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Comment by dmragone | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised more public projects don't run as bounty-style "build x and get $1 million" type systems. Rather than picking who's going to do what (or worse, building all in-house), having many different small times competing for one pot seems like it might be a better way to get a good starting foundation. Or perhaps that's a crazy idea for something as big as this.

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Who has time to build a $1M system and only potentially get paid for it? I know the basement Lisp hacker[1] probably thinks he could cobble it together in a weekend, but the reality is that these are huge systems. How could you get a team of people to build a system with a $1M budget without knowing if they'd ever get paid? How would the bounty be awarded? How would they know the winner produced software that is up to snuff? Would there be multiple parallel betas? Would this system encourage people to cut corners? Would the person choosing the winner be able to just give their buddy the prize and turn down everybody else?

[1] at this very moment I'm in my basement, hacking on some Lisp

Do you think any decent consultancy is going to be willing to invest millions of £ into building a system where they will most likely be able to recover none of it?

OTOH , more uk government code is being released as open source. So in theory any developer could study the source and offer to fix bugs/add features and give a more accurate estimate. This might increase competition.

Because the best aren't going to put good work into a project that will probably just get thrown away.

If you entered a bounty project with two hundred other entries (all of which have systems similar to yours), would you put hundreds of hours and all of your effort into the project in spite of the fact that there's only a 0.5% chance you'll get paid? Not if you want to stay in business.

The size of the project is barely even relevant, take a look at bounty programs that are up now for areas like design (99designs, etc) and how they are chastised for pumping out bad products from designers who are only putting a fraction of effort into the projects.

This type of system sounds great for those looking for cheap labor, but in practice it falls apart.

It might not lead to savings though. Suppose that the normal contract price is $1,000,000. If you have a bunch of small firms try to build the system, each on only gets the reward with probability p = Prob(they succeed and they get picked out of all the successful firms). A firm would only participate if the reward were greater than $1,000,000/p.

That's spec work.

Yes, that seems quite obvious, which is why it puzzles me that you took the time to post it.

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