Hire Programming Tutors now on WageMachine | Hacker News Reader

Hire Programming Tutors now on WageMachine

wagemachine.com

62 pointsbreck51 comments

I'd happily solve/tutor a one-off problem for 2 hours at a lower fixed price ($100-200), but as much as I like the idea of one-off tutor sessions, I can't get behind a minimum wage rate.

At my usual $150 hour rate, it would take 17 hours on WageMachine to match one hour of work. I could just as easily spend those 17 hours finding that one hour of work (and it wouldn't be just one hour).

[Edit] Thinking about it more, I think your idea is very good, but lacks any real traction without being able to genuinely pay real experts -- I don't mean "highly talented, industrious, college educated, English speaking, and lives in the United States", but rather, someone who has at least a decade of work experience, is near the forefront of their field, and would like to invest some time in assisting, teaching, solving other people's once-off issues.

One of the primary reasons I don't participate in StackOverflow is that the vast majority of questions are simply boring. For $150, nobody is going to ask a boring question (and if they do, at least they're paying market rate for the answer).

Maybe you could handle 17 WageMachine threads simultaneously.

Now there's an idea! It would be like sitting in the Django IRC for an hour or two, but getting paid for each person who you offer advice to, regardless of the time overlap.

Problem is that you'd lose time dealing with each transaction.

I'd rather have one $1000 transaction than a dozen $100 transactions unless the process was completely automated (no one questioning time-tracking, no getting-to-know-you period, no trading contact details - just work done and money in the account).

maybe you can, but the rules currently restrict things to 1 job at a time.

just removed that. (was a premature optimization)

Maybe you are in a good position to find that 1+ hour of work any time you want, but this may not be the case for everyone. I wonder how easy it is to win a contract on elance, etc. if you're a college student or have little experience. Similarly, a lot of people don't have time for full-fledged contract work.

I see it as a good way to earn some extra pocket money, as another commenter said, "for the ride home."

That's true, but are "unable to find better work" and "expert tutor" largely disjoint sets?

Even those who don't have time to contract will generally have more productive outlets available (... which is often how they became experts).

Thank you very much for the feedback. We haven't figured out product/market fit but thanks to all the feedback we're getting today we're getting closer.

We reduced the max shift from 2 hours to 1. We think this stresses that this is more of a tool to get small things done, meet future potential clients/employees, and earn small amounts of cash now versus a way to make a living.

Basically, instead of spending 17 hours looking for work, we think it makes more sense to do small <1 hr jobs for 17 people. That's 17 new potential future clients(at your regular rate). and it's ~$70-$150 bucks in your pocket(depending if they are 30 min or 1hr jobs). And you helped 17 people!

Does that sound like something you'd want?

I just tried out the service. As someone who isn't a full time coder it's great to have someone with years of experience on the back to share some tricks with me.

Plus I regularly hire freelancers and while making it simply into a freelancer market place would be a horrible idea, I would definitely say that I would hire someone who has been able to help me out with a problem in 30 mins. And I think it's also a good way for developers to see if their potential clients are complete idiots or if they're not too bad themselves.

I don't get how those 17 people would likely be "potential future clients". Clients who have the money to pay for things to get done... pay to get things done; they don't try to learn it themselves first.

Of course this is not an absolute rule, yes yes, it is possible, I just don't see how that really is one core benefit worthy of marketing.

  Every worker on WageMachine is highly talented, industrious, college educated, 
  English speaking, and lives in the United States.
  http://wagemachine.com/blog/learn_more_about_wagemachine

Then why the hell are they working for minimum wage at a deadend job on your site?

Some people don't want more then they need. If Minimum wage is supposed to be all you need to live off of, then you'll find people who like helping others working for about that. I've known teachers who's summer or side jobs made them more money their their primary jobs, yet they still teach.

This site isn't supposed to be a full time job, it's supposed to be a low barrier way to pick up a few bucks for the ride home. While programming might not be the best area for this (not sure about the market of tutors) I love the concept.

Meh. I do tons of free coding for people, and I would do this as well. It's like free coding, but I get paid and get to train my patience! =]

More importantly. How are the workers guaranteed to be highly talented? I'm under the impression that all the workers are added by invite; however, what are the real tests of ability? I'd be curious to know.

[EDIT:] I love the idea! (My only skepticism/criticism/dislike is that I can't find the hiring process online and therefore can't approve of it.)

First I think they need a rating system so people can see at a glance who is really good.

Then they need to pay based on ranking. Everyone starts at minimum wage but if you get five stars suddenly you are making $25 an hour.

Wanted: web programmer with knowledge of game theory to help design a rating system (must be useful, fair, and hard to subvert) for new programming tutoring site.

I regularly tutor people in programming and act as a helpdesk, am considered a good tutor/helpdesk, and I would never offer my tutoring/helpdesk services at that puny rate.

I absolutely love the idea, but you NEED to let the tutors set their own rate. Anyone want to build such a site, possibly working with me? I own "software-shaman.com" and have been meaning to set it up for something like this, but haven't felt any urgency yet.

EDIT: Now I also have programmer-helpdesk.com (and both w/o hyphens)

Thanks for the feedback.

We limit it to a 30min-2hr shifts. My hope is people will do a quick 30min-1hr help session, and then if it's a good fit continue to work together (offsite). The idea here is to speed up the initial intro period.

> You may not use WageMachine to find workers and then conduct the transaction off site, unless you pay them at least their "Normal Rate".

I don't see how that would be worth the trouble to a good tutor.

Hey jey, shoot me an email: j[at]jasonlbaptiste.com .

I'm looking for a Python / Django tutor at the moment and would love a system where I can choose and change the types of tutelage as I go along.

A $/hour scale is going to be the easiest way for me to ascertain the skill/knowledge/experience of the tutor.

Initially I'd be happy with someone outside the US - hell, I might even continue with someone from outside the English speaking world - but having the variable would be nice.

I wonder if hours are the best metric? All of the advisors i've had outside of school have rarely spent a whole hour with me, but still managed to help me a lot. Unless you are a complete beginner to programming, I suspect that a lot of the problems you have are of the "how do I do x in language y" sort. So maybe it could be priced by question, or by problem?

I agree. Experts may be interested in answering questions for wages around 10 dollars per question or problem. As you pointed out most questions and explanation sessions will not take a full hour.

In general I agree with tentonova2. Going rates are 10 to 20 times minimum wage. It's scary to imagine what sorts of people you'll get for minimum wage.

All this being said, If it's well organized and non-for-profit I would be interested in volunteering to work one on one with students. I am a strong believer that mentoring is a great way to train inexperienced programmers.

I imagine most of us have, at one point or another, ended up helping someone with their Math assignment at the local coffee shop. It would be nice to provide the same help to inexperienced programmers with the same casual relationship.

I like the clean interface. Your gear image looks ugly. Remove the period after "...wage right now".

Set up a comet-based common chat that everyone sees, and sit in it. This will let you help users learn to use your system, and will give you valuable feedback which you can use to improve it. You need to make "sitting around waiting for work" interesting. One way to do this is to piggyback the rest of the site on an irc-like technical chat.

You absolutely need a reputation system for this.

Why limit yourself to tutoring and to minimum wage? What if I'd like someone to give me a code review for $3?

I think this is a great idea, but agreeing with other commenters minimum wage is likely far too low. My brother and I are fairly new to ruby on rails, and we often get stuck and left at the mercy of support forums and friendly programmers. Many times we'd gladly pay for an "office hours" type service, especially since one hangup can cost us a day or two... one model might be to try letting users post questions along with an ideal price range and let programmers bid to answer it, like a stack overflow for business users.

Or elance for small/quick problems.

What I'd do is white-label it and make it available (revenue share) with communities/networks. e.g., say ForumX always has newbies struggling to install their code and get things working, and a voluntary support forum isn't always ideal. So they run paidsupport.forumx.com (or whatever) as a marketplace for cheap installation help. Scrape x% from the transactions to split between ForumX and WageMachine.

I like prawns idea, seems like something definitely testable. I was just going to throw out "google answers" service which was basically the same as what you are saying but for any type of question, and did not seem to work out.

If anyone...

- Wants an invite

- Has ideas about better use cases than programming tutors

...please let me know! (here or on breck7@gmail.com)

One thing that something like this may be useful for is in help at solving a particular problem (e.g. sending POST requests in Python and interpreting the responses).

Are there some programming tutors around Boston?

If so, I'd really appreciate an invite!

I fully support ideas like this. I see it as lowering the barrier to market. This could solve the problem of finding small work. I have out of work friends who are capable at tutoring but are currently unemployed.

I do wonder what you'll do about quality control. You say you have bright people who are happy to work for very little money, but I'll need to see why I can trust them. A reputation so to speak.

This almost seems like it's begging to be a paid stackoverflow, but I'm not sure what that would look like from a community standpoint (not the same as the free one). I'm getting the feeling it will be more like a craigslist then a structured sytem.

Will talent scouts transform this into "Interview a demonstrably capable programmer for $8.95 / hour"?

How are you handling employment/income tax issues?

up to the users

I can see it now... computer science class averages increasing in correlation to the beta release of WageMachine programming tutors...

I wonder if I'll be able to tutor people competently on programming with:

1. 5 years of ruby

2. 7 months of python + pygame

3. Approximately 2-3 weeks of C from arudino hacking

4. A year and a half of Java in high school

5. A month of experience with javascript, and canvas + html5 technology

This is potentially an interesting experiment in incentives.

I wonder if instead of giving tutors the 8.50 ph they could do something else with it that might be better incentive.

Invite codes for HackerNews:

To buy: hnbuy

To work: hnwork

"Sorry but you need a valid invite code to join."

Edit: I suppose you use the same form for both tutors and students to register. The hnwork code doesn't work there.

Sorry about that, I stupidly made them single use invites. Should be fixed now.

Hey, go bring some students on the site. Post on cl, whatever. Right now, there are 8 workers waiting, and 1 buyer.

Suggestion: embed the lobby in the homepage.

as someone not living in the u.s. i think it work better by connecting tutors from countries outside the u.s. and people from the u.s. except for the better incentives , it's probably harder for someone outside the u.s. to find work in the u.s , so the introductions might be more helpful.

Curiousity question: What is the rationale behind the name WageMachine?

Inspired by this: http://boingboing.net/2009/11/30/hand-cranked-penny-d.html

I can't find an RSS or atom feed for your blog :(

http://wagemachine.com/blog/feed

Let me know if that's a good feed. I don't use RSS at all so don't know what people expect.

It's good, but either a summary of your posts or the full text would be nice, as I usually read articles inside of my reader.

Yeah, full text in the feed, or don't bother with the feed at all.

ah thanks, will add that

Who are the competitors in this space?

That looks cool. :)

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