generosity. The giver now
| starts to worry if they're providing too high of a value.
| etothepii wrote:
| A girlfriend's mother once asked to pay me after fixing her
| computer.
|
| I said a bottle of wine will be fine. (I'd just turned 18)
|
| She said no I insist.
|
| I said well my rate is PS100 an hour and it took three hours.
|
| She chose to give me a bottle of wine.
| erhk wrote:
| Is 18 the drinking age in this story?
| pugz wrote:
| Given the currency (PS), I suspect so.
| xtracto wrote:
| I love it, and I think $45 USD an hour is great (it comes to
| $7,200 USD a month) which is great for the part of the world I am
| in.
|
| My worry is about the payout, which apparently requires Stripe.
| Personally I would be happy to receive payment in some crypto
| (even a stablecoin), or Paypal. But having to setup a stripe
| account seems overkill for me.
| nichch wrote:
| Interesting. I always envisioned a site where more experienced
| devs could help out newer ones with mock interviews or coding
| prompts to help quantify self taught coding skills.
|
| I just realized services like this would probably fit the bill if
| they also offered code reviews.
| _lemur wrote:
| Many comments highlight the issue of verifying developers. Did
| you think of leveraging Github Sponsor program?. Developers can
| be verified via github profile and paid through the same
| platform.
|
| [1]: https://docs.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-
| source...
| mcadenhe wrote:
| Right now devs are verified through S/O and it seems to fit the
| bill nicely because then you can vet the person's history of
| answering questions.
| kodah wrote:
| $1/min seems like a very arbitrary threshold. That means, that
| you as a developer, need to be making no more than $60/hr for
| your expertise. Following Indeeds hourly to salary conversion
| that means that if you make over $124,800/yr then you are
| actively losing value for each minute you spend in this
| ecosystem.
|
| That may be as intended. In certain states you may never make
| more than that, in others you may (almost) always make more than
| that.
| A12-B wrote:
| Who is making 125k p/y that needs a second job??
| kodah wrote:
| In a high cost of living area that would most certainly be
| the case. Usually these devs will get room mates and do other
| cost cutting activity to compensate but I imagine they'd be
| the ones most economically drawn to this solution other than
| other underpaid parts of the world.
| Closi wrote:
| Considering the questions tab currently includes "What the fuck
| is this?" and "Why is my butt full of poop?" I am going to assume
| they will turn off anonymous posting soon.
| notyourday wrote:
| Answering questions for money even at $1/min is fine _if_ the
| payouts work like clock work. I 'm not seeing anything that
| indicates to me how that part works. That's the only USP. The
| rest is just another non-liquid information market
| ricardobayes wrote:
| What a great idea. My advice to the OP is to get a few questions
| going. I made a similar site for remote work ads but I only had
| like 2-3 ads on it, expecting the users to fill it up. Well
| pretty much the initial feedback was that users felt it was a
| pre-launch/scam site because there was nothing on it. Look up how
| reddit was started. It took a long time even for them before
| actual users started to post.
| xwdv wrote:
| This is a profoundly inefficient way to make money. Since you
| can't really serve multiple people simultaneously there's no
| opportunity to apply leverage to your work, every dollar you earn
| has to be 1 to 1 effort, and because the rates are so low very
| few skilled devs will spend focused time on this.
|
| You must raise the rates.
| fabian2k wrote:
| I'd guess that the people at Stack Overflow might have an issue
| with someone using their name in this way. It should probably be
| clearer that this is entirely unaffiliated.
|
| 100+ reputation on SO is also a ridiculously low bar, it's almost
| meaningless. Not that any amount of reputation by itself is a
| sure indicator, but 100 really doesn't mean anything at all.
|
| This kind of site also requires a pretty large critical mass to
| work, you don't just want a bunch of random SO users willing to
| participate, but you need the right users with experience in the
| right tags to match to the requests in a reasonable timeframe.
|
| There's a good reason Stack Overflow doesn't allow people to pay
| for answers, people already cheat enough for meaningless internet
| points, this will get much worse with real money on the line.
| erhk wrote:
| You can get 100 rep on stack overflow by getting high rep in
| any other stack exchange site. By knowing a lot about tabletop
| games I could sign up.
| hiimtroymclure wrote:
| I am a junior dev with ~400 reputation. Trust me you dont want
| my help lol!
| notretarded wrote:
| Most of the higher rated accounts have their cred built up from
| asking good questions rather than good answers.
| avipars wrote:
| You need a way to report posts ...
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