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(Reposting with additions from duplicate https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10384792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10384792) It'll be interesting to s
by laurencerowe 11y ago
(Reposting with additions from duplicate https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10384792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10384792)
It'll be interesting to see if this works. I rarely found it worth my while engaging in a job with a new client if it billed under 10-15 days. $3500 is only a few days work, so they'll have to ensure the administrative overhead in bidding and billing is minimised.
> Whoever has the lowest bid at the closing time will have 10 working days to ship the code necessary to satisfy the criteria. If the criteria are met, the vendor gets paid. It's that easy. If the criteria aren't met, the next lowest bidder gets 10 working days to ship the code. In order to make this work, we will provide acceptance criteria, instead of requirements. This limits the possibility of misinterpretation and ensures the quality of delivery.
I fear that the focus on tight acceptance criteria may encourage gaming the system. There's no incentive for the contractor to do more than the bare minimum. Even if you gain a reputation with the procuring team of being reliable they still have to go with the lowest bidder for the next job.
For contractors, the optimum strategy would seem to be bid without spending any time coming up with an implementation strategy, then drop any jobs you win that don't seem worthwhile after a few hours working out how to implement it.
Ultimately this becomes a test of how well the jobs can be specified. For this to be efficient they have to include the time spent internally preparing and assessing the result vs working over a longer periods with people with whom they can build a trusting working relationship.
It might be more efficient to rely less on price competition and more on reputation. That would make it a low overhead system for engaging trusted contractors on individual tickets. There'd be far less preparation required in defining very tight acceptance criteria.
- ATsch 11y agoAbsolutely. I could imagine a system where the job goes to the lowest price * reputation, with lower (which in this case means better) reputation causing you to win the bid even if other companies bid lower. Assigning reputation in a system with financial incentives is a challenge in itself too. If reputation is decided in a non-transparent process, such as members of 18F deciding, the system is ripe for bias, e.g. towards companies with ex-collegues, friends or aquaintances. Any public form of online voting is subject to manipulation, closed voting of the companies involved would leat to a conflict of interest as companies have no incentive to distribute reputation fairly, and raising and lowering reputation depending on if the job was done or not allows companies to do the contract with the lowest effort possible, leading to the problem the above poster described.
- tssva 11y agoWhen bidding out with micro-payments using any criteria besides lowest cost requires enough additional justification and paperwork to eliminate the acquisition advantages of micro-payments.