Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is There a 'Gig Economy' Site For Tech Skills?
"Where I can meet up with people who just need solutions implemented?" asks Slashdot reader datavirtue:
Somewhere people can go when they have a solution designed in-house with documented requirements and are in need of a competent engineer(s) to assist with implementation. Where timelines and price estimates and rates are well defined and enforced. If they like me, and agree to the terms, we can proceed with the project -- expecting solid deliveries at each milestone....
I have been on some gig projects where the relationship was well structured by a third party and it was a lot of fun. I know a lot of engineers who would use a system like this if it streamlines entering the freelance tech market for them. People who would rarely take gigs otherwise. I have looked around but the services feel dead. I have been approached by startups in the past wanting to sign me up their service...but they didn't really go anywhere.
The original submission complains that many projects end up going to consulting firms that just scrounge up candidates from job boards. But what's the alternative? "Am I missing some great online community or website that has already solved this?"
Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Is there a 'gig economy' site for tech skills?
I have been on some gig projects where the relationship was well structured by a third party and it was a lot of fun. I know a lot of engineers who would use a system like this if it streamlines entering the freelance tech market for them. People who would rarely take gigs otherwise. I have looked around but the services feel dead. I have been approached by startups in the past wanting to sign me up their service...but they didn't really go anywhere.
The original submission complains that many projects end up going to consulting firms that just scrounge up candidates from job boards. But what's the alternative? "Am I missing some great online community or website that has already solved this?"
Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Is there a 'gig economy' site for tech skills?
There have been many. What happens is they get flooded with people from 3rd world countries, willing to do the work for pennies an hour. If you want to work as a "gigger" for tech stuff, then you'll be competing against people from Vietnam willing to do the same fork for $1/hour.
I don't respond to AC's.
Somewhere people can go when they have a solution designed in-house with documented requirements and are in need of a competent engineer(s) to assist with implementation. Where timelines and price estimates and rates are well defined and enforced. If they like me, and agree to the terms, we can proceed with the project -- expecting solid deliveries at each milestone....
Have you tried Ask Slashdot? Could you give it a shot and report back on how it works out for you?
Doing cheap, poorly implemented projects without any thoughts of long term support do not benefit you, nor the community at large.
If those cheap people are competent, then it should work out fine, and the sites should flourish. It sounds like they all died. why?
I earn $2k - $3k a month working on jobs brokered via Upwork. This goes nicely with my main work I get locally. I've in the UK but work on projects in the US and India currently. I recommend it though you do have to be selective on who you work for. There are a lot kids looking for their homework to be done and others that are completely unrealistic on what budget is required for the job. Upwork charge 10% + $50 per customer which is reasonable I think especially as they guarantee payment.
wot no sig
The best gigs are found the old-fashioned way, word of mouth...
(1) Do I.T. for small/middle sized businesses on a freelance basis. This gets you connections to do more interesting jobs -- custom app development, databases, etc.
(2) Stay connected to a local university, either by taking classes or teaching as an adjunct. Lots of grad students who want to be the next best startup.
Al-Qaeda sleeper cells have gigs. In safe and secure America we all need a corporate master to trickle down the green toilet paper (aka "dollars"). Then we can buy our mandated insurance and earn the privilege of life. Sieg heil the homeland.
Are you looking to shoulder all he risks and management costs, and none of the benefits, security and strength of teaming up?
Because that's how you will get that!
In fact, via "There is always a dumber one...", which in this case would be people like you, WE will be forced to have that.
Thanks for working for the enemy though!
I think you just answered your own question.
If those cheap people are competent, then it should work out fine, and the sites should flourish. It sounds like they all died. why?
Because they're not competent. I have to farm out a certain portion of work to our Philippines office for certain cost savings, it hardly ever saves any time or money due to all of the rework. They can do very basic drafting work if you give them instructions so detailed that it would be faster to do it yourself, but asking them to do any sort of original design work and it's always disastrous.
I'm not sure what you're asking, but do you mean places like Freelancer (which ate up vWork, which used to be called Rent a Coder)?
If that's what you mean, I don't know many sites like that anymore, and the projects they post are just crap for some reason unknown to me. And you have to compete with 3rd world developers in cost (rather than quality) on those crappy projects too.
Best thing as far as I can tell is getting your recruiter to find you term-limited contracts that suit you.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
Um...because the more competent devs emigrated to countries where they could get better pay? These sorts of sites are a confluence of cheapskates, pretenders, and unrealistic expectations. That tends to go just about as well as you'd expect. If you go with the lowest bidder you deserve what you get.
The Visual Basic coder so stupid he can be mistaken for creimer? Better brush up on your janitorial skills, pal.
...when they have a solution designed in-house with documented requirements... ...Where timelines and price estimates and rates are well defined and enforced.
An issue is that for smaller gigs that would make use of such a service, the requirements are not known or at least not formally known enough to the point where an enforceable timeline could exist. In software development, the hard part is always figuring out what to do, the actual coding is usually easy. It is common to not really know what you need to do until you start doing it (figure it out as you go along). In fact the whole Agile methodology is based on merging requirements gathering with development in an iterative cycle, with an unknown number of cycles necessary to get to what is a "finished" product.
Because of this most companies that (competently) do solutions in house will have both the designers and the developers on staff, those that don't will hire consulting firms to manage the design and deliveyr processes. I doubt either would would want to grab random folks off a job board for temporary work.
Smaller businesses that don't have dedicated IT or consulting firms are unlikely to have the skills to write formal requirements.
I used a service called gigster. I did one job and it was very professional, and the client was very satisfied and I was paid well. Then I tried to take another bigger job that had already been started and was being worked on by others and it was a giant disorganized mess. So I would definitely use them again for any new jobs but never jumping in on a job that has already started again.
Not unless $.01/hour is your going rate. Look online and you'll see that you can pick up jobs to do writing code but you are competing with the world and India who will work for that little in order to get creds as well as a few dollars.
As for local work, try the temporary work businesses. They've been in business for over a hundred years, in case you haven't heard of these things and believe that welfare is the answer.
Because competent software engineer get soon submerged by the noise of "wannabe" software engineers that cannot deliver. So customers run away.
if p then q does not mean that id not p you can infer not q without more information.
Because many were fraud sites with fake projects, charging $5 a year or even per month to be registered there.
Requests to cancel 'subscriptions' got ignored, I had to involve my credit card company to get reimbursed.
I guess after enough such cases the CC companies put pressure enough on them to get them closed.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I've found that some of the skills are absorbed by bundled services for small businesses. For example my friend who is a masseuse is basically a 1 person business. In the past she might have had to hire multiple people for small jobs: A receptionist/admin assistant to book and confirm appointments , a web developer to manage her site, advertising/marketing person, and an accountant/cashier to handle the books. The problem is she should only need these jobs filled for a few hours a week maybe. So she uses Square software which basically takes care of all of those roles for her.
So on her website powered by Square you can look at her open schedule, book an appointment, and get text alerts when it is coming up. When you pay it is linked to your appt (whether you got a 30/60/90 massage) and whether you paid for a bundle of appts etc.
Technically she doesn't need to know anything about HTML or database integration or mobile APIs or billing . All of that is seamless to her and she can focus on massages and not on the many tiny things she would have had to do as a business.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Lots of unrealistic projects with terrible specifications meets barely literate lowest-bid outsourcing, what could possibly go right? I just looked through a few projects, it's not worth my time even trying to find a reasonable project proposal. And if there was one, would they find me in the pile of junk responses they get? No. And if you get ripped off one way or the other, you'll be stuck in a dispute resolution process on your own dime. Basically if you find someone qualified it's a huge advantage to just use them again. That's not a gig economy, that's a market for temp workers. The initial work should basically just be risk money to test them out before you offer a real contract. And in most cases I'd switch from a fixed price to hourly rate for any decent developer, unless the scope is very specific.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Have you considered just dressing in drag in the shady part of town with a sign hung around your neck saying "free lube provided?"
The more you support a gig economy the more you make businesses not want to hire people on a permanent basis... which reduces benefits and wages.
Gig ecnomy is for suckers.
... what you ask for doesn't even exist in established companies.
People are dumb, don't know what they want, don't appreciate it when you build it for them, and don't want to pay. This is almost universal.
Good luck with that
Yeah, that all sounds good, but how does it handle the billing when she jerks a guy off?
The same way your mom would. Oh, snap!
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
That is a slippery slope...
With the cost of lube nowadays that is not a good way to make money...
Set up your own company, create a website listing your past projects (presumably successful) and blog. Write magazine articles.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Only if you apply enough lube.
I tend to rant.
She's long dead and cremated.
No happy ending for you!
... oh and learn to do something other than just tech, it opens your perspective quite a bit, and allows you to understand problems much better (and vice-versa for non-techies!).
If you can be empathetic with your customers, they'll contact you for anything and everything, and have no problem paying your price, as long as you're reasonable and do quality work. Don't gouge, and understand that the costs you give them come off of their bottom line, same as yours if you need stuff done. Understand that, and so will they. Nobody works for free and small business owners generally respect that.
The odd greedy asshole here and there? Fuck 'em. Unless they're extremely valuable to you in the long run as a customer requiring constant updates/maintenance, then you should tolerate them, but only to a point. Let them find out on their own what they get for what they want to pay and happily accept their business when it all comes crashing down. No need to gouge them out of spite either, all but a few of them will have understood how the tech world can be.
My old employer charged $100/hour for most work, 9-10 years ago, and people were willing and ready to pay it because he would take the time to walk people through the work, and explain preventative measures so they don't have to come back in a couple weeks with similar issues. Everyone wins, and he's still as busy as ever today, serving a fairly small population. Good service counts!
I tend to rant.
You're so right. It's because aliens form the future came down and abducted all the potentials customers right before they were about to hire someone. But that's secret information, so don't tell anyone or they'll come for you too!
If you accept "if p, then q" you can conclude "if not q, then not p".
Applying that to the original quote results "The sites are not flourishing, thus the cheap people were not competent." I think that this is exactly what the poster meant to imply.
What you're quipping is correct, but irrelevant.
No good deed goes unpunished...
Or, to be profitable they used industry averages in their predictions, and then they drive the prices down in their own market segment so they can't make what they need, even when they have the number of users and contracts that they predicted.
For the same reason cheap A/V gear from China has practically destroyed the market for what USED to be the "sane" mid-high end... gear by companies like Denon, Matsushita/Panasonic/Technics, Pioneer, etc. In the 80s, "good" stuff wasn't insanely more expensive than "shit" stuff, and sounded a LOT better. Now, "shit" stuff is almost free, but "good" stuff is WAY more expensive... and the quality differences themselves are a lot harder to objectively quantify (digital electronics are good at hiding scores of design sins that would have been painfully-obvious fatal flaws on analog gear).
So... companies WANT good, settle for dirt cheap, end up disillusioned, and instead of saying, "we need to hire the more skilled, but more expensive, candidates" (from ANY country), they just give up.
The fact is, there are lots of good, smart people in Vietnam, India, etc. And for the most part, they cost as much -- or MORE -- as their American & European peers. Most of them eventually get tired of trying to stand out from the rabble & emigrate to someplace where their value is appreciated.
The fact is, India & Vietnam (to name two examples) are cheaper than the US overall, but the cost of living well in Mumbai or Hanoi really isn't much less (if it's less at all) than the cost of living well somewhere like Cleveland, Dallas, Charlotte (NC), etc, regardless of how cheap it might be to live in a shack out in some godforsake rural area where reliable electricity without daily rolling blackouts is still a novelty.
Bill rate is the same, but a much bigger tip is expected.
The OP is asking for a top notch project team who only needs someone to help with implementation. I've been doing IT for 20 years at this point and my experience has been that well scoped, managed and executed projects are the exception to the rule. More often than not there is at least some, if not major amounts of "making it up as we go" taking place.
Any team that is competent enough to lay the groundwork already has people lined up to do the implementation.
If those cheap people are competent, then it should work out fine, and the sites should flourish. It sounds like they all died. why?
They aren't. The people buying the work aren't competent, either. I wrote some articles for someone through Upwork, fulfilled the requirements, and they were less than happy with the results but weren't willing to pay enough for better. They wanted 100% English fluency, but were only willing to pay enough to get a foreigner — and not one with excellent English skills, either. That person could make a lot more doing something else with those skills, like translation. Most people going to Upwork to get something done are looking for cheap work, done cheaply.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Some of them might be exellent programmers for example, but in my experence the communication is the main issue. Just growing up differently they don't understand what needs to be done, even if they know english well.
Of either the results of the work that they're paying for or the competence of the person or persons doing the work. The same problem arises elsewhere in the economy wherever the goods or services being offered require persons with specialized expert knowledge to produce and the quality of the finished product is not something that most consumers can easily ascertain for themselves. Examples include dentists and the medical profession in general, legal and financial services and real estate. The astute reader will recognize that these industries are among those least disrupted by new tech precisely because they're complicated, opaque, expensive and not frequently purchased by most consumers. Software development shares many of these same attributes and thus will encounter many of the same difficulties. Frankly, that might be a good thing. We have enough crappy and insecure software floating around already and a gig economy in software development would likely make that problem worse.
They didn't die, just sold, merged and changed names (ie. former Elance): https://www.upwork.com/
If you provide value for money, you can still find "gig" work, but need to learn how to sell your hours and working capability.
Like Uber, it won't pay for your life costs, so what many do is hire a team to fulfill a small to medium size project instead.
It's not really about cost savings. It's about destroying the middle class.
A handmaiden of fascism complains about destroying the middle class. Smell yourself fucknuts.
Is Upwork.com not good?