4 ms·
Interesting, but what am I looking at? Someone is willing to do a job for a dollar?
by teach 11y ago
Interesting, but what am I looking at? Someone is willing to do a job for a dollar?
- mkohlmyr 11y ago"what am I looking at?" An utterly terrible auction system.
- blowski 11y agoWhat's terrible about it?
- dsr_ 11y agoThey didn't think that they would be attacked. The system specifies that the lowest bidder gets the job, and has 10 days to fulfill it. If they don't, the second-lowest bidder has 10 days. The lowest bid possible is $1. Once that bid has been made, nobody else can bid. Strategy: create 2 companies. Company A bids the maximum price as soon as the auction is created. Company B bids $1 immediately thereafter. The underlying entity now gets 20 days to complete the work for the maximum price. During the first 10 days they need to be careful not to accidentally send in the final project.
- roel_v 11y ago"During the first 10 days they need to be careful not to accidentally send in the final project." This deserves a special mention as a risk factor for this sort of business model :)
- maaku 11y agoIt's trivially broken if you can get in the first two bids: (1) Bid high, profitable amount, then: (2) Bid the lowest possible amount. (3) Do nothing for 10 days, meaning the result of the auction reverts to the 2nd highest bid (your initial high bid).
- newjersey 11y agoWould it help if we triggered a new round of bidding after every failure, disqualifying anyone who won previous bids?
- blowski 11y agoSeems like you should just allow anyone to bid anything at any time. There's no reason to disallow someone from bidding higher than the current lowest bid.
- newjersey 11y agoSorry, I thought I edited quickly enough but I clearly didn't. Readers, I had previously omitted the wording winner so it read like I wanted entirely new bidders, disqualifying all previous bidders.
- llimllib 11y agoThat would solve the immediate problem, but make it easy to DoS the system with $1 bids
- zardo 11y agoYou can submit low bids, not do the work, and delay projects. The rules will obviously need to change for the market to be functional.
- rory096 11y agoA job for the government, specifically. 18F is the (outgrowth of the) team that overhauled healthcare.gov. Presumably it's an altruistic open source programmer willing the help out the government without pay. https://18f.gsa.gov/ https://18f.gsa.gov/
- vessenes 11y agoI think it might be a programmer trying to troll the bid system, and willing to code (or "lose their bid on acceptance criteria").
- rch 11y agoA company doesn't need to be purely altruistic to 1) publicly contribute to an open source project and 2) effectively 'win' a government contract. Given the simplicity of the task in question, one could choose to take it on as a reasonable business development expense.
- dspillett 11y agoI suppose it could be someone who wants to work on the project for kudos... Or, more likely, there is someone trying to game the system as one of the comments suggests.
- protomyth 11y agoI would turn an investigative eye towards the second lowest bid. [edit: cwarden's comment in the thread explains the problem perfectly - rule's lawyers are quite useful]
- elcct 11y agoHow it is best to cook kudos? I have some spare rice and tomatoes...
- Jtsummers 11y agoIf you have a day job, the scale of these tasks are (potentially) implementable by a 1-3 person LLC. A $1 bid could be for resume fodder, a more serious bid is bonus money.