Even without the first free minute and time spent reading questions, the most a dev could hope to earn with this service is ($0.75/min)(60 min/hr) = $45/hr. Perhaps for students or devs who barely meet the 100 rep minimum requirement, that might be attractive, but for the experts who've written the best Stack Overflow answers, that's likely to be a (small) fraction of their bill rate.
Free contribution is rewarding as a means of helping.
Well-paid contribution is rewarding for the $$$.
Poorly paid contribution often loses both incentives.
I have had issues that took me several hours to try to debug, only to have someone else show me how to fix it in under 2 minutes. So that dev gets paid $1, but I would easily pay much more for the fix in that issue because of how much time I sunk in it.
The Graybeard engineer retired and a few weeks later the Big Machine broke down, which was essential to the company’s revenue. The Manager couldn’t get the machine to work again so the company called in Graybeard as an independent consultant.
Graybeard agrees. He walks into the factory, takes a look at the Big Machine, grabs a sledge hammer, and whacks the machine once whereupon the machine starts right up. Graybeard leaves and the company is making money again.
The next day Manager receives a bill from Graybeard for $5,000. Manager is furious at the price and refuses to pay. Graybeard assures him that it’s a fair price. Manager retorts that if it’s a fair price Graybeard won’t mind itemizing the bill. Graybeard agrees that this is a fair request and complies.
The new, itemized bill reads….
Hammer: $5
Knowing where to hit the machine with hammer: $4995
> Well-paid contribution is rewarding for the $$$.
This is crucial. Changing incentives changes the social contract and relationship and does that irrevocably.
I recommend Dan Ariely’s book Amazing Decisions on this topic.
Example: You don’t pay for the thanksgiving turkey dinner at your inlaws’ and if you did that’s be rude no matter the amount.
If you give your neighbor some fruit from the tree in your yard that’s one kind of relationship. If next year you try to sell it that’s a very different one. Transitioning from one to the other is significant.
Lastly, financial incentives kill generosity. The giver now starts to worry if they’re providing too high of a value.
I said a bottle of wine will be fine. (I'd just turned 18)
She said no I insist.
I said well my rate is £100 an hour and it took three hours.
She chose to give me a bottle of wine.
45$/h will attract a LOT of attention online. And not from the folks who should be answering questions. Just look at what happened with Hacktoberfest [0].
I can and do regularly solve problems that save people hundreds of hours. I would gladly pay to have someone solve my technical challenges that cost me hundreds of hours.
(I am an expert in Python and a deep Generalist with experience across many domains and types of software.)
I follow the easy to understand rule that my price for freelancing must be at least double what I make as a full time employee, and thus a full time employed position must be at worst half of what I make as a freelancer.
This also allows me to see approximately where my best position in the market is. For example right now I am getting offered full time wages above half of my freelance rate (which is a little over $100 an hour) which implies to me that for my profile it might be more worthwhile to take a couple years full time employed.
on edit: changed rates to full time wages
For what it’s worth I was earning a salary around $110k CAD, and my contract rate (assuming I worked full time) worked out to around $240k CAD. No one has had a problem with it yet (although I went back to a salary position since then - I have kids and contracting was hard to organize around family and the pandemic).
I don't think anyone is going to make much money off of it starting out since I don't have a large supply of questions coming in yet, but there are a lot of underemployed devs out there who would be happy to make an easy $15 bucks an hour just googling answers for people and telling them what to do.
I think a lot of poorly-received questions on S/O are the result of people not knowing where to look for their answer, or being intimidated by reading the docs or source code. So they post the questions hoping someone can guide them.
Call a Dev isn't a competitor to S/O. S/O is a wiki. Call a Dev is basically Clippy in human form that you pay per minute.
Maybe there's a reason they are unemployed
> I think a lot of poorly-received questions on S/O are the result of people not knowing where to look for their answer, or being intimidated by reading the docs or source code.
Isn't is the point of engineering? To know how to get information and what to search for? If the 15$/hour dev knows and the guy on my team doesn't, why am-I not employing the person answering questions? My company sure pays more than 15$/hour...
If you've ever tried bidding on remote dev jobs online, you'll practically always get undercut by an indian dev at a price you can't even come close to matching, and unfortunately I suspect that given how often they appear in comments online asking people to do their entire project, I suspect they may often be bidding for jobs they don't know how to do.
Stackoverflow pays $0/h and attracts great answers and OSS pays $0/h and attracts great developers.
If someone is doing something for only the intrinsic motivation, putting a dollar value on it changes it to an economic calculation. The person may still do it for money, but they're more likely to only do a level of effort commensurate to the economic reward. Whereas if they're doing things for intrinsic reasons they may be willing to do more work.
There are a couple of behavioral economics experiments that bear this out. The Soma Experiment from the 70's gave participants a puzzle game to solve, and measured how long they tried to solve it. One group of participants was paid for their time, the other wasn't. The paid group on average spent less time trying to solve the puzzle than the group that wasn't paid. There are a couple of other experiments in that vein, but the common thread is that intrinsic motivation can be more powerful than economic rewards in multiple contexts.
So someone might be willing to contribute some code to OSS for free, but if you ask them to develop some code for $30/hr they might pass.
> Free contribution is rewarding as a means of helping
Eh...
There are times when I'd spend 15 minutes writing a small bash script for $30. Sometimes I feel guilty about buying luxuries like delivered food, and I wouldn't feel so guilty if I use half the saved time earning enough to pay for the meal, even if it is well under my typical billing rate.
People who are used to getting a salary severely over estimate how much money an hourly rate translate to per year when you don't have guaranteed work lined up.
As a rule of thumb $x per hour is equivalent to roughly $xK per year for a salaried position when you account for unpaid time between gigs, paying your own insurances, paying for your own equipment, not getting paid vacation and sick leave, etc.
No, you're going to pay $70/hr for car repair and roofing work in the middle of the US.
Just because Silicon Valley developers want $300/hr doesn't mean the whole world regards that as a standard.
$45/hr, billed by the minute for a bunch of short gigs spread out across the day with the need to do fresh business development between each one will never leave you anywhere near half utilized.
Put the bill rate at $200/hr in this situation and you might replace that steady $40k/year salary. But it’ll be a lot more stressful.
That’s about USD $90,000/year.
This is good money, if you live remotely in a lower cost of living, foreign country. But it’s a mediocre salary in the United States. You can barely pay your expensive rent with $90k/year. Actually, you’d be at poverty level. And there is zero possibility of affording a house with this salary. But you might be able to eke by if you live in the less competitive Midwest.
90,000 is well away from poverty.
[0] https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_....
I think the issue is a lot less that the Midwest is less competitive and a lot more that the cost of living in a West Coast tech bubble is exorbitant.
- Many entry level programmers at big companies (think Walmart Labs, Target, Goldman Sachs, etc) are too scared to ask managers/team for help. If you work for a large company, make sure new hires feel safe asking questions and seeking help or they will seek it elsewhere.
- The really hard questions they're willing to pay $240 an hour for have too much context for you to grasp. They want you to replace their ORM layer or tell them why their 600 line test case is not working.
- Getting customers is not too hard by poaching them from Stack Overflow, Reddit, CodeMentor.
- Developers make good money working full time and idly sitting at their desk part of that time. Here you only get paid for active time and the idle time in-between will kill your salary. Your motivation has to come from helping other people and watching them grow, not from $$$.
I used to be active on CodeMentor a few years ago, and the bad thing for these problem solving kind of requests is that they are usually prompt requests. Now working remotely, in theory, you can be available almost any time, the problem is, that after a while you just feel like not wanting to leave what you do. At least not on a short notice.
Agreed upon mentoring sessions that can be scheduled work a lot better from this regard.
Actually, when I joined codementor, I was working on a startup that offered psychology consulting in a similar way. (And one of the reasons me joinging codementor was to get first-hand experience of the dynamics of such a service.) Our psychologists didn't like either that they had to be around and that they had a lot of non-meaningful inquiries. (Similar to what you see on codementor.)
Yes I would like this
I have contributed to the SE for more than 6 years, beginning as a greenhorn and ending so far with more than 400 posts(most are answers). I find the value of SE is threefold: 1, it provides me a communication platform; 2, it provides me a place to take notes; 3, it keeps track of my improvements partly by a reputation system which I can monetize elsewhere. I only spend time writing answers there in my idle time.
edit: conversely I would be interested to know if such an option already exists
100+ reputation on SO is also a ridiculously low bar, it's almost meaningless. Not that any amount of reputation by itself is a sure indicator, but 100 really doesn't mean anything at all.
This kind of site also requires a pretty large critical mass to work, you don't just want a bunch of random SO users willing to participate, but you need the right users with experience in the right tags to match to the requests in a reasonable timeframe.
There's a good reason Stack Overflow doesn't allow people to pay for answers, people already cheat enough for meaningless internet points, this will get much worse with real money on the line.
- $0.75/min is $45/h and it's awfully cheap for what's ultimately consulting work
- 1 free minute in each call, call ends if no payment source is connected: what about people that would keep getting those one minutes? I know it's not much, but for some problem it might be enough if not to solve it, at least to get input that could lead to resolution.
I still like the idea because I feel strongly about stackoverflow pushing for solving everyone's issue instead of someone's, which often end up solving barely anyone problem as solutions provided are way too generic. The added effect is also that the community has devolved into a hot mess that will close so many questions as dupes even when they're not.
I am sure a bunch of these sorts of questions will roll in and, if you're trying to continuously get answers within the free minute you're probably going to end up accidentally paying them a good portion of the time.
Don't undersell this ability, it takes years to develop, and honestly is part of the value a "senior" person brings to the job. If you don't believe me, just watch a beginner searching for the answer to their question on their own. They'll use overly-broad terms, click irrelevant links, and spend several minutes looking at non-useful answers.
As someone more experienced, you can look at StackOverflow answer and instantly see it _was_ the right answer in 2012, but is no longer compatible with some other thing and trying to implement it is going to result in a world of hurt. You'll also know what search terms to use, what to avoid, and little tidbits like "SQL Server" refers to Microsoft's, or that the answer involving a sysv script probably isn't relevant to your issue with Debian Bullseye.
And so the person who has to field this call shouldn't get paid?
I personally don't need the money , but if you have tons of student loans, an extra 1k a month isn't bad.
I can’t tell you the number of people who asked me to do work on for their day job... I would always accept at $100/hr.
Almost every week I’d max out my 15 hours I’d set aside for “tutoring”. So beyond that I’d charge $200/hr, and I’d still get people for both tutoring and day job style work lol
$1/min is a fair price, but if you’re good you can make a lot more
Did you get to clone their entire code repository?
When I use Fiverr to hire a dev, I often have to contact multiple prospective devs to figure out that their skills are a match for the problem I'm trying to solve. I'll chat to 5 (all who advertise python) and give a one line intro about the problem, and it's immediately clear than only 2 can or wish to do it. E.g if I need someone who specifically knows the Selenium package.
Do you have a similar mechanism that can help to match the right dev with the right customers?
Also, $1/minute is more expensive than Fiverr. For my quick projects I would still use Fiverr due to the cost savings. I'd expect to fork out $60 for a two hour project there. On the other hand, others here are saying that it's too low for their hourly rate. Some price flexibility might be a good idea?
Once you receive a ping you can vet their S/O profile and if you like what you see you can start the call.
It's not so much for contract work or to complete tasks or projects like fiverr is. It's about getting personalized help with code your struggling with.
Also, understood about the different use case.
$30/h is a typical rate for a dev on Fiverr, I've been very happy with the value I've gotten from it.
Do you use codementor as a mentor or as a mentee?
Immediate feedback: If you want me to sign up, 75¢/min is too low, and you do need a mechanism to raise rates. My standard codementor rate is $2.25/min (and goes up to $3/min on some specialized skills).
Feel free to email me if you want some feedback/video chat. I was on hackhands back when it still existed. I'm a sucker for these types of platform. I especially love getting clients looking for actual coaching/mentoring, not just debugging.
I'd consider adding a GIF or video of the flow to connect with a dev.
On the helper's side, since it's by the minute, it's not much risk if the person is completely over their head and beyond any reasonable help, you're still getting paid while you try to figure that out. Except that the pay is somewhat low versus the going rates for consulting work in the western world.
1. I post a question.
2. Someone elects themselves as a candidate to answer that question.
3. I receive notification of the candidate and approve them
4. A call happens
Do you have any idea around what sort of time lag would be inherent in each step? Do you expect steps 1-4 to happen within a half-hour window and thus be mostly instantaneous as far as phone interactions go or could it go longer?
If you expect a quick response then I don't know if your rates are high enough to keep people actively watching the question board instead of checking in a few times a day - if not then I think the usability of the product may suffer since scheduling the call could become problematic. If I have a meeting in an hour should I bother trying to set up this call or do I need to wait until I have several free consecutive hours?
As it stands, there isn't much supply of questions or devs to answer them (just launched today with no early signups). I was thinking one way to get around this would be to let devs subscribe to email or text notifications when a questions is posted with a specific tag.
That may be as intended. In certain states you may never make more than that, in others you may (almost) always make more than that.
> 75¢ a minute is not enough
I personally don't think it's too low for a job where there's no interview and the only requirement is > 100 rep on S/O. With a critical mass of question flow, answering questions on Call a Dev would beat working at your local gas station making $11.50 an hour.
The job market is ultra competitive for junior-intermediate devs. And there's not a lot of opportunities for them to make money b/w grinding leetcode, sending out resumes, and competing for contracts on upwork in a race to the bottom.
I made Call a Dev as a place to find a companion to help you while you are struggling with something. They may not know the exact answer to your question, but sometimes two heads are better than one and getting a little perspective from someone else is all you really need.
> 100 S/O rep is too high/low
For todays questions about whether aliens exist, where do babies come from, and why do my balls have sperm in them, it's admittedly too high. But until I get some real data points of people requesting refunds (which you can opt to do just by clicking a button after a call ends) it's seems okay.
> Letting people post anonymously/not having a report button
The first app I ever built on my own was all thanks to Michael Hartl and his rails tutorial from 7 years ago. As soon as I deployed that app I was eager to show him what his free tutorial had enabled me to build so I emailed him and he said, to paraphrase, "Cool. I can't really see it though because it wants me to sign up to use it."
Ever since then, I've been relentless about removing friction. That trade off means that a few troll posts are bound to get through and I'm ok with that. This app is still in the interesting project phase so adding a report button is a nice to have that I can add down the line, but after working on this for 3 months I had to get it out the door.
Appreciate all the feedback.
For anyone curious about the stack its an elixir/phoenix/liveview app.
I’m not convinced that digging out a new, lower, bottom is the right solution to this issue.
If you were truly stuck on a problem at work, wouldn’t you be willing to spend $2 or even $5 per minute to solve it? That could be the difference between your service paying sweatshop wages versus actually providing a viable option for underemployed devs.
And I wouldn't characterize the opportunity to make > $10 for less than 20 minutes of work from the comfort of your home sweatshop wages.
If you're willing to pay more money for more guarantee you should check out codementor.io
I would definitely love to try this out at least once. I could see it being helpful.
I would’ve never thought that was a thing, much less a little career while it lasted. But it provided some jobs to people, whose purpose was to just play a bunch of Nintendo video games.
I don’t have the link, but maybe someone can find it on YouTube somewhere.
15 years professional experience + 5 years experience in latest specialized tech stack + 1 hour = $200 dollars/hour for contracts longer than 6 months. Hourly rate is higher for shorter term contracts.
My rate is more cost effective than not delivering the solution.
$200 per hour is about $400K per year, which is around senior engineer total comp rates, https://www.levels.fyi/.
You have to ask for the rate and demonstrate that you can deliver solutions and deliver solutions.
The person getting help is effectively trained to apply a quick fix mentality to everything because nobody is going to pay by the minute to learn fundamental software engineering concepts, no matter how much they should know them.
And for the person doing the helping, the pay is below average plus they need to review call requests for free in addition to it. They'll probably also have to deal with entitled stubborn people line in every customer service gig.
I predict the result will be that capable developers will avoid helping, because they can have a better working experience and more salary elsewhere. At the very least, I'd avoid wasting my time on such a platform. I would maybe consider it at $300 per hour, but the pay needs to be extremely high to compensate for the free reviews and idle time in between paid calls.
That again makes the service less useful for people needing help, because all the truly capable developers are off the platform. So you pay to get a quick fix from a mediocre developer... Kind of like on fiverr.
I'm a professional developer and I write arduino software for money "on the side." The effective rate varies a lot, but it's safe to say I won't be giving up my day job too soon.
I basically describe it as getting paid to tinker.
It benefits two parties: the person who needs help/needs code written and me. I get paid to do stuff I like and can do it sitting on the couch watching TV. This is how I envision a lot of skilled devs doing this: as a nice sideline that's fun to do. Not everything needs to be thought of as a replacement for your primary income source.
You get a good developer they fix the issue in a minute get $1.
You get a not-so-good one they take all day and bankrupt you.
You have an expectation mismatch, you pay the developers for their value not their time.
Better to have a model like Quirky did, $80 flat rate or something and obviously filter out the bad developers on sign up.
The mismatch is easily done away with by adding ratings to the system. So much so, than on similar platforms, if you are unlucky and run into a hard issue/prick customer (or some combination of this) too early then it can ruin your chances forever. (It does matter a lot whether you get your 1 out of 100 3* ratings as the first one or the 100th one.)
My worry is about the payout, which apparently requires Stripe. Personally I would be happy to receive payment in some crypto (even a stablecoin), or Paypal. But having to setup a stripe account seems overkill for me.
$45/hr seems pretty low from here (Eastern Europe) and it definitely DOES NOT translate to $7200/month (which would be an OK income). Anywhere. You can't do this kind of work 160 hours/mo. Though if you have a stable project and you do this on top and only calculate the monthly income for a comparison, then OK. But you'd still have to calculate with at least your holidays.
[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source...
I’ve regularly asked questions on SO that were too specific to get a good answer. I’d have loved to be able to just award $100 for the accepted answer.
It seemed so bloody obvious. But no, bounties are based on karma, you can’t even set a bounty if you’re a new user, and SO tries to make money as a job board...
* to those who have enabled the feature
It's kind of a chicken/egg problem where there aren't enough questions because I don't have enough people to answer them, and there aren't enough enough people to answer them without a steady supply of questions to keep them busy.
I'm reconsidering the pay rate after reading a few of the comments here.
A potentially interesting option would be to offer tiers based on stack overflow reputation, and to ensure that a developer has reputation from the desired tags.
Some of my best problem solving is while I'm out for a walk letting my mind wander. This is very much not for me.
Oh, on top of this, I'm sure the dispute process after spending say two hours trying to do something and failing for whatever reason is going to be _fun_.
I was edited several times by non-contributors removing my desire to be polite. What bothers me is that these words are being attributed to me without my usual polite demeanor.
StackOverflow was pretty awesome at one point in time, but I'm not providing free answers on the site anymore.
Since I already know the answer to the question, the call would simply be me expanding/explaining the answer. It would be very valuable for the person on the receiving end and not much work for me. The value isn't in that I'm "an experienced developer", the value is that I'm a developer that had the exact same problem the asker is having.
Answering some "general" question wouldn't be very interesting to me, and wouldn't have the known value of asking the exact right person. That to me just looks like a gig economy version of Stack Overflow. The mechanical turk version of enterprise development.
Those are actually pretty high adrenaline situations, at least in the beginning, because you only have a few minutes to grasp what's going. Or at least it feels like so and at least you need to start showing signs of understanding the problem. It was pretty fun (and stressful, in a positive way) in the beginning.
If it could integrate with a pair programming thing that let the helper edit the user's code on their machine in real time, that would be even better.
However I do worry that more complex problems cant be solved over a phone call. So it has to be a context less question that's simply over my head. But I have had many!
Cool project. It may or may not work, but with a pivot it definitely could.
I am an expert in Python and a deep Generalist with experience across many domains and types of software. https://stackoverflow.com/users/1459669/no%c9%a5%ca%87%ca%8e...
I've heard this one before. Next you'll get the state of california to classify me as an employee.
The only feature I need are notifications and subscribtion to tags. Say I want to keep the site in the background and only answer specific questions. I want to subscribte to the `android` tag and get a notification in the browser, whenever an android questions comes in.
You must raise the rates.
What kind of liability is there for engineers asking for help and working in FinTech for example? The attack surface here for social engineering gets bigger.
Once you're working, you have peers you can ask who will answer any beginner/intermediate questions.
I just realized services like this would probably fit the bill if they also offered code reviews.
Jokes and downvotes aside i support any product or platform that helps devs gain independence.
I suspect this may be a bug in Safari's handling of CSS Grid layout, but you might want to try and work around it.
I think I had actually signed up to it as a sidegig, from one of those corporate HN threads
