6 ms·

Ask HN: How to find people to develop your side projects? and vice versa

54 points by esac 10y ago

I keep finding myself on both the sides of this question "I have money but no time, how do i find some bright college student to work on this small project for me?" "I need 400€, How do i find a small project i can develop for and have no expectation of follow up or commitment" I find hard to trust elance, upwrok and similar as it's either super-developer-guy or random-indian-guy, middle ways are buried behind the two extremes. On the other side of the fence, as a programmer on those websites it takes a lot of time to build up reputation and network and it's easier to just get a job at McDonalds or similar (e.g. make a website and let someone else maintain it) for those 400€. Something like university/hackerspace/open source facebook group with a barrier of entry to keep the quality but nothing as formal as a website

kiril-me 10y ago
Why not ask Hacker News Community? May be we can create monthly post. I find people among my friends. What work really good, but unfortunately slow. But usually people are ready to help with out money. My projects are startups and people found them interesting. I you need money or ready to pay you can go to freelance website, but I don't know what quality do you get.
rando444 10y ago
You get what you pay for. Every one of us spends our lives building on our experience and then presenting that experience to others in exchange for compensation. Without a system to manage this, it's just something to be exploited. How do you as the employee know that someone isn't going to have you do a bunch of work and deny you compensation, or request you do more additional work than what was agreed upon? How do you as the employer know that someone isn't going to just take your money and not provide the requested work or provide something substandard? If you can't build a reputation on either side, there's no reason for anyone to trust you.
- esac 10y ago
  That's why I felt that reputation should come from status/community, as a developer I don't want to be untrustworthy with my university/oss/friends/peers and as a employer i want to be able to exert social pressure on the developer in case things don't go as expected.
  - tobltobs 10y ago
    That's both time the same side of the coin. Apart of that: "exert social pressure on the developer in case things don't go as expected" is an awful way to deal with conflicts.
moyok 10y ago
I have been looking for a solution to the same problem - short projects with no long term commitment for some side income. Maybe this is useful - CodeGophers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11663869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11663869
dos4gw 10y ago
http://reddit.com/r/forhire http://reddit.com/r/forhire is full of the latter.
- esac 10y ago
  thanks for the link! I feel like I wouldn't trust the devs there, unless i can verify/get to know them physically outside it would feel like throwing money in the wind and hoping it works
  - jrochkind1 10y ago
    Anyone that tells you they can take your random idea and implement something high-quality and useful (if that's even possible for your random idea) for 400€ is indeed not to be trusted. The kind of skilled, competent and trustworthy people you're looking for would know that it's a recipe for disaster. (400€ is USD$450. At an already low $50/hour, that's 9 hours. Or at a ridiculously exploitive wage, when it comes to software devs, of $25/hour, that's 18 hours, or 2-3 solid days of work.)
    - esac 10y ago
      In my country (Italy) 400€ is 1/3 of the monthly wage for a junior developer
      - collyw 10y ago
        I wouldn't expect a junior to be able to manage the whole stack and get stuff on a server. Write an application probably, but it took me a few years before I could manage everything.
        arethuza 10y ago
        "I wouldn't expect a junior to be able to manage the whole stack and get stuff on a server." Why not - with the right PaaS platform deploying stuff is trivial and you don't need to worry about servers.
kranner 10y ago
> random-indian-guy Can you pick another stereotype please? It costs you little and is less degrading to us Indian guys and girls who happen to see it. I'm sure there are newbies and/or posers of other nationalities as well on freelance websites.
- esac 10y ago
  Wouldn't another stereotype be degrading for the other group ?
- ebbv 10y ago
  It is a stereotype but y'know he may be talking about the reality in this case rather than just a general stereotype. That said it's best to avoid it. Bad developers come in every form of humanity. EDIT: WTF? All I did was try to give OP the benefit of the doubt that maybe he's not a total bigot. I agreed stereotypes are bad and that there are bad developers of every type of person. Someone who thinks that's down vote worthy, please explain yourself. I'd like to know what's so objectionable about that.
  - smt88 10y ago
    I didn't down vote, but it's worthy of one because you're defending racism. Racist stereotypes aren't insidious and vile because they have no truth to them. Most stereotypes are based on reality, and some even apply to the majority of the stereotyped group. The problem with stereotypes is that you're lumping people together in possibly negative categories only because of their race. That's scientifically unsound and harmful to the individuals who want to (and should be) considered individually without prejudice based on their race.
    - ebbv 10y ago
      That's the thing though, I'm not defending a stereotype. Re-read my comment. The last thing I do is agree it's best to avoid stereotypes, and that this particular stereotype is wrong anyway because there's bad programmers of all types.
- 10y ago
duggan 10y ago
I know the founder, and it might be that Cohort[0] is what you're looking for. Not publicly available yet, alas. [0]: https://cohort.is/ https://cohort.is/
tyingq 10y ago
You mentioned "bright college student" and "university", which makes it seem like you have a preference for that route. Most schools have some kind of online job board. One example: https://du.studentemployment.ngwebsolutions.com/JobX_FindAJob.aspx?s=1&ls=1&sdgpi=3 https://du.studentemployment.ngwebsolutions.com/JobX_FindAJo... That said, while there's likely some great budding talent there, there's also a dearth of real world experience. You may find pitfalls there.
projectramo 10y ago
Everyone is "random" when you first meet them. That Indian (or Pakistani, or Croatian, or Thai) person could be just the partner you need. At least look at their work. And a lot of time they charge less because their cost of living is much lower. You can actually pay them more than others would and still save on a "super" developer. I think it would be equal time and less energy than going to a University Hackathon for hours and waiting to see who rubs you the right way.
clentaminator 10y ago
Your question is making me rethink all "formal" employment as "Someone with a side project looking for people to work on it".
welder 10y ago
These are community websites, since you don't want a marketplace: 1. Find someone from https://nomadprojects.io/ https://nomadprojects.io/ 2. Go to a hackathon and meet devs. These are marketplaces: 1. https://gigster.com/ https://gigster.com/ 2. https://gun.io/ https://gun.io/
iweinfuld 10y ago
I solved this problem for me by building https://Squads.com https://Squads.com. You're welcome to check it out of course. Invite only, to solve the random-klingon-eunuch problem. Here's a full feature walkthrough without marketing bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17uPOmgFFo4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17uPOmgFFo4
tomeglenn 10y ago
I'm currently working on a platform to facilitate this sort of thing called http://hivemindly.com http://hivemindly.com but it's not yet ready for a public launch. You can register your interest though.
iheartmemcache 10y ago
I think what you have is a misunderstanding of the market. 400 Euro isn't going to get you more than maybe half a days work (a day for a long engagement, for someone who's billing mid-tier[1] simply due to the economics of freelancing. You're paying both ends of FICA/SS so that's (-) ~17% federal immediately of whatever he's taking in. For US freelancers, you're paying for down-time between clients and meetings that won't convert into any work. SuperDeveloperGuy (regardless of his nationality) is going to have a full book, and as such will be able to command a higher rate than random-(any-ethnicity-guy-with-less-than-desirable-experience). The reason why we bill out at lawyer rates is because our labor patterns are similar. HN has a freelancer thread you can check. I've used it before. I generally discriminate based on the quality of their comments (a subjective metric, admittedly) as well as how long they've been a HNer. Keep in mind college kids are getting 35/hr minimum at any summer co-op, so again, 400 EUR won't get you very far. RE: Elance, et al -- On Upwork I've had great experience with the Eastern Europeans/Russians who have tons of feedback (is it still racism if it's a positive stereotype? hmm). [1] (Personally a client approaching me with a rate in that range is price-signaling to me "I'm going to brow-beat you for every dime"; somewhat counter-intuitively the quality of clients I've had has increased as a function of the rate at which I bill. Once I crossed the 3-figures-an-hour-threshold people started taking my time a lot more seriously.)
tmaly 10y ago
Its quite a challenge. I was on vacation over in the Philippines, and I decided to see if I could find someone to help with the front end for my side project. I interviewed two people. The guy I ended up working with did an amazing job using a team of freelancers on the first task. On the second task, he asked for more money up front, and then that was the last I heard from him. He took the money an ran. I am looking for another person or team to help me now, but I think the process is going to be to start with a small task and try to build trust. The most important skill in these cases is the ability to write amazing specifications. I have had some good practice over the years, and you would be surprised how much it helps.
- jpmoral 10y ago
  I'm sorry you had a bad experience with a Filipino developer. I hope it hasn't soured you on the country as a whole.
  - tmaly 10y ago
    I am not sour at all, I love the country. There are always going to be a few bad apples anywhere you go in the world. Here is the guy just in case you ever come across him http://spinworksstudios.com/ http://spinworksstudios.com/
DrNuke 10y ago
With 400 euros you do not need a dev but a modder: he/she buys templates and cloud space from well known marketplaces for peanuts or for free then inserts your content, sets up your project online and writes you one page to manage it properly. He/she will spend a couple hours and you are served with a working minimum viable product for showcase.
keenerd 10y ago
> "I have money but no time" You have time. The only person I've ever met who actually had no time was on his deathbed. Everyone else is poorly prioritizing their time. Or their money. Cut your expenses in half and you regain half of your productive hours. And of course doing it yourself is an investment in yourself - possibly the most valuable investment you can make. Naturally this assumes that you treat the project as "deliberate practice" and not something to simply get out of the way. If you have the right sort of personality traits (which anyone can develop) you absolutely have time.
jerf 10y ago
One of the big problems you have is that at that price range, overhead is eating away at your money pretty fast. Even if you do an hour of negotiation with a few people for "free", then pay one of them hourly strictly for the work, both you and the people you talk to need to be factoring in that time to the ultimate price and whether it's worth it. I will observe that when people describe the successful freelance jobs they do at those rates, including some other comments in this very thread as I type, they seem to tend towards being some very stereotypical tasks that generally amount to "installing WordPress/Magento/similar and slight customization". If you're negotiating something non-stereotypical, you can eat up serious percentages of the time just describing the situation. You may have to step up to a slightly higher tier to even get beyond "hello".
xchaotic 10y ago
I'm not sure what more do you expect ove upwork and the like? Tinder for developers? Unless you put in the time, it's not going work, in love or coding. Simple.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
edoceo 10y ago
I've hired 'random-$whatever-human' many times. Sometimes Indian (1/7) sometimes not even guys! WUT! Your hiring problem is caused by your lack of time commitment to finding the talent. Your impatience comes through loudly in the post. That said, Upwork could use some improvements (which I'm working on). You'll have to get over the idea that you can higher someone perfect , instantly and that some magic group (that you dont actively manage) will ensure that people meet your quality standards
mxuribe 10y ago
Maybe a local dev. group/meetup? I haven't been to one in years...But the one I used to visit (focused on web design AND web dev. which agreed was too broad) had often some senior folks, as well as newbies/college students/grads in attendance. Most everyone was very polite and accepting of both seniors and newbies. This of course constrains your search to folks who physically attend these meetups...but at least you can discuss things more easily than electronically, vet them in person, etc. Or, maybe, this question that you posted here on HN you can actually bring up during one of these meetups, and see if others have the same challenge, what advice they can offer? True, not as scalable as a website (or some similar alternative/online group), but at least your name would get known around the locale, and there's the networking opportunities, etc.
marcell 10y ago
Shameless plug: this is the exact use case for my start up, http://codegophers.com http://codegophers.com which we launched recently. For people looking for coders, we offer quick turnaround on small projects, typically priced between $100-$500. For coders, it's a quick way to make money without having to commit to a multi week project. Please check us out or email directly at start@codegophers.com

54 points by esac 10y ago

kiril-me 10y ago

Why not ask Hacker News Community? May be we can create monthly post. I find people among my friends. What work really good, but unfortunately slow. But usually people are ready to help with out money. My projects are startups and people found them interesting. I you need money or ready to pay you can go to freelance website, but I don't know what quality do you get.

rando444 10y ago

You get what you pay for. Every one of us spends our lives building on our experience and then presenting that experience to others in exchange for compensation. Without a system to manage this, it's just something to be exploited. How do you as the employee know that someone isn't going to have you do a bunch of work and deny you compensation, or request you do more additional work than what was agreed upon? How do you as the employer know that someone isn't going to just take your money and not provide the requested work or provide something substandard? If you can't build a reputation on either side, there's no reason for anyone to trust you.

esac 10y ago
That's why I felt that reputation should come from status/community, as a developer I don't want to be untrustworthy with my university/oss/friends/peers and as a employer i want to be able to exert social pressure on the developer in case things don't go as expected.
- tobltobs 10y ago
  That's both time the same side of the coin. Apart of that: "exert social pressure on the developer in case things don't go as expected" is an awful way to deal with conflicts.

moyok 10y ago

I have been looking for a solution to the same problem - short projects with no long term commitment for some side income. Maybe this is useful - CodeGophers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11663869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11663869

dos4gw 10y ago

http://reddit.com/r/forhire http://reddit.com/r/forhire is full of the latter.

esac 10y ago
thanks for the link! I feel like I wouldn't trust the devs there, unless i can verify/get to know them physically outside it would feel like throwing money in the wind and hoping it works
- jrochkind1 10y ago
  Anyone that tells you they can take your random idea and implement something high-quality and useful (if that's even possible for your random idea) for 400€ is indeed not to be trusted. The kind of skilled, competent and trustworthy people you're looking for would know that it's a recipe for disaster. (400€ is USD$450. At an already low $50/hour, that's 9 hours. Or at a ridiculously exploitive wage, when it comes to software devs, of $25/hour, that's 18 hours, or 2-3 solid days of work.)
  - esac 10y ago
    In my country (Italy) 400€ is 1/3 of the monthly wage for a junior developer
    - collyw 10y ago
      I wouldn't expect a junior to be able to manage the whole stack and get stuff on a server. Write an application probably, but it took me a few years before I could manage everything.
      - arethuza 10y ago
        "I wouldn't expect a junior to be able to manage the whole stack and get stuff on a server." Why not - with the right PaaS platform deploying stuff is trivial and you don't need to worry about servers.

kranner 10y ago

> random-indian-guy Can you pick another stereotype please? It costs you little and is less degrading to us Indian guys and girls who happen to see it. I'm sure there are newbies and/or posers of other nationalities as well on freelance websites.

esac 10y ago
Wouldn't another stereotype be degrading for the other group ?
ebbv 10y ago
It is a stereotype but y'know he may be talking about the reality in this case rather than just a general stereotype. That said it's best to avoid it. Bad developers come in every form of humanity. EDIT: WTF? All I did was try to give OP the benefit of the doubt that maybe he's not a total bigot. I agreed stereotypes are bad and that there are bad developers of every type of person. Someone who thinks that's down vote worthy, please explain yourself. I'd like to know what's so objectionable about that.
- smt88 10y ago
  I didn't down vote, but it's worthy of one because you're defending racism. Racist stereotypes aren't insidious and vile because they have no truth to them. Most stereotypes are based on reality, and some even apply to the majority of the stereotyped group. The problem with stereotypes is that you're lumping people together in possibly negative categories only because of their race. That's scientifically unsound and harmful to the individuals who want to (and should be) considered individually without prejudice based on their race.
  - ebbv 10y ago
    That's the thing though, I'm not defending a stereotype. Re-read my comment. The last thing I do is agree it's best to avoid stereotypes, and that this particular stereotype is wrong anyway because there's bad programmers of all types.
10y ago

duggan 10y ago

I know the founder, and it might be that Cohort[0] is what you're looking for. Not publicly available yet, alas. [0]: https://cohort.is/ https://cohort.is/

tyingq 10y ago

You mentioned "bright college student" and "university", which makes it seem like you have a preference for that route. Most schools have some kind of online job board. One example: https://du.studentemployment.ngwebsolutions.com/JobX_FindAJob.aspx?s=1&ls=1&sdgpi=3 https://du.studentemployment.ngwebsolutions.com/JobX_FindAJo... That said, while there's likely some great budding talent there, there's also a dearth of real world experience. You may find pitfalls there.

projectramo 10y ago

Everyone is "random" when you first meet them. That Indian (or Pakistani, or Croatian, or Thai) person could be just the partner you need. At least look at their work. And a lot of time they charge less because their cost of living is much lower. You can actually pay them more than others would and still save on a "super" developer. I think it would be equal time and less energy than going to a University Hackathon for hours and waiting to see who rubs you the right way.

clentaminator 10y ago

Your question is making me rethink all "formal" employment as "Someone with a side project looking for people to work on it".

welder 10y ago

These are community websites, since you don't want a marketplace: 1. Find someone from https://nomadprojects.io/ https://nomadprojects.io/ 2. Go to a hackathon and meet devs. These are marketplaces: 1. https://gigster.com/ https://gigster.com/ 2. https://gun.io/ https://gun.io/

iweinfuld 10y ago

I solved this problem for me by building https://Squads.com https://Squads.com. You're welcome to check it out of course. Invite only, to solve the random-klingon-eunuch problem. Here's a full feature walkthrough without marketing bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17uPOmgFFo4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17uPOmgFFo4

tomeglenn 10y ago

I'm currently working on a platform to facilitate this sort of thing called http://hivemindly.com http://hivemindly.com but it's not yet ready for a public launch. You can register your interest though.

iheartmemcache 10y ago

I think what you have is a misunderstanding of the market. 400 Euro isn't going to get you more than maybe half a days work (a day for a long engagement, for someone who's billing mid-tier[1] simply due to the economics of freelancing. You're paying both ends of FICA/SS so that's (-) ~17% federal immediately of whatever he's taking in. For US freelancers, you're paying for down-time between clients and meetings that won't convert into any work. SuperDeveloperGuy (regardless of his nationality) is going to have a full book, and as such will be able to command a higher rate than random-(any-ethnicity-guy-with-less-than-desirable-experience). The reason why we bill out at lawyer rates is because our labor patterns are similar. HN has a freelancer thread you can check. I've used it before. I generally discriminate based on the quality of their comments (a subjective metric, admittedly) as well as how long they've been a HNer. Keep in mind college kids are getting 35/hr minimum at any summer co-op, so again, 400 EUR won't get you very far. RE: Elance, et al -- On Upwork I've had great experience with the Eastern Europeans/Russians who have tons of feedback (is it still racism if it's a positive stereotype? hmm). [1] (Personally a client approaching me with a rate in that range is price-signaling to me "I'm going to brow-beat you for every dime"; somewhat counter-intuitively the quality of clients I've had has increased as a function of the rate at which I bill. Once I crossed the 3-figures-an-hour-threshold people started taking my time a lot more seriously.)

tmaly 10y ago

Its quite a challenge. I was on vacation over in the Philippines, and I decided to see if I could find someone to help with the front end for my side project. I interviewed two people. The guy I ended up working with did an amazing job using a team of freelancers on the first task. On the second task, he asked for more money up front, and then that was the last I heard from him. He took the money an ran. I am looking for another person or team to help me now, but I think the process is going to be to start with a small task and try to build trust. The most important skill in these cases is the ability to write amazing specifications. I have had some good practice over the years, and you would be surprised how much it helps.

jpmoral 10y ago
I'm sorry you had a bad experience with a Filipino developer. I hope it hasn't soured you on the country as a whole.
- tmaly 10y ago
  I am not sour at all, I love the country. There are always going to be a few bad apples anywhere you go in the world. Here is the guy just in case you ever come across him http://spinworksstudios.com/ http://spinworksstudios.com/

DrNuke 10y ago

With 400 euros you do not need a dev but a modder: he/she buys templates and cloud space from well known marketplaces for peanuts or for free then inserts your content, sets up your project online and writes you one page to manage it properly. He/she will spend a couple hours and you are served with a working minimum viable product for showcase.

keenerd 10y ago

> "I have money but no time" You have time. The only person I've ever met who actually had no time was on his deathbed. Everyone else is poorly prioritizing their time. Or their money. Cut your expenses in half and you regain half of your productive hours. And of course doing it yourself is an investment in yourself - possibly the most valuable investment you can make. Naturally this assumes that you treat the project as "deliberate practice" and not something to simply get out of the way. If you have the right sort of personality traits (which anyone can develop) you absolutely have time.

jerf 10y ago

One of the big problems you have is that at that price range, overhead is eating away at your money pretty fast. Even if you do an hour of negotiation with a few people for "free", then pay one of them hourly strictly for the work, both you and the people you talk to need to be factoring in that time to the ultimate price and whether it's worth it. I will observe that when people describe the successful freelance jobs they do at those rates, including some other comments in this very thread as I type, they seem to tend towards being some very stereotypical tasks that generally amount to "installing WordPress/Magento/similar and slight customization". If you're negotiating something non-stereotypical, you can eat up serious percentages of the time just describing the situation. You may have to step up to a slightly higher tier to even get beyond "hello".

xchaotic 10y ago

I'm not sure what more do you expect ove upwork and the like? Tinder for developers? Unless you put in the time, it's not going work, in love or coding. Simple.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

edoceo 10y ago

I've hired 'random-$whatever-human' many times. Sometimes Indian (1/7) sometimes not even guys! WUT! Your hiring problem is caused by your lack of time commitment to finding the talent. Your impatience comes through loudly in the post. That said, Upwork could use some improvements (which I'm working on). You'll have to get over the idea that you can higher someone perfect , instantly and that some magic group (that you dont actively manage) will ensure that people meet your quality standards

mxuribe 10y ago

Maybe a local dev. group/meetup? I haven't been to one in years...But the one I used to visit (focused on web design AND web dev. which agreed was too broad) had often some senior folks, as well as newbies/college students/grads in attendance. Most everyone was very polite and accepting of both seniors and newbies. This of course constrains your search to folks who physically attend these meetups...but at least you can discuss things more easily than electronically, vet them in person, etc. Or, maybe, this question that you posted here on HN you can actually bring up during one of these meetups, and see if others have the same challenge, what advice they can offer? True, not as scalable as a website (or some similar alternative/online group), but at least your name would get known around the locale, and there's the networking opportunities, etc.

marcell 10y ago

Shameless plug: this is the exact use case for my start up, http://codegophers.com http://codegophers.com which we launched recently. For people looking for coders, we offer quick turnaround on small projects, typically priced between $100-$500. For coders, it's a quick way to make money without having to commit to a multi week project. Please check us out or email directly at start@codegophers.com