I've found small contract jobs through Dice and jobs.perl.org.
Ask HN: where's a good place to look for smart contract work?
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: Ask HN: where's a good place to look for smart contract work?
#12If you have cash in reserve until the end of the year, why not get serious and launch your own product based startup?
With some emphasis in marketing, you could quite easily bank $5k-10k from the product and be in a good position to show off your project (that is already making moola!) for winter YC.
Re: Ask HN: where's a good place to look for smart contract work?
#13If you have cash in reserve until the end of the year, why not get serious and launch your own product based startup? With some emphasis in marketing, you could quite easily bank $5k-10k from the product and be in a good position to show off your project (that is already making moola!) for winter YC.
Because I went broke at a previous startup and am paranoid about having cash in the bank.
Re: Ask HN: where's a good place to look for smart contract work?
#14My advice: Attend networking events, meetups etc. Tell people you are looking for work, most of my work has come through friends (which you have seem to done) Charge what your worth beginning day one, maybe cut your personal friends a discount, but doing work for next to nothing to build your portfolio is great, but trying to raise your price afterwards is very very hard. To answer your original question: check dice.…
How do you know what you're worth? I've read "post your salary" threads and other things that show up on yc or programming.reddit, but I still can't really tell.
And notice a flaw in all "what I am billing threads": they are positing a 40-hour week average, whole year round. Maybe in a hyperactive market it is possible to do that, but I think it would be fair to posit at most 2/3 uptime (out of about 250 work days per year). Why so low? You will spend considerable periods in downtime, looking for gigs.
Re: Ask HN: where's a good place to look for smart contract work?
#15You didn't say what sort of contract work. You are doing a "startup" yet getting into contract work is also a "startup." They are both businesses and any business takes time to build up to a point where you can make a living from that business. It also takes time. There will likely be times when you are freelancing where you don't have enough time or energy left over at the end of the day to work on your other projec…
I should mention that I worked as a contractor for 5 years, so I'm familiar with how to manage contract-based employment. However, this was on the opposite coast, and since I've been in the Bay Area, I've been working at other people's startups. I'm a bit out of the contractor networking loop.
What I'm looking for is some piece of something a startup wants or needs to do immediately, but doesn't have time.
I'm altering the details on this example so that I'm not breaking an NDA, but the most promising candidate out of the leads I've received is an online service that needs a simple desktop based upload/sync application. I'd be writing the upload/sync app. Stuff like that is what I'm most interested in.
Re: Ask HN: where's a good place to look for smart contract work?
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you know what you're worth? I've read "post your salary" threads and other things that show up on yc or programming.reddit, but I still can't really tell.
And notice a flaw in all "what I am billing threads": they are positing a 40-hour week average, whole year round. Maybe in a hyperactive market it is possible to do that, but I think it would be fair to posit at most 2/3 uptime (out of about 250 work days per year). Why so low? You will spend considerable periods in downtime, looking for gigs.
Only the good posts tend to talk about that. You will not 40 on billable stuff, unless you are crazy. There is a bunch of admin/business work to account for, that leaves you billing less than 40 hours per week, at least with still having some sort of life.
Re: Ask HN: where's a good place to look for smart contract work?
#17My advice: Attend networking events, meetups etc. Tell people you are looking for work, most of my work has come through friends (which you have seem to done) Charge what your worth beginning day one, maybe cut your personal friends a discount, but doing work for next to nothing to build your portfolio is great, but trying to raise your price afterwards is very very hard. To answer your original question: check dice.…
How do you know what you're worth? I've read "post your salary" threads and other things that show up on yc or programming.reddit, but I still can't really tell.
A quick and dirty baseline is to take your yearly salary and divide by 1000, giving you an hourly rate.
Re: Ask HN: where's a good place to look for smart contract work?
#18My advice: Attend networking events, meetups etc. Tell people you are looking for work, most of my work has come through friends (which you have seem to done) Charge what your worth beginning day one, maybe cut your personal friends a discount, but doing work for next to nothing to build your portfolio is great, but trying to raise your price afterwards is very very hard. To answer your original question: check dice.…
How do you know what you're worth? I've read "post your salary" threads and other things that show up on yc or programming.reddit, but I still can't really tell.
My short and fast rule Is charge about 4-6x your hourly salary of doing equivalent work. You pay more taxes, you are not receiving benefits, and most of all you are doing difficult work. Of course there are exceptions to this rule.
If you make $20/hr slinging code. Consulting that be $80/hr. May seem high, but really it is quite low. The big boys charge $250/hr. I think that rate is fair for small businesses.
If you need justification for charging a certain fee. Research numbers on how much it costs to actually hire someone full-time and all the extra costs associated with it. Time, Interviews, Job board placements, training, benefits(big costs long haul). If your being hired to do something you know and pretty much getting going on day one, they should be paying a decent sum of money for you, because you had already done the legwork, you step in and work.
You are also temporary to them if the contract ends(a.k.a they fire you), as employee you get unemployment(extra cost to the company), exit interviews, more time and money wasted. If you an IC the contract ends, what are you going to do. Look for the next gig, more time spent with no money coming in.
My favorite pricing quote is the one about the artist, name escapes me. A lady asks him to paint her caricature of face and he get out a piece of paper, paints a few lines and she says it's amazing and ask how much, he says 5k or something. She says thats ridiculous it took you five minutes. He responds no it took me my whole life.
I'm not saying I'm picasso or monet or whatever, but the work you do today will be added to your overall experience and knowledge that you will apply to the jobs of tomorrow, and you should be compensated for that. i also don't change $1000/min (it be nice) - sorry for rambling
Re: Ask HN: where's a good place to look for smart contract work?
#19My advice: Attend networking events, meetups etc. Tell people you are looking for work, most of my work has come through friends (which you have seem to done) Charge what your worth beginning day one, maybe cut your personal friends a discount, but doing work for next to nothing to build your portfolio is great, but trying to raise your price afterwards is very very hard. To answer your original question: check dice.…
How do you know what you're worth? I've read "post your salary" threads and other things that show up on yc or programming.reddit, but I still can't really tell.
How do you know what you're worth?
Think about what you need to make, and double it. Then double it again. You're probably getting close to what you ought to charge. I expect to pay $50-$200/hour when I hire a contractor (depending on whether they are famous for what they do or not), and when I did contract work I billed at $125/hour. I was reasonably well-known for the field I contracted in, with a published book and code sprinkled throughout the project I supported, and my name appearing daily on the related mailing list--I probably should have been charging more, as I never lost a customer because I cost too much.
Someone once told me that if you, as a contractor, don't get a response of "fuck you!" in response to your estimates about half the time, you aren't charging enough. That's probably really good advice. You'll work less, but work better, because you can really devote yourself to the clients you do have. This assumes that you are really good. If you aren't really good, then you'll just have to take what work you can get at whatever rate you can get. Doing fantastic work fast is more important than working cheap, because people will recommend you if you're good and expensive (they'll say, "This guy is a bit pricey, but he does amazing work") but probably not if you do crap work and don't pay enough attention to them (if they say anything at all about you, they'll say, "I can never get this guy on the phone, and he does sloppy work, but he works cheap").
If you were hiring a contractor, which of those choices would you call? And which kind of customer would you rather work for? The cheap customer always demands even more than he's already getting, and expects to be treated like a king for it. The customer that wants great work is grateful when he finally finds someone that will deliver--at just about any price.
Also note that the larger the corporation, the more you need to charge to deal with their red tape. You will have to invoice according to their rules, you will have to keep yourself updated in their vendor database, you will have to deal with additional tax forms, and you will have to get sign-off on projects from more people. Working in a big corporation will also drain the life from you at an alarming clip, because they will have meetings over the stupidest crap--you'll be getting paid huge sums for eating donuts and listening to endless arguments over what to name a table or a variable, but you will probably die a little inside, as well. After my first couple of experiences with big corporations, I began to charge extra for soul death (that's not how it appeared on the invoice...I just added another $25/hour to the rate).
Re: Ask HN: where's a good place to look for smart contract work?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you know what you're worth? I've read "post your salary" threads and other things that show up on yc or programming.reddit, but I still can't really tell.
My short and fast rule Is charge about 4-6x your hourly salary of doing equivalent work. You pay more taxes, you are not receiving benefits, and most of all you are doing difficult work. Of course there are exceptions to this rule. If you make $20/hr slinging code. Consulting that be $80/hr. May seem high, but really it is quite low. The big boys charge $250/hr. I think that rate is fair for small businesses. If you…
>My favorite pricing quote is the one about the artist, name escapes me.
I've heard that story. It's probably apocryphal, but instructional.
The artist is Picasso (at least in the variation I encountered).