Are you a freelancer, or looking to hire someone? Take our survey | Hacker News Reader

Are you a freelancer, or looking to hire someone? Take our survey

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32 pointsaditya16 comments

I am curious as to why the "hiring/freelancing" problem has not been cracked yet. Given the issues with global sites such as oDesk and elance perhaps the problem really does not scale without sacrificing either reliability or quality and an inherently local solution either in terms of geography for a specific city or more widely for a specific skillset is the most realistic approach so that referrals and personal recommendations still carry some weight.

oDesk and elance leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The only real way I can see using one of these services is where the potential employers bid on my limited time, and not the other way around. That way your helping the workers to get paid more, and you are not helping the employers pay less.

So, I'm always getting asked for referrals to good people (engineers, designers, etc.) Here's what I'm thinking of building: http://auctionme.me (I'll find a better name, promise!) as a side project

But if you find yourself in that boat, please take the survey and let me know!

Survey taken.

I'm concerned that any competitive bid site like this will lead to the foreigners underbidding Americans, a la elance & oDesk. How will your service avoid that?

I'm ready to compete with anybody, as long as folks know how good I am - so I don't end up competing with a newbie at .1 the price that they will never deliver on.

Yeah, that is a huge problem with elance, etc.

Two things I've been thinking about

1) Invite only referral system - You only get in if someone vouches for you -- keeps quality up, probably keeps your cost up as well, if you want bottom of the barrel you go to one of the other places.

2) If it ends up being completely open, then people can sort by third-party signals (github followers, stackoverflow karma, quora karma, linkedin connections, etc.)

Thanks for taking the survey!

Seems like a price floor would solve that problem assuming that's what the people paying for the contractors really want solved.

I think I would spin it and make it North America only (or is there something that already does that?). That would be a great selling point for a lot people.

I promise I'll charge just as much as American developers. No, really ;)

The one feature I like about vWorker is that, when posting a job, I can limit the potential contractors to "mature economies," defined as the US, Western Europe and Australia.

i've been working on this problem for folks in production/post-production rather than in programming/dev. would love to chat on what i've got so far.

there are some very big differences between what folks who are new to freelance need vs those who are 'old hat' and very little that is out there to connect these individuals together. im interested in trying to solve the issues that many industries are currently having with mentorship and education while also making sure folks work at rewarding jobs.

...is this really an "auction?"

Would love to chat, drop me a note (email in profile).

Yeah, I'm not certain if auctioning your time will really work, but once people start using the system, I'll know better. It is a fairly interesting problem, and lots of things you can do.

I hope you post the results of the survey.

Is http://www.coderloop.com/ relevant to this?

WTF is a survey doing on the front page of HN?

It's not all that uncommon.

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