Ask HN: Where can I find true “Expert” freelancers | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where can I find true “Expert” freelancers

15 pointsTimJRobinson11 comments

Sometimes at my workplace we come across some really obscure bugs or issues with technology that we use, e.g. HAProxy, or database sharding / replication, and nobody on the team has enough experience to diagnose what's going on without spending a few days getting really deep into the technology.

In situations like these we'd like to a find true expert with the technology, someone who has dedicated most of their time to it, and we'd be happy to pay $300+ an hour for their expertise. Most of the time we don't even need code written, we just some guidance on what could be broken and how to fix it. Usually we need help immediately too.

Unfortunately I can't find any sites that have these kind of freelancers. I remember hearing about a site like this a few years ago on a podcast, but I can't remember the name. Normal freelance websites take far too long to post the job, filter all the bad candidates and maybe find one person that knows what they're doing.

StackOverflow is the answer you are looking for.

Example: "HAProxy"

Go to http://stackoverflow.com/tags/haproxy/info and on the right hand side, you will a section called top answerers. Each of these people have spend a good amount of time answering questions on the topic you are looking for and then have been up-voted by a community of peers as having reasonable answers, that work, and that help people solve their issues.

To "HAProxy" in particular, we find that "Willy Tarreau" is the top answerer. Doing a quick google search ("Willy Tarreau" HAProxy), we find on Willy's about page "My name is Willy Tarreau...Today, my work mostly consists in designing and auditing robust and scalable hosting infrastructures. This has led me to develop the HAProxy load balancer, which is used in several large infrastructures with high level of demand concerning availability, performance and security."

There is a good probability that if you wrote Willy an email saying, I'm happy to pay $300+ for an hour of your time that you'd get an answer, if not a potential introduction to someone who can help.

If your budget is $300/hr, then I would either contact the core developer(s) or use one of the consulting companies specializing in that software. Also there is a lot of cross-over in those groups, which you can use to filter the latter category. For instance for Postgres, scan the hackers mailing list for the most common names. In a lot of signature lines you'll see "EnterpriseDB" or "2nd Quadrant". You could also look at who is giving talks at the conventions.

As a freelancer (IMO an exceptional one), I would love to charge $300/hr, and I feel for the "drop in and recommend/make a fix" engagements I would be worth it. But realistically at that price people are paying for lower risk. They want high confidence that whomever they hire will truly solve the problem. Usually that means hiring a company instead of a person. It's true there are as many bad consulting shops as there are bad freelancers, but it's still a little easier to pick out the top ones by their public activity, and you know they are open for business if you want to hire them.

I would avoid "marketplaces" like gun.io etc. As much as they try to maintain high standards, they still wind up competing on price. My own rate is nowhere near $300/hr, but it is still too high for those places, so I doubt experts with real name recognition are active there.

You can't really because the people you want to hire for a few hours are all fully employed elsewhere. If it were possible to do this why would any company have employees - management could just hire a rolling series of experts to build and fix all the technical problems that arose.

The good news is the internet make working out the problems yourself possible, even if somewhat time consuming.

I do something of the sort at Dreamlance - http://dreamlance.io/

The professionals are filtered by their past experience, communication skills & technology / design chops.

The projects too are pre-qualified before they're matched with the relevant expert.

My email is in my bio.

I love this idea of website that facilitate business to access this niche expertise. I'd be interested to join such website in my areas of expertise and see it as a great opportunity to help in my free time (& earn some extra money too)

I'm afraid I don't have a ready answer for you, but your question has surely given me a great idea for a side-project!! :-)

For open source software such as HAProxy contacting the contributor(s) might be the best approach (even if they don't usually do consulting, an hourly fee of $300+ should be convincing enough).

Other than that Stack Overflow or a plain Google search might be your best bet.

Moreover, there are services such as Gun.io that only list high-quality freelancers.

The Techdirt Insight Community was something like what you are looking for, although less of hour-based work, more like small to medium fixed price projects. Not sure if it is active nowadays. I was a member in its early days.

It would be interesting if there were a curated list of recognized industry experts.

E.g. My friend Dathan Vance Pattishall [0] is a MySQL super-expert guru.

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/dathan

Mailing lists for these technologies or projects, especially if the core developers frequent these lists.

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