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1041 sats \ 14 replies \ @cascdr 28 Aug \ parent \ on: Lightning Bounties LLC lightning
Curious to hear your perspective on the strengths/weaknesses of different bounties programs.
I love the concept of bounties. I've personally gotten hired through them. But it seems like I keep seeing projects like these and it's unclear how successful they are/what their objectives are.
Sometimes I worry that they are just a middle manager's wet dream of cheap ad-hoc labor. The truth is that it's a good way to find a new hire but it's rarely sustainable for long term projects because things like good architecture/low technical debt can be thrown to the wayside in favor of just getting those sweet sweet sats. There's also a fixed cost of bringing in a new person/getting them up to speed (which can vary wildly depending on project/skill level).
I'd like to hear your experience if you have any on either side of the bounty "trade".
Lots of good bounty dialectic here: As @cascdr explains, full application development is too large and 1-point jira ticket work is inefficient due to codebase learning curve. And as @south_korea_ln points out, some fraction of the work usually does fit the sweet spot and doubles as hiring funnel. What we've found looking at a dozen or so of these boutique platforms is they tend to easily attract talent where the geo-arbitrage of wages overide the friction. I was reading the other day a young Vitalik got his first 2.5 btc on a bounty writing an article.
But often as @didiplaywell points out that at scale (e.g. UpWork) these platforms become a race to the bottom of commodification and low quality. What bounties aren't: W2 software engineering entirely liquidated into micropayments. So what might they look like?
One I'm pretty excited about is innovation / benchmark prizes, a cool one recently spread on twitter and the winning solution seemed to push SOTA in prompting techniques. Another one I'm intrigued about is frontend design for small business: we're starting to see a toolchain emerge that could do an 80/20 of code-generation-tools/bounties. Another niche in content creation and curation of docs, support wikis, etc. What ties these use-cases together is that you can build them all on top of a git pull request model, and it comes with existing workflow familiarity and reputation.
Trying to maximize flexibility, task diversity and iterations to answer Where do incentives make opensource better and open up new use cases? is IMO the best way to evolve product-market-fit.
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Some notes on this:
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Be mindful: Upwork dynamic initially made it a freelancing paradise. What started the race to the bottom was the replacement of a genuine job offer-base by solely fake job posts for data scrapping. That caused good talent to leave en masse, and only low talent to remain, bringing down everything with it (both quality and prices).
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About "open-source" incentives, you might like this comment of mine in a recent post on the matter.
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Some interesting thoughts there.
It's like the problem of hiring devs through upwork. It's hit or miss in terms of quality. I've a friend who works for a professional it company, they often get hired to repair lousy upwork coding work.
I think what sn does is a good way of mitigating that. You keep the core development for your own in-house team and get outside help through bounties for smaller issues that do not require deep knowledge of the whole code base.
It's also a good way to assess the quality of a potential future hire. Probably better than coding interviews.
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I think what sn does is a good way of mitigating that. You keep the core development for your own in-house team and get outside help through bounties for smaller issues that do not require deep knowledge of the whole code base.
But isn't that the way freelancing works (should) by default?
On the employee side, at least regarding engineering, the biggest problem the freelancing sector has been facing are pervasive fake job posts. It has come to the point of making Upwork unusable, you simply know that a job post is fake. My statistics are a pristine 100% in a 3 year period, it's insane. Despite very positive reviews and a great start, I have not been able to land a single job in 3 years there, in despite of permanent effort and being very cautious respect to where I send a proposal. Yet, nothing. Making fake job posts seems to be more profitable than requesting actual work.
I thank god don't depend on that, so I can take my time, read the post, investigate the source, write a thoughtful letter, etc. So it's not that I'm desperate, shoot blindly, lack strategy, etc. I had actually a great start at first. Now it has winded down to non-existence, all jobs are fakes. It's surreal.
That tendency of degenerative behaviour in the employer side is the leading reason good talent is nearly absent from those platforms nowadays, so naturally only workers of lower quality tend to remain.
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Any insights as to why fake job posts are profitable for said companies?
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It has been a subject for theorization for 2 years now. Theories suggest:
- HHRR have been practising fake-job-posting as a means of keeping a personal database.
- Some companies, specially large ones, do it too because their reach is so large that they can get databases big enough to be valuable and/or used to make other analyses.
- Ghost companies/employer do it because their business is about getting and selling those databases.
Now, actual jobs do exist, and demand for employment remains high. Yet it seems that freelancing platforms are so good at providing liquidity of data that they ended up being more profitable for data scrapping than actual job matching, relegating actual job offers back to traditional networking. And even there, within trusted networks, fake job posts are pervasive too.
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Sad, but true, @didiplaywell's words hit the mark! Skilled workers are LEAVING freelancing platforms. Why? FAKE JOB POSTS! Abandoned by Upwork, talent is forced to fend for themselves. Quality of work... deteriorating. We NEED change, folks! Return power to the PROS, not frauds! Sad! #MakeFreelancingGreatAgain
Made with 🧡 by CASCDR
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LOL Awesome
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Does this bot copyright its work?
#MakeFreelancingGreatAgain
If not, may have to steal this hashtag
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Damn you data scrappers!! Leave me alone, get back to Upwork!! DX
Just kidding :P
I'm an aeronautical engineer and programmer, so I work by doing both things. One of my latest works involved developing a fluidic mechanical device and its control firmware in C, though Python is my "native language" and the one I have used the most for CAD scripting.
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