Bountify – Crowdsource small coding tasks | Hacker News Reader

Bountify – Crowdsource small coding tasks

bountify.co

49 pointsredDragon31 comments

Open articleView on HN

I love specialized task-oriented marketplaces like this and hope several of these take off.

The only other that I'm aware of at the moment is Tweaky.com.

Tweaky appears to focus on front-end development while I see a back-end task or two at Bountify.co.

Another difference is the minimum price. Tweaky is at $39 and Bountify is at $1.

Are there other big differences between the two?

I would hesitate to jump into a marketplace with low minimum prices because I have been groomed to 'get what I pay for' with development. It's hard to imagine that $39 is sufficient for a lot of tasks let alone $1.

As a person currently in the market for developers:

Finding a front-end rock star went well although it was slow going. We filled that position within a couple months and have asked that developer to source to Tweaky (and to check out Bountify) for spillover until/if/when we need to hire another person in-house. Our in-house developer would audit/implement changes coming from Tweaky/Bountify.

Finding a back-end/systems engineer rock star is turning out to be a bigger challenge for us and at this moment I would find a lot of value in a verified systems engineering marketplace to source work to. I find Bountify appealing in that sense although I would wait for a high quality validation procedure before sourcing systems work to a 3rd party. Even then, I would only allow access to a test environment with a requirement for instructions on rolling the changes live so I could bring in somebody who has worked closely with me to audit and implement that solution.

The bottom line for me: I am very much in favor of this type of specialized marketplace and am glad to see Bountify.co enter the arena.

Another one that's been around for a while is http://www.wpquestions.com/ (and they actually have a network of sites now - see sidebar)

Very cool, thank you for sharing!

@jameszol, please add http://freedomsponsors.org to your list ;-)

Noted, thank you!

Some of the tasks are at least an hours worth of work and they are offering a bounty of 1$?

You need to prune these types of job listings, they're just spam and completely unrealistic.

Example: https://bountify.co/1c

Solid days worth of work. Tweaking, designing, etc.

50 bucks! That's terrible. Any thoughts on how to mitigate this problem?

Most users, including myself, provide solutions for fun. Look on StackOverflow; a lot of answers are very involved, and it's a free service. Bountify is like a Stack Overflow for code tasks, with a bonus of beer money if your solution is selected. Bottom line is that it's mostly for fun, as the bounty amounts are trivial wherever you live.

Developers don't need money for pizza or beer, but here's a thought - give 20% of that money to charity.

Right now users have the option to donate their bounty winnings to charity, which some are doing.

Very nice!

I would rather do something for free than have to worry about the extra accounting declaring lots of $1 amounts to the tax department entails.

If you donate your winnings to charity (a feature provided on Bountify), there are no accounting issues to worry about.

In the US you don't have to declare income under (i believe) $500 from a single source in a given year. So if you earned 5,000 $1 payments, each from a different source you would have to declare NONE of them. If you earned 1,000 $100 payments from different sources you wouldn't have to declare those either.

Personally I'd rather do something for free that benefits the general public than for someone who just seems to be a cheap bastard. Now, if it were coding for an open source project and getting payed trivial wages because the project has no money and devs just need help getting something done... maybe.

Looks pretty cool, I can definitely imagine outsourcing some easy-but-long tasks. I think that you should not aim at becomming "stack overflow with bounties" but a real marketplace, so the "do it for fun and a few beer bucks" tasks should be pruned.

I'm pretty sure I'd use this sometimes as well, especially when struggling to find bugs and needing another eye on the code.

I think the few-bucks posts will probably fall away over time as more serious requests get posted.

Great idea.

As someone who wants a small project to try out a new framework, this seems like a great site to find projects.

It might be helpful to have users flag tasks that they are working on, so that others can get a sense of how many people are currently working on an answer.

Thanks for the feedback! That's an interesting idea. Right now, registered users can click "I'm working on it" on a given bounty to privately signal to the bounty creator that they have started work. I was hesitant to make the list of current workers public because it might dissuade other would-be solution providers from answering, since they might assume that the other user is almost done with the problem (when they might not have done anything at all). I might add in some kind of "I'm working on it" track record for each user, so people can see how often they actually solved problems they said they'd be working on. Thanks for bringing that up.

Hmmm... I guess I am worried about the opposite. The fact that lots of people might be working on it and I might be wasting my time.

Perhaps allow partial answers?

I have seen this happen often with StackOverflow. Were a person gives a one line answer to start things off, and then within 30 minutes elaborates the answer to a very detailed one.

Recently, I've been thinking about how it might be possible to improve the current model of how commercial software development is done today.

I was thinking along these lines:

A company has a Github repository with several tasks. Independent developers choose tasks, fork the repository and upon completion of the task send a merge request. The company would then review the committed code and upon approval pay the developer.

While this at the first glimpse seems like a pretty simple and feasible model there are obviously quite a few gotchas:

1.) How can companies make sure developers don't use their source code for their own purposes? 2.) How can a company make sure it's not wasting time on a developer? There would have to be some sort of rating system. 3.) How could you break down more complex tasks so developers don't have to spend weeks just to understand the software they're working on. 4.) Is it possible at all to accomplish non-trivial tasks on a complex software system one doesn't have at least some sort of training on? 5.) How would you make sure a company actually pays the developer upon task completion?

Quite a few problems, indeed. Nevertheless, do you think such a concept might have legs?

>do you think such a concept might have legs?

I do! I have been thinking about this much like you BjoernKW.. my dream is individual bid able pivotal tasks, that are part of a coherent whole agile project. When organized the right way, the fastest person to complete them on a distributed team wins, and there would be no limit of team size.

I actually ran a request on Bountify, and it was cool. There was some pushback for programmers who thought it was too much of a project for low $, while others enjoyed completing it for the challenge (and actually got paid).

Plenty of challenges (in making this really work for companies), but I believe Bountify has a good start here.

I'm trying it out at the mo.. It seems to be fairly full of Google searchers.. The fact that there are so many $1 means I thought by going in at $10 I would get a good response.. I've had quite a few, but there's no incentive for the responder to test their solution that it has met the test.. It's like Stack Overflow in that the first to respond often wins.

Interesting idea! I only had a quick look around the website but still have a couple questions:

1.How does the poster verify a solution?

2.If verification involves looking at the code, what's stopping the poster from just copying the code?

If the bounty poster requests code, they would verify it by running that code on their own. Most bounty creators are programmers themselves, so that is not a big issue for most users. Non-technical users have posted bounties as well, but they generally request deliverables that are easy to verify, such as complete html pages or website widgets they can drop into an existing page.

An unscrupulous bounty creator could indeed steal a working solution and post it as their own. However, any attempt would be quite obvious, as there is a "Timeline" for each Bounty that shows every revision of every solution in the order it was created. In practice, there have been no disputes or stolen solutions on the site thus far.

Hope that answered your questions!

Personally, I would remove the bounty price restriction, and find a way to allow the market to let the all good listings rise the top, and bad ones towards the bottom.

Lots of $1 spam.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm considering revising the bounty amount options and will most likely remove the $1 category.

Another solution would be to allow people to stack up bounties. Like the upvote system in SO in fact.

I like the idea of the solution being presented. This way you do not work only for money, but money do come as a bonus

http://freedomsponsors.org (disclaimer - I'm the founder) has a bounty system like that.

One difference is that users are encouraged to place bounties for existing issues on open source projects issues - the main goal on FS is to kickstart Free Software projects - but you can place a bounty for an "unlinked" task much like Bountify, like this one --> http://www.freedomsponsors.org/core/issue/13/a-complete-jee-...

Another big difference is that there's no money escrow. You pay after the task is done, if you're happy with the result.

Looks great, but why do you need to have the ability to update my GitHub profile when signing up?

Hi @olegp, I'm the founder of Bountify. Thanks for the kudos! Unfortunately, the only way to get the user's email and github url is to request the "user" scope, which has write access. Bountify will never edit your Github account, but I understand that's besides the point, it's a terrible thing to ask for. I plan to work around this ASAP, as I imagine it's dissuading quite a few would-be users. Thanks for the feedback!

Hi everyone, I'm the creator of Bountify. I'm very grateful for all your comments! A great deal of the site's current features were built based on feedback from HN, so if you have any other suggestions for making the site better I'd greatly appreciate it.

Great concept and implementation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com