Slashdot Mirror
Crowdsourcing Software Development to the Masses
Lucas123 writes "Computer World is running a piece on Crowdsourcing. That's a catchy term for the practice of taking a job traditionally performed by employees or a contracted company and outsourcing it to an undefined, large group of people in the form of an open call on the Web. Article author Mary Brandel views it as a viable way to develop cheap but innovative software. Sites like TopCoder and their coding competitions are becoming more popular with big name companies like Constellation Energy because programmers who take on the job are global, offering many different perspectives on any one job. 'The creativity and innovation of how people are rationalizing these designs and building components enables us to interject a perspective and approach that normally we wouldn't have access to,' Constellation's director of IT said." Is there any potential here, or is this just a buzzword bad idea?
All of "open" and reward based programming schemes are merely ways to avoid hiring programmers. "Let's find someone to do it for free." Only morons would do it.
This is my sig.
TopCoder has nothing to do with people accomplishing work. It's a competition, nothing more.
I bet this will be about as successful as my last idea, cokesourcing. I'd open my garage door in the morning and there would be piles of cocaine for anyone to walk up and snort in huge mounds. While they were there I merely encouraged them to add some code on the computers sitting in my garage.
I've never seen so many confusing drug related delusions put into comments! Luckily the comments made for a great book and that was how I, L. Ron Hubbard began Scientology!
While this definitely isn't new it's always a good thing to get another pair of eyes on code. Turning it into a competition has the tendency to trick programmers into doing better or working harder with a (sometimes false) sense of personal gain.
Excuse me while I gather the virgin sacrifice and assemble the pentagram required to solve your problem
So their argument is that everything in the field of software engineering is useless so lets just hire a bunch of people off the street? I cant wait until the time comes around to do some maintenance on that software, I'll be laughing.
Whatever kind of software we are talking about, you'll most likely get a horrid UI and the resulting usability headaches.
On one hand, you get design by committee. A UI that is not great, but just didn't offend anyone, the software equivalent of a meal at Olive Garden. Many MSFT apps have a designed by committee feel.
On the other hand you get no real UI conventions so various parts of the application look like what they are: a patchwork. Some F/OSS software has this type of design shortfall.
Sounds like a less focused version of an open source project. F/OSS embraces a certain ideal. I don't know if providing a free service for a for-profit corporation falls under that idea.
blah blah blah
"Crowdsourcing" usually means getting people to do stuff for you for free, where you own the results and the people who created them cannot use them except by paying you (if at all). This is why people should be sure that projects they contribute to as volunteers release their results under some kind of Free license. For example, contributions to Wikipedia are free-licensed, and even if Wikipedia died or turned ultra-evil tomorrow, you could use the articles yourself under the GFDL, or set up a fork based on them. The same is true of contributions to MusicBrainz (Open Audio License), among other such projects.
For a good early example of the opposite, recall the CDDB fiasco---lots of people submitting data that ends up owned by someone who won't let you use it except under onerous licensing terms. The rise of "Web 2.0" has basically taken CDDB-style business models and made them much more common, so it's important to make sure you aren't enabling that sort of thing that in the long term ends up working directly against your interests.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
So, the company describing this task had their architects divide the "project" into a hundred or so pieces to be worked on separately. Then, the best designs, submitted confidentially, get picked and used the company, with some "royalties" getting paid out. The company developers combine the best of these components into the finished product...
Something just doesn't seem right here... MobSourcing, RiotCoding, I mean CrowdSourcing. Seems like a good way to get all sorts of stolen code, easter eggs, and pretty much crappy code into your codebase.
Jeesh - Doesn't anyone read the classics anymore? It's only been available for over 130 years...
Anyone who can turn this into Crysis 2 by noon tomorrow gets a lolipop and a free In Soviet Russia joke
DEF width = 1280
DEF height = 800
OPENCONSOLE
IF CREATESCREEN(width,height,16) 0
MESSAGEBOX NULL,"Failed to create DirectX screen","Error"
END
ENDIF
FILLSCREEN RGB(255,255,255)
sx = 0.1f
sy = 0.2f
speed = 1
It's a cute idea when you're deep in Twainspace and the master is firmly in control of reality, but it's quite another thing in the real world. Does anyone know anyone who's managed to get others to paint their fence, either literally or figuratively? I think it's a rare thing and it almost happens more by accident than by design. Yes, some places like Slashdot have managed to build a public gathering spot and sell some ads around it, but it's quite another to get this crowd to do real, coordinated work. Then, I contend, you might as well hire people and pay them because it will take even more work to herd the crowd of cats.
Is this significantly different than sites like www.experts-exchange.com which allow you to buy and sell solutions/code snippets?
The article makes two points that, put together, concern me - "If an InnoCentive participant's idea is selected, he can be rewarded up to $100,000 for it."
and
"Who's to say that a company that doesn't pick your solution as the 'winner' won't nevertheless take your idea and run with it anyway? InnoCentive handles this by requiring all participants to sign an agreement protecting confidential information, and it prevents third parties from seeing and stealing others' ideas by allowing only the organization that posted the problem to see proposed solutions."
This may prevent a third-party from stealing your idea, but it does not address the issue of the company posting the problem from stealing your work. If a company wants to, what's to keep them from saying that no one's code was good enough to win the $100K, then using some, or even all, of the ideas submitted anyway. It's not like you get to look at the code for the final product to make sure your (unpaid) work has not been used.
Never let reality temper imagination
Never let reality temper imagination
Where does 'innovative' come in? Is somebody going to look at their tiny part of the code and go "wooo we should use fuzzy logic, here!" ??
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Building new things is great and all but any sane software engineer will understand that maintaining the software is a much harder and more complex problem than building the first version. Even if you pick the best built components, at some point later your customers are going to want a new feature or want a broken feature fixed. I don't think you can simply hold a competition to figure out who can submit the best maintenance job. Additionally, once the competitors submit their entries, they have no further obligation to work for you. So you've essentially lost the most important assets (the people that wrote the stuff) on the day you receive the finished the work. You could always have your own people maintain it but they will be much more costly than had you kept the original authors who do not need to re-learn the code.
You have to love how good intentions are often taken advantage of by the money hungry. It just irritates me.
That's a catchy term for the practice of taking a job traditionally performed by employees or a contracted company and outsourcing it to an undefined, large group of people in the form of an open call on the Web
You mean like a few days ago when a story submitter commanded us "slashdotters" to go rifling through Microsoft's OOXML documents for them so, that IBM and friends wouldn't have to pay staffers/paralegals/lawyers to do so?
Please help metamoderate.
I put a job on Rent-A-Coder once. The job was to take an existing GPL piece of Python code that understood how to query some, but not all, of the various registrar WHOIS servers, and make it understand the output from each of them. The existing code was years out of date, but did approximately the right thing. Each registrar has a slightly different format for the same WHOIS data, so you need a collection of parsing modules, or something smart enough to do it generically. It's not a difficult problem, just time-consuming.
The code, and a test file of 1000 test domains, was provided. The statement of the problem said that all the test cases had to work. The resulting code would be re-released under the GPL.
Four programmers in succession took that job, with bids from $200 to $500 and locations from Ireland to Russia, and none of them produced any working code.
Crowdsourcing can work if enough people participate. The laws of probability take over from there. What drives the success and stability of this counterintuitive approach is The Law of Large Numbers and some of the Central Limit Theorem. Basically, with enough random contributions, the counterproductive/arbitrary elements tend to cancel and the coherent parts add up over time. Ironically, this is probably why democracy tends to be a reasonably stable form of government. From a business's point of view, it is great because you essentially get free labor. However, the drawback is that if you don't have enough people participating, you essentially get white noise as your output subject to large fluctuations. You will also have to be patient before you hit the right critical threshold of users to get projects done on any meaningful time scale. Software projects have different needs but, using Wikipedia as a working example, this means you need roughly a hundreds of thousands of rabid, active users to achieve modest stability over several years. In other words, SourceForge. You may needs something on the scale of the open source movement itself for it to work in software.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
There's a similar movement afoot in advertising that goes by the equally dumb buzzword of "Consumer (or User) Generated Content". Under the guise of advertising that's more "in touch" with consumers, agencies are letting the public create their campaigns for them. Be it ketchup or Doritos or whatever, the result is usually only "in touch" with the person who made the poorly produced, half-baked idea, and then it's ability to resonate falls of sharply beyond that.
You know what?
....until you get one crap piece of code that goes into an infinite loop on bad input or just some odd input and kills the whole shit. Unless you've written a good set of unit cases, and if you did you'd probably easily write the code yourself with that level of understanding. Reviewing code is IMO a very time-consuming and difficult skill, and putting good people to review bad code to look for the best is usually a waste of time. Either they will skip the checking, or they're skilled enough to write it themselves and on better time. Though I suppose it's better than putting bad people at reviewing, which is the deaf leading the blind. Honestly, would you like a product that's put together by a hundred different indian code shops, only somewhat worse?
What every software company wants is predictability - they want to know if you typically turn out good code or poor code, then they can review accordingly. And by that I don't mean nothing, everyone has a bad day and everyone makes mistakes, but if it's the new intern you know it needs much more review. There's no way they could be just as thorough on all parts and still deliver this century. Crowdsourcing sounds to me like a lemon market, where you'd want reliable contributors rather than the fly-by-night lemon sellers. That's exactly the opposite, where you go into long-term relationships and both side want long-time commitments rather than this micromanagement.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
When I first saw the words "Crowdsourcing Software Development" it reminded me of the coding practices of the Federal Government in Snow Crash, where Y.T.'s mother worked on a tiny piece of code with no idea of what she was actually contributing to. Basically the coders would each handle one function and know nothing of the whole. Entire departments probably wouldn't even know what they were working on as the contracts were huge and the projects enormous. It was a cool concept (actually that whole chapter on Y.T.'s mom was a great read), just hope it never pans out.
This article seems nothing like that though... just a short stream of consciousness.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Crowdsourcing?
You mean..
Open source?
Difference?
Hey I know, let's make up buzzwords for things that already have them. Yes, that's going to help.... I say we brick this idea.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
The problem with crowdsourcing is that the crowd might not trust you, especially after being burned. Consider the "CDDB" database, which allows computers to identify the music CD that's currently sitting in the drive by building a hash of its contents and searching for that in an online database on the Internet. If it wasn't there, you could enter the data yourself, and then the next person to put the same disc in their computer would enjoy a track list that you composed. It was great, it worked, and it was a great example of crowdsourcing ... but why are there others now, such as FreeDB? Because the folks holding the database just up and decided one day to make it proprietary. They renamed it to GraceNote and declared that anyone who wants to make use of the CDDB now has to pay for a license.
Naturally, the free world moved on and started FreeDB in its place, but the message here is: if you're going to crowdsource, don't stab your crowd in the back after you get what you want from them.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Actually, they sell electricity to Constellation
It's deregulation. All utilities were basically "split" into generation and delivery. Generation owns the generators, and delivery is the wires and the customer base. The generation people sell their power to the grid - which there is the PJM power pool, and in turn the delivery side buys, for spot needs, from the grid at what's called location marginal price. The LMP is a calculated thing, it is designed to be a public price so that its transparent to all players.
What happens though, particularly in the east coast, is that, thanks to NIMBY, there's simply not enough electricity being generated for this to work. Particularly in Maryland, no one wants to build enough generation, and so, Constellation goes and buys the electricity from somewhere else across the country. Right now, this is commonly in Texas, because Texas seems to have no problem with building big coal plants, and so Texas makes a lot of money exporting electricity to the rest of the country.
So yes, Constellation is, in a sense, buying electricity from itself, but, it also has to pay a ton of middle men along the way, from ISO operators, energy traders, and even the rights to move transmission between ISOs.
The moral of the story is, if you want the cheapest possible electrity and best possible service, support legislation to recombine generation and transmission entities of various utilities, then, support the eminent domain and deregulation needed to allow these reconstituted utilities to construct enough coal plants to meet demand. If you want windmills, rats on treadmills, or other environmentally friendly generation, then be prepared to pay a premium on it.
This is my sig.
Why pay for something when you can get it for free (even if you're only paying pennies on the dollar by outsourcing)? Comedy clubs have used this model for years with "Open Mike" nights, and media outlets have their unpaid "interns".
There is an endless supply of desperate, talented people who will do anything for free in the hope that their gifts will get them noticed by an employer. Employers, of course, are quick to exploit this reservoir of free talent without mercy or restraint.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
You wouldn't crowdsource any other engineering task, so why software?
Sometimes it's not just a buzzword, it's also a bad idea.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
Seems to me that doing this sort of thing could, assuming minimal checking of the results, open one's code up to widespread abuse in the form of 'back doors' or 'logic bombs' that anyone not pleased with the idea (say, programmers unhappy with the entire outsourcing/offshoring pattern) could manage to slip in.
As others have (accurately) pointed out, this is also little more than a way to be lazy about doing a job, and not caring if it's done right as long as your company gets paid for it. What benefit do those actually writing your code get for their efforts?
There are right ways and wrong ways to go about doing any task. This strikes me as just plain wrong. I certainly wouldn't want to do any project I come up with this way. It would be like Boeing throwing open their design process to the world, and saying "OK, you design our next plane for us, but we get to use any idea you come up with and not pay you." Ludicrous, hmmm?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Hi,
This is my first post on Slashdot but I had to answer this one.
Actually, I'm quite amazed that the guys behind TopCoder manages to run a company on the concept of a permanent competition. I am myself in the business of "crowd-sourcing" development on the web since 3 years. I cofounded a company named The Coding Machine (http://www.thecodingmachine.com/) and when we founded it, the first model that we thought about was the model applied by TopCoder.
But we went on a different model. The rational behind it is that we wanted to build a community of developers rather than having a "crowd" of developers competing against each other. Competition is right to a certain point, but having a relationship based on trust with a developer is much more important to me. You cannot expect people to keep competing forever. A constant competition can be fun for some time, but as a developer, I would certainly not do that for a living.
On the other hand, if as a developer, I know a project manager that trusts me because I delivered good work, and that is ready to take me in priority for other developments, I will come back. Building trust and making a true community is certainly complex, but is in the end much more powerful than crowdsourcing.
So this is what I try to do every day at The Coding Machine. After 3 years, we have a few strong relationships with about twenty developers, but we value them much more than a crowd of a thousand developers.
But anyway, I'll be interested in following TopCoder to see if their business model keeps working after a few years.
Would be interesting if there is a massive bug found and half the team was unavailable at there real jobs and could not find time to design a possible fix.
I guess this "open source model" could never be used for a serious application which required rapid response work if a bug was found.
Sorry, had to be done.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Er, I think it was Tom Sawyer. Huck Finn was too busy traveling down the Mississippi... which he threw a silver dollar across before becoming president.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Um, where are they? And what planet do you live on?
This scam is so 19th Century! Read chapter eleven of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
because programmers who take on the job are global, offering many different perspectives on any one job.
This is PHB speak for "cheap foreign labor". I recognize phrases similar to this from pro-H1B (visa-worker) business lobbyist websites. "Many different perspectives" is just fluffy "global community" talk to hide the real i$$ue.
Table-ized A.I.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
See it everywhere. .com with all the tech outsourced. Apparently if you kiss enough asses and make enough powerpoints you start to believe that that's what makes shit happen. The leaches go from one very important golf game to the next while the engineers are busy making shit and rolling their eyes at the douchebaggery. Engineers make the world go round. The eyerolling I mean, something about angular velocity or some shit. Kind of slept through physics class. I was a business major at the time, didn't think it was very practical.
Overstock.com Divulges Secret To Its Cyber Monday Success
Their secret? They hired engineers. I shit you not, they were a
It's an incredible waste of resources. Creative ideas and approaches to a problem are a dime a dozen and therefor dirt cheap. Management gurus don't like to consider this because that's all they do. The implementation is the hard/time consuming/expensive part. If I'm running the show, I make a request for proposals, pick the best one and then implement it once. Apparently MBAs like to stick the rest of us with the costs of duplicating labor.
This is yet another way to try to use the OSS community to write code for businesses. Most companies that try to just make money selling other people's code fail, only the true "community" ways of writing code manage to survive, think of Red Hat, they have Fedora and many other ways for the Community to help write the software without it becoming a "we need you to write a program to do X" it is the way that people can work at their own pace and do what they are good at which makes OSS programming so successful, sure some jobs get neglected because people don't like writing drivers and the like, but over time, it creates a better user experience because there are multiple developers with their own agendas, not simply "unpaid work" like "crowd-sourcing" is. Companies need to realize that unless there is some sort of accomplishment such as bragging rights, a better software for you to use, pay, or fame, people won't work on these projects, they need to realize that OSS developers are looking for something and aren't just people who decide "oh I have a free evening lets spend 12 hours coding tonight for some companies project without being paid" they need something and "crowd-sourcing" doesn't do that.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
You're making some assumptions that are incorrect. Firstly, you're assuming that everyone is there for the money. For many people, TopCoder provides a way to have "something" on their resume. Even if their competition history isn't glorious, it's nonetheless the best experience that many new graduates (or other young developers) will have to show (and for many bright students it also provides a flexible source of income). But even if a submission only passes the initial filtration steps, it's a demonstration of basic competence that many employers respect (TopCoder has been sponsored by Google/Microsoft/NSA/AOL/Deutsche Bank/many other AAA companies).
Secondly, suggesting that these people could easily get higher paying jobs is only sometimes true. Many competitors quit their "regular" job because they were making more at TopCoder per hour. This is especially true for competitors in areas where the average salary is lower, or where work befitting their skill level isn't available. Regardless of dollars per hour, doing work for TopCoder allows a tremendous amount of freedom in terms of when, where, and how much you work - and for many people those are important factors.
And I'm not saying it's a perfect setup, certainly not for everyone. I have never done much with the design/development competitions because the numbers don't work - for me - and honestly I'm not sure how well I'd do. But, for many people, it has proven to be a great fit.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Now that I think about it, DivXNetworks' OpenDivX project followed the same path. DivXNetworks shafted the developers by changing the license and removing the code from their Web site, so someone forked the project and later it was re-written as Xvid.
Random contributions are far more likely to break something than improve it. This is why the most successful projects have plenty of places where the appropriate bias is introduced. Take away those and coderot will quickly set in.
Graduates who partake in these competitions are probably too inexperienced to see that this way of getting experience ruins their and every other developer's chance of earning reasonable pay in the future. Getting lots of designs for the price of one plus overhead will lower company's willingness to pay for steady work, even if the process eventually fails due to maintenance issues.
Besides, assume the process does not fail. Why would businesses hire coders at all? Then it's the music industry business model: A few stars become filthy rich, many just get by and most can never make a buck despite working hard, but they keep trying because the reward for making it is so big. If that sounds fair to you, I can't help you.
If graduates want experience, they can always help out an open source project. Pay is the same, because they won't beat more experienced developers (or they wouldn't need the experience to get a job.) This way they can at least use the fruits of their own labor when they get a job.
Competitions are scams, just like internships these days. If you do the work, demand the pay. Grow a spine.
So...
catchy
adj., -ier, -iest.
1. Utterly moronic: a catchy term for the practice of outsourcing a job to an undefined, large group of people.
sic transit gloria mundi
Like every other crowdsourcing idea, it has potential but only if the tools were free and convenient as well... For eg. a web browser based IDE with an integrated design and test environment
Perhaps it time those old visual programming ideas were implemented on the internet....
This appears to be a "brillant" idea from some meathead MBA who thinks FOSS works by magic.
These are the same people who think that outsourcing IT is a good idea. I've seen it from both sides, and I have never seen an outsourcing arrangement (regardless of national boundaries) work well.
I'm not talking about bringing in contractors to help; generally, a good contractor will become as much a part of the team as the empoyees, just with different constraints. I'm talking about "Hey, Big Freaking Impersonal Company, I'll pay you less than it's costing me to {manage my servers, write my code, keep my network secure, etc.}"
The best you get is divided loyalty, over-conscientious techs working around the system to keep the users happy and lying to management on both sides. It can get much worse than that, when people are cynical enough, or just get exhausted and overloaded.
Yes, I am in that kind of situation right now.
I had forgotten how much cooler teenagers look when they are smoking. Oh, wait
Truly, if one has the masochistic desire to experience cringe-worthy job requirements, go to rentacoder. You too can develop code for $50 that would otherwise be worth thousands of dollars. A few years ago, I thought I would join and make some extra cash.. But it turned out to be an opportunity to troll assholes trying to get something for nothing.
.wav and convert it to a midi ring tone. Guy in India wants it done for $50-ish dollars. I've written something similar in Matlab, so I know how freaking non-trivial it is.
Some projects I recall off the top of my head:
-Write software that will take in a
- Create a solid state disk drive for somebody's extra RAM. Willing to pay $300. Har har. I, ahem, told them I could make a prototype for $50k, plus the cost of Xilinx tools.
I've done bits of consulting, and doing projects for small, clueless companies is by far the worst job you can do as an engineer. They are technically clueless, don't understand that engineering costs money and want it done yesterday. Rentacoder and its ilk only magnify these problems, because they troll for technical people who will work for relatively nothing.
Recently, I offered to hire myself out as an embedded systems engineer at $60 an hour, and that is pretty much whoring myself out compared to what other people charge for consulting, but the Indian dude who wanted to hire me only wanted to pay $20 an hour. F off.
All I can say is, if these site works for somebody, good for them. I have bigger fish to fry. It's quite hard for me to see how this attracts any real talented people.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
'tweren't Huck, 'twere Tom!
http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_tom.html
I am amazed at the cynicism of people here. Yes, the possibility exists of theft and deceit. But a group who offers a prize and then doesn't deliver when the requirements they lay out are met will not get more than one crowdsourcing campaign to work for them, a possible greater loss than the gain of stealing an idea they advertised a prize for.
Then, there are some problems that are a good idea to attract a crowd of potential problem-solvers into trying to solve. I for one am happy that there are more and more worthy challenges being defined with a prize at the end. Whether the prize be token compared to the effort involved, as in the X-Prize, or the prize be possibly substantial compared to the investment required, as in the Virgin Earth Challenge (devising a plan to reduce atmospheric CO2, prize $25 million), the competition style definitely can be an effective complement to the hire-only problem-solving approach. There is a huge number of problems that are important to solve (global warming and other ecological issues are mere drops in the ocean), and which will never be solved if only left to engineers-on-staff that are told to work on them. With some problems, it doesn't matter how smart your people are, or how much money you are throwing at it. You sometimes just don't know where the solution will come from.
In some cases, solving the problem, no matter how many man-hours 'lost', is the one and only goal, and the solution benefits all. How about winning a war? Or preventing famine? Or curing disease? I'm amazed no one seems to have pointed this out to counter the complaints. I wouldn't mind working on a grand challenge in my free time and be happy if it worked, and maybe got a prize. If I don't want to work on it, I don't, and no one fires me for it.
In short, cynics all line up at the "I don't want to shoot and I don't want to score" kiosk of life. Don't think for a second that those who make it big in business, society, science, etc, always see an immediate return on their investment of blood, sweat and soul. The ability to strive, and the willingness to try challenges that are unmet, and possibly undefined, is often what leads to growth in this increasingly brain-seeded civilization of ours.
Competitions looks like a good way to support Open Source projects. Of course the best way is to publish your own code - but if a company wants to do something more and support some OS project they can pay some of the project contributors - but this can destroy the motivation of the other contributors and pack it with politics. Making a competition can be a good way of supporting a project without distorting it's structure.
Does anyone else here who's a bit crap worry about these developments? If I wanted my code to be reviewed by someone who knew what they were doing, I wouldn't have a manager.
What y'all are saying is that RAC is a buyer's market. I agree.
I tried it once and survived. My trick was to use it as a resource for non-experts looking to break conceptual logjams. I went into it knowing not to expect a clone to Yahoo for $1000.
All I needed was to fix an irritating spacing problem on a little website of mine. I made a point of going against the grain of the site and "overpaid" on purpose. For $100, I got 2.5 solutions (depending on if I wanted to use tables or CSS plus some tutorial PDF's so I could have a clue about how to muck around with it all afterward.)
I figured it would be something like 2 hour's work for the "warm-shots" here, so at a random $50/hr "Journeyman coder rate", $100 became my fee. I would like to be known for paying close to sensible value for jobs I post.
I'd use the service again because I'm sure I'll come up against another silly problem that I'm just not able to crack open. That's why I'm not a designer.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
No democracy in the world can boast of a larger number of political parties than India. None. Take a look here. Ask anybody on the street if they are satisfied. Democracy is overrated.
It was Tom Sawyer :)
Huckleberry Finn was his friend.
There appear to be a lot of misconceptions about TopCoder and it's business model. I work as an architect for TopCoder and can honestly tell you that it's one of the best software development companies in the world. I've written a blog entry to clear up a lot of the misunderstandings that some people have. http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/visualbasic/dotnet/archives/about-topcoder-inc-21092