Show HN: Freelance Hacker Network | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Freelance Hacker Network

hackerlist.net

83 pointsmekarpeles39 comments

As someone who's hired several freelancers before (and is continually hiring), the process has often been very time consuming and frustrating.

I welcome new solutions.

For me, the main problems are centered around communication and trust.

In my experience, freelancers are difficult to work with because they're hard to communicate with as they may have several projects going on at once, enjoy living a rather unstructured lifestyle, don't like to email, amongst other things.

If I have a good spec sheet that details exactly what I need done, when I need it, at a fair price, will you deliver?

I find that question to be very hard to answer when reviewing people. Though, I believe a major reason for that is because I'm not technical (my background is in interface design and not backend stuff).

I'm aware that part of the problem stems from me. As freelancers are worried about new features being added on later, changes being made, new problems arising, lack of payment, etc.

With that said, I've have some good experiences. The best being when the spec I've written is in fact good and not making any changes to it until it is delivered as written, on time. Payment being promptly made. And then discussing changes.

On the other side of this, I've had clients that can't provide needed information, want me to wait for some other contracted individual to finish part of the job or provide information, then can't understand (after the two week project has run to six weeks because of their own delays) why I can't now give them 100% of my attention and blame me for the delays.

Now that they've pushed this whole thing so late that it's interfering with other projects, or plans that existed prior to taking Delay Client's project. They had me three weeks ago and chose not to utilize me. Why's that my fault? (not directed at parent - directed at Delay Client)

I've been contracting for several years and I think perhaps enough time to emphasize with my clients even when they can't tell me what they want, so permit me to offer the other other side.

People can't provide a spec because they don't really understand what they want. Sure. And certainly, part of that in many projects is poor communication between stakeholders and a refusal to make decisions.

But especially for public facing sites it's often difficult to impossible to figure out what behaviors or workflows are effective and which are not. Prototypes have to be built, put before the public, A/B tested, etc. This process is time consuming and often results in fundamental changes to the spec that can affect large amounts of code. A spec can't really be written, handed over, implemented, signed off on. So communication and flexibility really has to be built in to the relationship between the stakeholders and the developers.

The thing that I found is really essential to a good relationship with clients is instant messaging. All developers and stakeholders need to work regular hours and be available on IM. Projects where everyone is on IM, in my experience, go much more smoothly than projects where IM isn't used or is only used by part of the team.

The real magic behind IM is that it's a communication method that doesn't necessarily demand immediate attention when a message is sent, so it doesn't interfere with a developer's day the way the phone does. It just changes the status icon color and allows you to respond when you get to a stopping point. But then when you do respond it seamlessly turns into a two way conversation.

I've gotten to the point where "is everyone on IM?" is my principal litmus test for deciding if a project is going to be a pleasant one to work on or not. This is far more important than pretty much anything else, including the quality of the initial spec.

You have to deal with that sort of situation proactively. Ring them up and explain their delays have pushed the project into a period where you have other commitments. Ask how long it will take them to resolve their delays etc. and offer to reschedule the contracted time after that. If they screw you around later politely decline their work.

If you don't respond to the blame they are giving you then they will continue to heap it on you. And that is not a working relationship.

I don't think there's one magical solution. The more we work with you guys, the better we will become at reducing friction and eliminating wasted time in the process. It shouldn't take 5 days for companies to vet potential contractors, like is often the case with oDesk.

You mention a lot of important issues like trust. I'm hoping by being extremely selective (and limiting the number of accepted hackers initially), we'll be able to keep quality and trust high (or make necessary adjustments).

You've hit the nail on the head.

The central value proposition here for employers is delivering talent that you can put faith in.

This definitely offers an interesting solution for those on the other end of the equation as well. As a contractor, a service like this would enable me to work like I was employed by a company without the corporate bullshit. Ideally I would get paid for the tasks I complete with little upfront time investment and know how much I'll get for it. Maybe if this project is really ambitious they could even do only part of the task and someone could do the rest, paying the developers appropriately by percentage.

"If I have a good spec sheet that details exactly what I need done" If you have this you are way ahead of most and most.

If you are not technical then the timing should probably be up for discussion rather than being part of the spec. The developer has the expertise there.

Pricing should (imho) always be up for discussion.

I've been presented with similar versions of your question -- "If I have a good spec sheet that details exactly what I need done, when I need it, at a fair price, will you deliver?"

I think the proper approach, especially if you are not technical, is to just go over the spec. Talk about what I feel is properly fleshed out and where there may be some ambiguities. This way, hopefully, we end up with a situation where I understand your interoperation of the spec and you understand my approach. Any questions, we write down and either go over before commencing work or structure things such that we can address those questions in a reasonable way.

When freelancing, it really is about delivering what the customer wants, not my interpretation of what they want.

I applaud the idea, however vague it may be, but there really isn't anything to see yet. The "application" process seems to be limited to gathering Github usernames with no feedback about what happens afterwards (I assume: nothing). There is no UI, not even a demo or some screenshots, no concept of how this is going to work at all except that it's going to be a marketplace somehow based on reputation. A little more detail and some form of presentation would have been nice.

As a rule I try to be nice and constructive when people show their projects, so don't get me wrong: there is a need for a better freelancing portal and it's great you guys are on it. I'm just not sure how I can give any meaningful feedback based on what you're showing us today.

Interesting thought. Try invoking the Blub paradox here[0]. Who knows who the best hackers are? In some sense, only the best hackers do. On the scale of hacking ability, you can only look down and truly understand what is beneath you. When you look up at people beyond your ability, you have no idea whether or not they are crackpots or 1337 haxors. So, for this website to be effective at all, the people judging and deciding the hackers need to be at the top of the hacking scale to offer any sort of guarantee as to the quality of the hackers listed.

Dipping into personal experience and anecdotes, I don't recognize the names of any of the people organizing the site. To me, this means that the site probably doesn't have the very best hackers running it and so cannot guarantee that they have some of the very best hackers on there. But, I suffer from the paradox/curse of Blub as well, so I have no idea if the people running this are skilled in their hacking abilities or whether it is just a few grad students who put something together last weekend.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

N.B. This comment falls into the same pitfall that the original essay does in that it only considers the field in question to have one dimension. Hackers come in all shapes and colors just as programming languages do.

Hi Zack, this is a really great point. I wouldn't claim to be the best hacker in the world and your insight is spot on as to the problems this introduces. I can say that, like most marketplaces, hackerlist will be ever evolving and dynamic. Our objective and our promise is to increase quality over time.

This means offering the right tools to help companies and freelancers make educated decisions (rating systems, reviews, programming tests, etc). It having dedicated staff to vett programmers and companies.

Specifically in terms of the Blub paradox, I can say that sabalaba and I have used a myriad of different freelance services and have a pretty good idea of the services they are missing. If we are able to curate and nurture a ecosystem with better hackers than any of our competitors, I'll feel proud that we've been able to at least offer our clients a superior service.

I really appreciate your points and I admit this is something we're going to simply have to prove. That's why we're not earning any commissions for our first batch and are keeping our network small enough that we can resolve problems one at a time.

cheers, Zack!

Hi Mek,

As a hacker and freelancer I can tell you that I would not appreciate programming tests.

There are two reasons why I put up with computers and code: 1)I feel like it. I want to make something interesting 2)There is an incentive. Someone is paying me money for my skills and services.

Taking a test falls under neither of these categories. I see it as a waste of my time and there is nothing to show for it

Also, every single programming test that I have seen is just plain terrible. Not to mention there is no way to enforce against cheating. Therefore making the entire process pointless and a hassle for everyone.

Just my two cents..

Cheers!

Small nitpicky feedback: I dread the tagline. I don't really know what oDesk is, and I doubt I want to know. Can't you just say what Hackerlist is, instead of saying what it's almost?

EDIT: And I wonder, are the people listed freelance hackers? They all say they're CEO and CTO somewhere. That sounds like a fulltime job.

What is this? I ask because neither the title nor page give me any indication.

[edit] At the time I asked this the HN title was "Freelancing, solved."

Howdy Maascamp, I hope you're having a nice week. Here's a post from earlier which explains the concept (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4710470)

My co-founder (sabalaba) and I have been working on Hackerlist (http://hackerlist.net) - a selective network of great freelance engineers. This seems like something many of you have been looking for as there are a shocking number of "freelance" posts (from both clients and programmers) on HN each month -- HN ids: 4596379, 4463692, 4323612, 4214767, 4184757, 4053078, 3914001 3783658, 2539892, etc. We admit, at this stage Hackerlist is an experiment. We're only asking for your time and patience -- we'll help you land contracts with top companies, handle the logistics, and you'll keep 100% of your earnings. No catch. We'll handle the vetting process, source contracts, and continuously work one-on-one with you to improve our tech until it serves your needs. Unfortunately, to preserve high quality, we're unable to accept more than 32 candidates and 6 of these spots are already filled. If you'd like to be considered for Hackerlist, email me at michael.karpeles@gmail.com or submit your github username on http://hackerlist.net Our long-term vision is to create a realtime system (think the intersection of mechanical turk, stackoverflow, oDesk) where trusted freelance engineers can immediately clone a git repo, start hacking on a technical problem, and upon completion, get paid what they're worth. P.S. Suggestions and feedback are appreciated -- we don't want to build something you don't need.

Couple of concerns here, although I went ahead and applied just in case. First, I tend to keep my programming "persona" separate from my "regular" persona. That avoids issues with places I've worked or may be working. Second is that my GitHub is rather sparse because most of my clients don't want their code shared. I don't think that's unique to the mobile space (Android/Java and HTML 5 primarily) as when I used to do PL/SQL work I don't recall seeing a lot of code out there other than Oracle samples.

So just curious how you are planning to make this marriage work?

Hi Eric, your github account has a link to your website where (only if you've made it public) I will take the initiative to contact you. I don't intend on excluding people just because their github account doesn't have 20 projects on it. Moreso, it's just a selector for the target demographic. Also, feel free to be creative and put your linked in url or email in if you think that's more representative of your background. Last, but not least, I'm happy to hear more about your talents if you send me an email (michael.karpeles@gmail.com). Sabalaba and I will be going through each submission, one at a time.

As suggested before, we're keeping our first batch of acceptances small so we can better understand the challenges which you face and help you overcome them.

cheers!

Hi there,

I'm in a similar position to Ewan, so this comment comes as a relief to me. I have a portfolio site that's also limited to only projects clients have approved to be made public. Whereas my LinkedIn has more information on what I've done.

I've sent an application with my LinkedIn.

FWIW as a freelancer:

where trusted freelance engineers can immediately clone a git repo, start hacking on a technical problem, and upon completion, get paid what they're worth

The problem needing to be solved in this field is not exactly where you're aiming. I can count on one hand the number of good clients I've had who had a DVCS ready to clone and work on :)

The market you mention is probably fairly small, and not hugely lucrative. (as you noted, you are keeping your initial pool of hackers small)

But if you want a wider problem to solve: there are many many small companies looking for hackers to come in and get them on the right track (DVCS, proper deployment mechanisms, backups, security, etc.).

Just food for thought, good luck with the site!

I think I understand what you're explaining, but I'm not sure. Can you give an example how someone would use this website if they're a freelancer and how someone would use this site if they're looking for a freelancer? All I see is an input box for a github username and nothing else to click; not sure if I'm missing something or the site is just a list for now?

Hi citricsquid, you're right -- the website is very plain and not entirely helpful. For our first batch, we will be working directly with accepted engineers, offering them the opportunity to work with several companies who have already expressed interested in the hackerlist network.

In the future, we'll provide an interface which is very similar to oDesk. The main difference will be, we plan on changing the process to remove a lot of the pain points that clients and freelancers currently face (vetting, interviews, payment, and all the other time wasting blockers).

If you'd like to setup a time to chat, I'd be happy to tell you more about our next steps and would love to listen to your suggestions and needs. (michael.karpeles@gmail.com)

TL;DR - Hackerlist is an oDesk alternative specifically for talented engineers.

You should lead with that and put something similar at the top of your website.

Edit: Nice, just noticed changes on your site. You guys are fast.

Second, you should use this as your leading title. Makes it much easier to understand.

Put a description on your site... it's basic user experience stuff.

Also limiting the slots has no point at all.

The whole thing seems like a totally incomplete concept that was created in half an hour.

And "a selective network of great freelance engineers"; seriously? It's a single static page with images and a couple of links per person...

Hi Hansi, I'm really thankful for the feedback. We'll work on creating a page with additional information (FAQs).

You're right about one thing -- the service is very much incomplete. Our philosophy is to continue to talk to customers (hackers and companies) and minimize the amount of building we do without their blessing.

In terms of the limiting the network size, we know we're going to encounter problems (we're counting on it!). As a result, we want to make sure we'll have the resources to spend time with each of our customers during early alpha stages.

I'd love to hear your feedback on how we can improve the site. Do you hire contractors or are you looking for opportunities? Let me know how I can help.

So you are providing a service like Odesk. There certainly is a huge need for this right now. Just come out and say it. Put a blurb on the site, something like:

"Hackerlist allows you to hire a skilled worker without the need to interview them one by one. Join, define a task, price it, and get results from great engineers. Hackerlist works with a pool of some of the best technical talent to deliver what you need. No resources wasted on poor results. Streamline your work process by taking care of finding the niche talent you need to get things done"

Exactly, I would say the biggest problem with oDesk is that it takes so long just to start hacking. The process should ideally be:

1) Claim a project you like 2) Clone the repo, start hacking 3) Get paid

instead of

1) Apply to a project 2) Wait for a response 3) Schedule a skype interview 4) Skype 5) Start hacking, email a zip file (I've honestly been asked to do this) 6) Get paid

Thanks for the feedback Zephyr, we'll update the site shortly

I need to find skilled Unity game engine coders. It would be awesome to have Unity icons at the bottom like the ones for their other credentials.

Howdy lxpk, I might know some programmers who are a good fit. We'll be sure to throw you some free credits when the marketplace officially opens. Keep in touch and email me if you have any questions - michael.karpeles@gmail.com

Ummm... that's kind of a broad statement. Are you looking for folks who can use Unity to create desktop games? Mobile? Looking for stuff compatible with the web player? Unless you were just using that as an example and don't have a current pressing need.

We make Code Hero, a game that teaches how to make games and that teach everything else.

http://www.primerlabs.com

The open alpha is desktop Mac/Win/Linux only for now as we use dynamic compilation tricks not available in the mobile build targets till we do workarounds or modify Unity's source code. We're going to release the beta on Steam.

We need coders with C# and Unityscript skills sufficient for turning the Unity runtime into an MMO IDE. We're at 4 coders right now plus 3 volunteers.

I'm as much interested in having the community highlight Unity game programmers for other Unity game developers with similar hiring needs as I am for our own.

I don't understand this obsession with GitHub. I have a GitHub account, but it's not much used -- mostly for my clients who use it, and for forking some projects I want to play with. But I have much more work on BitBucket, since I use Mercurial heavily for my own projects.

We use github as one filter for developers applying to matchist (http://matchist.com/talent) but I'm weary of using it as the ONLY filter.

Many developers use github as a private repository of code (by choice or by necessity from their clients) or don't use github at all. Does either of these make them a bad developer? Not in my opinion.

I understand you have to draw the line somewhere (we do at matchist too) in terms of setting a base qualification but I personally don't feel github is that base qualification.

I immediately thought of: http://geekli.st/

Just curious how this is differentiated? That it's restricted to users on HN?

Howdy brandall, great question.

Geeklist is a great idea for building community and sharing. This just isn't a problem we're trying to solve.

Hackerlist provide a premium network to match skilled engineering freelancers with companies. It seems like a lot of people currently rely on hackernews freelance posts to accomplish such. Current competitors like oDesk tend to underpay, lack the same quality standards, and don't specialize exclusively in skilled engineering jobs.

I think toptal.com does something similar but it is focused on recruiting freelancers rather than providing a useful odesk-like interface.

Cool idea, but the UI needs to come up a bit to match the 'world class' connotation being delineated.

hahaha this is noisebridge up in here. hi guys!

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