I actually talk about my anyfu experience here: http://jeffwhelpley.com/2012/03/14/just-in-time-expertise-my-secret-weapon/ http://jeffwhelpley.com/2012/03/14/j

I actually talk about my anyfu experience here: http://jeffwhelpley.com/2012/03/14/just-in-time-expertise-my-secret-weapon/ http://jeffwhelpley.com/2012/03/14/just-in-time-expertise-my.... As you can tell from that article, I am all for consulting in short intervals, BUT there are a couple issues with the Pomodoro Hiring Experiment. First, 20 minutes is way to short. I have had hour long sessions with several experts since my original blog post and I truly believe that you can only get value from an expert in under 60 minutes if you already have a prior relationship with them and they already understand the basic problem you are trying to solve. If not, it is going to take 10 - 15 minutes just to get on the same page with them. Look, talking to an expert is not magic. I don't care how good someone is, they aren't going to solve your problem at the drop of a hat even if it is a simple problem just because of the time it takes for context switching and getting up to speed with your background. One last thing. There is a big difference between getting expert advice for higher level strategical or design questions vs. solving an actual coding problem. I think if you are just using an expert for strategical/design issues, you can get a lot of value in an hour. If you are trying to solve a coding problem, you run a serious risk of not getting any value at all for your short time period. How many times have you debugged an issue that you thought was easy, but then ended up taking you 6 hours. There is little chance you would even ask an expert in the first place for a simple problem (i.e. it wouldn't be worth it), so there is likely a pretty good chance that if you are looking for an expert to solve a specific technical problem it is going to take more than 20 minutes. In summary, an hour of expert time is awesome for higher level design and strategy but short periods of time to solve difficult specific technical problems will never work.