Hire a Developer, Watch Them Work In Real-Time

New submitter alphamore writes: Live Coding, which is like Twitch for developers, has added a service that allows viewers to actually hire someone they've been watching. The aptly named 'Hire a streamer' service works exactly as it sounds. Via the profile of a developer you've seen coding on the site, a 'hire me' button lets you request their time. The service is completely opt-in for developers, so not everyone will be for-hire. When you click on the 'hire me' button, you'll be met with a list of disciplines that developer is familiar with, and their hourly rate. Once you've booked a session, the money is held in escrow (transactions happen via the site) until the developer has completed the work.

Comments

Sounds stupid

[Psychotria]

When I'm coding I might spend 30 minutes thinking about something or scribbling on paper and then spend maybe 2 minutes actually typing the code. Those are just fictitious numbers of course, but really both of those numbers could be much higher or much lower depending on the problem.

How does this service account for thinking time?

Re:Sounds stupid

[Psychotria]

I should say that I am no longer working as a software developer because I needed a change and got another degree and now work in a science field, but the same thing still applies and programming is still part of my job.

I could spend 8 hours writing crappy code, iterating over it, changing it, tweaking it, etc, etc, throughout a typical work day. But, and I'm pretty confident in this, I can (and do) instead spend maybe 25-75% of my day (or more) thinking about things -- designing things -- before implementing them and end up with a better result. I've had jobs where lines of code, or in some cases, words per minute typed, were a metric and left them as soon as I found a job based on reality instead of fiction.

Re:Sounds stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Those aren't developer jobs, they're programmer jobs. You know, the kind of jobs that are often hidden behind "implementation left as an exercise to the reader". The kind of problem that you have to think about does not concern programmers. Their job is to apply the tools to translate a specification into a program.

And fuck these people for giving employers the idea that "computer people" should be watched and paid piece-rate like a factory worker. To the employers: If you pay be LOC and hours worked on a problem, then that's what you get: Lots of code that takes a long time to write.

My opinion about all this

[CustomSolvers2]

This is the second article about Live Coding here; in fact, I wrote a comment to the previous article. Back then, I said that the idea seemed interesting and was about to test it for self-promotional purposes. Finally, the experience turned to be HORRIBLE.

I was expecting it to be a business run by/addressed to programmers, genuinely interested in promoting programming; an assumption which was quickly proven wrong. Although I never felt any kind of interest in watching someone writing code, I believed ideas on the lines of "newbies find it very helpful".

This experiment didn’t last for too long and that's why I am not completely sure about the target audience. In any case, I met quite a few completely-clueless people not knowing anything about the given programming language, even about programming in general; asking random things and pointing out irrelevant problems. There were also cheerleaders, trying to trigger participation in the less-appealing-to-me way possible (e.g., talking about random things without caring about the code being written at all). There were also some people interested in knowing what was going on, but they were a minority.

As far as my intention was just taking this as an excuse to have videos where I was coding (like a picture of mine: a complement to my online references), I didn't mind too much the aforementioned issues. The worst part was the site itself (and their staff). They are certainly not programmers, but want to manage the whole thing their way. The result? I found the overall service/site very unappealing at different level (support, features, control on your videos, etc.). Imagine that Slashdot is being completely managed by Dice people (including moderation)!

My recommendation to any programmer planning to go down that road (mainly with Live Coding): this is not a site/concept managed by programmers. Accept this point and you might even enjoy the experience (so many people, so many minds).

Coder all day long? I wish.

[vmfedor]

Okay, sure, you can watch a coder in real time, but most of the time people don't need a coder, they need a developer. A developer has project management and other "soft" skills. Coding is the hammer and the nails... you have to know what you're creating before you start to build it. Most of the time you would see the developer typing up emails, creating diagrams and flow charts, writing executive summaries, managing their agile tracker, consulting on a conference call, researching documentation, etc.

I'm so tired of people thinking that software engineering is about coding. It isn't about coding, it's about developing real-world technical solutions of which coding is a relatively small part.