Live data from Hacker News

How I Hired Someone On Craigslist And Quadrupled My Productivity

hackthesystem.com

1–10 of 129 posts

Re: How I Hired Someone On Craigslist And Quadrupled My Productivity

#2
This is an interesting and funny experiment, but I believe it's success lies in the fact that the author lucked out and found someone who could actually help with his work for $8 an hour.

I didn't watch the videos, but from the text it sounds like the lady was more like a good coworker, certainly better than your average minimum wage slapper.

Re: How I Hired Someone On Craigslist And Quadrupled My Productivity

#3
"Social working" -- I always thought this was the most important takeaways from XP and agile methodologies, that the highest quality work gets done when we tell each other what we're going to do ahead of time (agile/scrum), and then collaborate in the most literal sense by sharing one screen (pair programming) to see that the work gets done in the best possible way. Granted there are surely lots of other takeaways, but those are two things I did take, and I only do one of them.

Re: How I Hired Someone On Craigslist And Quadrupled My Productivity

#4
I think it's a neat and creative idea, but I wonder about its long-term effectiveness as they get to know one another better. It's easy to be embarrassed when making mistakes in front of someone you don't know at all, because there still exists that social awkwardness between the two. But get to know someone well enough and it's much easier to shrug off. Maybe he should just hire someone new every few weeks to keep things fresh?

Re: How I Hired Someone On Craigslist And Quadrupled My Productivity

#8
Ignoring the moronic link bait about slapping, essentially what he did was apply pair programming to writing. It would make far more economic sense to do this as well, since the level of entry to get a person to pair with to write is far lower than for a programmer, so kudos.
Post reply on HN