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This looks like a great way for delusional "entrepreneurs" to get terrible results. Looking at one of the bounties currently available: > We would like there

This looks like a great way for delusional "entrepreneurs" to get terrible results. Looking at one of the bounties currently available: > We would like there to be a search bar in the middle of the navigation bar. The user should then be able to enter a query and filter questions in the database. The searching should be “fuzzy”, meaning that a search query such as “Issue with HTMA and firbase” should return the item with “firebase” or “HTML” in its body, title, or tags. There should also be the ability to filter by factors including date posted, author username, and whether the question has an accepted answer. The amount offered for this is $100. That's the equivalent of two hours of someone making $100k/yr - which would be a relatively pedestrian salary for SWEs in the US. For that amount, you're asking someone to: * Get into your codebase * Add a UI element * Wire it to a backend * Set up a fuzzy-search implementation I'd take more than two hours just reading documentation before I got started on a task like that. Even assuming the person filling the bounty is familiar enough with something like Firebase to be able to set up a pre-existing search implementation in a short timeframe, there's no way you're going to get anything functional in less than a day of work end-to-end, including tooling setup, implementation, basic spot-checking, and deployment. At that point, the person working on it is making roughly minimum wage in most states. Is this just supposed to be a stealth outsourcing/wage arbitrage play? I can't imagine anyone in the West doing this, other than maybe undergrad students looking to build a resume.

irf1 4y ago
This $100 bounty was shared by an undergraduate student founder at Harvard College who is looking for contributors / new teammates. There are likely classmates/peers/developers who may find it fun and worthwhile to solve this bounty and collaborate with Caine. Certainly, university students have thus far found Algora to be neat. You are not wrong, the amount is very low, but it's ok amongst students looking to hack things up. Personally, with my co-founder Zaf we cannot presently afford a full-time engineer, but with bounties we are getting a lot of work done while sticking to our tight budget. It's a modular tool, you can do what you wish with it and award as much as you wish. So far, we have personally awarded $7,876.68 in bounties to our own contributors, and our bounty payouts will be higher as our budget permits. Your analysis is not incorrect. Of course, people who contribute to open source (mostly without pay) may beg to differ, sometimes it's just fun to build stuff and help out. We certainly also hope to see more, higher-paying bounties :) - Ioannis
jimrandomh 4y ago
There are a lot of platforms built on this premise, and most of them are plagued with stuff like this. In fact I'd say that, if you want real engineers on your market, keeping wildly-unrealistic-expectations listings out is probably the core problem.
- arcturus17 4y ago
  Filter by price? That’s what I’ve done when I’ve perused Upwork and while there are still delusional people at all price ranges (eg, someone wanting a 150k app built for 10k) you do filter a lot of crap.
drusepth 4y ago
These prices seem comparable to established platforms like Upwork for isolated features like this, even if you filter to West-only freelancers. I sometimes take small gigs like this to learn new tools and/or just help the community while earning a bit of extra spending money. $100 feels a little low for this just because of the added fuzzy-search implementation, but it's important to remember that a huge amount of developers between the coasts make significantly less than $100k/yr.
deleted 4y ago
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irf1 4y ago

This $100 bounty was shared by an undergraduate student founder at Harvard College who is looking for contributors / new teammates. There are likely classmates/peers/developers who may find it fun and worthwhile to solve this bounty and collaborate with Caine. Certainly, university students have thus far found Algora to be neat. You are not wrong, the amount is very low, but it's ok amongst students looking to hack things up. Personally, with my co-founder Zaf we cannot presently afford a full-time engineer, but with bounties we are getting a lot of work done while sticking to our tight budget. It's a modular tool, you can do what you wish with it and award as much as you wish. So far, we have personally awarded $7,876.68 in bounties to our own contributors, and our bounty payouts will be higher as our budget permits. Your analysis is not incorrect. Of course, people who contribute to open source (mostly without pay) may beg to differ, sometimes it's just fun to build stuff and help out. We certainly also hope to see more, higher-paying bounties :) - Ioannis

jimrandomh 4y ago

There are a lot of platforms built on this premise, and most of them are plagued with stuff like this. In fact I'd say that, if you want real engineers on your market, keeping wildly-unrealistic-expectations listings out is probably the core problem.

arcturus17 4y ago
Filter by price? That’s what I’ve done when I’ve perused Upwork and while there are still delusional people at all price ranges (eg, someone wanting a 150k app built for 10k) you do filter a lot of crap.

drusepth 4y ago

These prices seem comparable to established platforms like Upwork for isolated features like this, even if you filter to West-only freelancers. I sometimes take small gigs like this to learn new tools and/or just help the community while earning a bit of extra spending money. $100 feels a little low for this just because of the added fuzzy-search implementation, but it's important to remember that a huge amount of developers between the coasts make significantly less than $100k/yr.

deleted 4y ago

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