Ask HN: How do you handle small web/tech requests from friends? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you handle small web/tech requests from friends?

8 pointsdotBen15 comments

I'm sure most HN'ers are the resident geeks in their wider circle of friends and get a lot of requests like:

* Can you set up a WordPress blog for me?

* Can you migrate my website from sharedHostX to sharedHostY?

* Can you help me pick an e-commerce service to use to put my store online?

* Can you fix my slow/crashing computer?

I get a lot of these (from Non-Tech friends) and stacked up they take up a fair amount of my time. I've never accepted money for doing stuff like this, even when offered, but now wondering whether for anyone that isn't family or immediate friend whether I should.

I'm wondering how you guys handle these kinds of requests?

EDIT: On the point of learning to say "NO": I guess I've always seen doing requests like this as 'paying it forward' or participating in the gift economy.

But when it comes time for me to need help I'm more likely to Google something/work it out for myself then really ask for help.

Depends on the person. I always have to fight the urge to send them this link: http://lmgtfy.com/

Often I try to find the easiest walkthrough online I can find and e-mail it to them. I add in the messaged something along the lines of "here is a guide to doing this yourself, I should have some free time in x weeks if you get stuck." Usually this gets them to at least attempt to do it themselves and most of the time they are fully capable.

Hmmm... for me at least, quite often the requests are from people who are non-technical and so don't have the ability to do it themselves.

By and large, I refuse such requests. Often I dodge it in a subtle (yet true) way by pointing out that I run Linux on all of my own computers, have for years, and therefore have lost touch with the state of Windows admin/repair/etc. This suffices to keep my mom, sister, aunt, etc. from giving me too much grief to help them.

Beyond that, my non-techie friends have basically been trained to not bother asking me, as I pretty much always politely refuse, by pointing out how slammed I am with my day-job and startup project. When you explain to people that you routinely work 80+ hours a week (and it's true) they tend to be more understanding.

That said, if it's a question I can answer without doing any significant research, and if the person has shown some initiative in trying to deal with the problem on their own, and if I actually have a spare moment, I'll occasionally try to help somebody by email or whatever. One of my sister's friends was taking an online class on Java programming, and I answered a few Java questions for her, but I never spent more than 2-3 minutes on it.

What is your day job? If your day job involves any of those things just quote them a comparable hourly rate and don't feel bad.

I usually let people know up front how much the service they are requesting is going to cost. A lot of the time this scares them away.

You could always try to work out some sort of service exchange. Given the people you are helping offer services that you'd want / need.

or you could learn to just say no.

Good point. I'm a consultant/contractor by trade so I have a very clear billable hourly rate...

But my billable rate for SF-based high quality developer network and API ecosystem strategy + development is not good value for setting up WordPress. In fact it's probably a degree of magnitude bigger if you compare it to getting a student or off-shore person to do it.

I've had a number of "please setup Wordpress" type requests. These days I just point them at a hosting company with a One-Click-Installer (Dreamhost has worked ok for me) and tell them to have a go.

If I don't think they are going to be capable of doing that, then I point them at Wordpress.org

Well I'm a shareholder in WPEngine.com (WP hosting platform!) so yes, I should route all my WP requests I receive to them! :)

The Big N.O....

I do a limited amount for close family, and a very small number of non-profits I help out.

For the rest and for complicated requests from the above folks, I refer them to a computer shop or other person, or say I don't have a good recommendation on where they could get help with that.

I just helped out one non-profit by pointing them to some existing web tech they could use instead of writing software, and gave them a quick sample, and offered to teach them or find a consultant to teach them how to do the full version of what they wanted.

With another non-profit, I help them with the stuff that's fun for me, and connect them with other people to do the other, more time-consuming stuff they want to do.

Ah, the age old unpaid service request.

I find this very similar to the designer's issue of spec work in the design community - http://www.no-spec.com/faq/

The best response I've heard to the spec work issue is making an analogy to other service trades. E.g. if you wanted a bathroom in your house re-modeled, would you pay the contractor only if you liked the job he did?

Maybe we could parallel that to this issue - "if my trade was carpentry instead of computer ______, would you feel comfortable asking me to make you wood furniture?"

I actually made an online course with some of my basic "tech knowledge". Now if a friend asks me, for example, about the process I went through to create a Facebook application, I send them to my course. I obviously won't charge my friends for the course.

I still get questions like this and have recently started to refer my friends to Quora.

Ultimately, as you mentioned, the overall lesson is to learn how to say 'no'. You can do this with respect and tact.

I think web design is a really good trade to have and you should not stack up a list like that. If you are on HN, I imagine you have grander ambitions of doing your own things, so if I were you I'd learn to respectfully say no more often. I learned this one the hard way, but once I started saying no, it was no big deal, and I was helping others, but in reality these tasks take away time from my own coding projects, and it's not worth the trade off.

Find a different way to pay it forward with friends and family rather than offering your professional technical skills (if it's becoming too time consuming, maybe you'll have down time some times, and you'll know you can pick it back up).

I'll say "yeah, I usually charge $X for that, when can you work on it with me/when would you like that done?"

If they're willing to pay for it, it shows that it's actually a legitimate help to them. If not, it saves my time.

For good friends I'll do it if I have the time (it's not like any have asked me to build them a facebook yet). For family I'll usually always do it - they've earned the favours many times over.

For friends and family? I do any favor they ask for.

I am not so self-righteous that I refuse my friends/family favors.

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