Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?

#151

Post by ghaff » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

menaerus wrote: post #143

leros wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't found these fractional sites to be very useful for development work. The rates are low and the few dev jobs already have 100s of applications.

I see rates around $100 all the way up to $200. Is that really considered low in the States?

Probably mediocre. Even absent being a source of full-time income accounting for the fact that there's going to be a lot of unpaid/dead time, I personally won't take a job for less than $1K for a day+-ish unless it's really interesting or I'm doing a favor for someone I know.

(One of the issues with short-term fractional work as an income source is that you can end up only being paid for a fairly small percentage of your total time. If the rate is good, that may be fine as a part-time job. But in my prior industry analyst stint, we actually had quite good day rates but we spent most of our time keeping up with industry happenings and writing free stuff.)

Re: Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?

#152

Post by shinypenguin » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 2:16 PM UTC

dj_axl wrote: post #59

Any niche? I mean, possibly large-scale data processing, yet I've seen people go more niche than that. In other words if your resume has 5+ years in one particular industry then that might be whom to target.

My niche is basically - I'm building distributed systems with minimal external dependencies that are fast and work reliably on the minimal amount of hardware/complexity. I do focus mainly on data processing and gathering. The result is, that my client does not need that many servers or that big of a devops team to manage the service and it's reliable and scalable.

For example, I have build events gathering distributed system in Elixir (without external systems) that handled 930m events (33k reqs on peak hours) per day on 2 dedicated servers and that was only because minimal HA was required. It resulted in processing and aggregating of few billions of rows per day, in almost real time (few seconds behind realtime). It's still up to this day, few years later with only outages being updates of OS and Elixir/erlang updates to the app.

I love learning and understanding things - do you know of any niche that would fit mine and where I could go deeper with my knowledge and experience?

Re: Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?

#153

Post by em-bee » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 2:25 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #123

thekevan wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found when people ask this question, it's usually because they don't have a network to ask. Or, right or wrong, they just don't like the social aspect of going to their friends for work.

To be fair, there's a good argument for never mixing friends and business. You wouldn't want a project that goes wrong (which is a risk of doing business and somewhat expected and budgeted for on both sides) to jeopardize an friendship, and similarly you wouldn't want someone exploiting your friendship to get an unfair advantage in business (that they will often not reciprocate if the situation was reversed).

from one tech friend i learned this, after a failed project of his that cost him a friendship: make friends through business, but don't do business with friends.

Re: Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?

#154

Post by em-bee » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 2:28 PM UTC

doright wrote: post #126

ghaff wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly don't think it's shameful. But, while that's more or less what LinkedIn was intended for, it's also become sort of a last man standing medium for professional professional posts--or at least pointers to such--unless you can organically drive enough traffic to a subscription or a website.

I guess the reality is, what we term "shameful, amoral, slimy and vapid LinkedIn spammers" are actually thousands of relatively like-minded people all saying some variation of "please let me get/keep a job or I won't be able to keep living" in just a creative/repetitive enough fashion that one or more recruiters/persons who know other people will keep them in orbit for the next source of income. I have been on the ot…

i don't quite understand what caused the no more paychecks, if you were on the other side of this...

Re: Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?

#155

Post by shinypenguin » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 2:29 PM UTC

cauliflower99 wrote: post #148

6 week contract at my company (not sure what your skillset is though): https://zinkworks.teamtailor.com/jobs/5678393-dba-graphdb-6-...

Thank you for the link, sadly I don't have enough experience with graphdb, so it's outside of my skillset.

Re: Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?

#156

Post by shinypenguin » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 2:31 PM UTC

dubeye wrote: post #150

It would seem that marketing was not one of your responsibilities in past roles

Definitely not, I was always in strong technical roles - any pointers where to start with marketing? :)

Re: Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?

#157

Post by em-bee » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 2:33 PM UTC

aaronbaugher wrote: post #116

ryandrake wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the self-promotion part that's seen as slimy and shameful. Yes, as an employee I trade my time for money, but I don't write blog posts at the office about what kind of transformational and high-impact work I'm capable of, and about this week's top-10 coding life-hacks, and how I can single-handedly turn your project around from life support to on-schedule deployment. Admittedly, the people who are good a…

As one of the other replies (nested too deep to reply to directly) said, many of us were raised to be humble and self-effacing, especially about skills related to innate abilities like intelligence. So it feels unseemly to say, in essence, "Hey, you should hire me because I'm great at X, Y, and Z." It feels weird enough to list skills and accomplishments in a resume, but overtly selling yourself feels wrong. Maybe pe…

that only works if we know each other very well. every time someone tried to talk me up i felt more awkward than if i had done it myself, because that person didn't know me well enough to actually judge that. the only talking up by someone else that i can tolerate is: "i have worked with this guy and i would hire him (again)"

Re: Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?

#158

Post by em-bee » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 2:47 PM UTC

Asraelite wrote: post #142

magicstefanos wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feeding your family is the more "ethical" thing here

I get what you're saying, but this reasoning has always rubbed me the wrong way. You will often hear scammers and con artists justify what they do by saying it's the only way they have to support their family. It's like, why is your family more important than any other family in the world? It's still a selfish act.

disagree. feeding your own family IS more important to you. it has to be, because that is your responsibility. you are not responsible for other families. not at the expense of your own.

the question is rather: why is unethical behavior the only way to feed your family?

in case of the suggestion to just quit after 9 months i would say that if there is no other way to get work, then what choice do they have? this is similar to lying about the intention to have children. some might consider lying unethical, but it is so important that it is in fact legally protected in some countries.

Re: Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?

#159

Post by Asraelite » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

em-bee wrote: post #158

Asraelite wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're saying, but this reasoning has always rubbed me the wrong way. You will often hear scammers and con artists justify what they do by saying it's the only way they have to support their family. It's like, why is your family more important than any other family in the world? It's still a selfish act.

disagree. feeding your own family IS more important to you. it has to be, because that is your responsibility. you are not responsible for other families. not at the expense of your own. the question is rather: why is unethical behavior the only way to feed your family? in case of the suggestion to just quit after 9 months i would say that if there is no other way to get work, then what choice do they have? this is s…

> you are not responsible for other families.

Why not? Do you not consider yourself at all responsible for the wellbeing of society?

Re: Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?

#160

Post by liammoore » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

A lot of the advice here about networking and marketing yourself is solid, but I want to address this part of your question directly - “Do you know of any project boards or feature bounty platforms to find short-term projects?”

I’ve faced a similar issue with traditional freelancing platforms, so I ended up building a platform where experienced engineers can work with agencies to manage and deliver projects. It’s a different model from traditional outsourcing, where you can either bring your own projects or get matched with ones based on your skillset. You’d be in a technical leadership role, helping build and manage a team of developers to deliver the project. You can also have as much hands-on involvement with the coding as you choose. It could be a good fit for you given your situation and experience. I’ve written a blog detailing the idea in more detail, feel free to check it out and reach out with questions - https://sourceror.co.uk/blog/how-tech-leaders-can-gain-exper...