Timeline for I'd like to see job ads for part-time or freelance work [duplicate]
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
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| May 5, 2023 at 9:01 | history | closed |
Andrew T. cottontail Robert Longson Mureinik Wai Ha Lee |
Duplicate of Sunsetting Jobs & Developer Story [closed] | |
| May 5, 2023 at 8:32 | review | Close votes | |||
| May 5, 2023 at 9:01 | |||||
| Sep 14, 2017 at 15:05 | comment | added | user247702 | @Donna Any short-term plans to change that? According to the 2017 survey "10.2% work as independent contractors, freelancers, or are self-employed". I'd wager that these people also look for new work more often than those employed full-time. So you're leaving out a non-significant group of people currently. | |
| Sep 11, 2017 at 19:44 | comment | added | Donna | I can't speak to changes to our platform, but I can share background about why you'll mostly see full-time, permanent jobs. We don't actively pursuing contract jobs (but we do support them). The reason they are a relatively small portion of total jobs might be related to the fact that we typically work with larger companies (rather than small/medium-sized companies). | |
| Jul 14, 2017 at 3:18 | answer | added | Warren Dew | timeline score: 0 | |
| Jul 11, 2017 at 4:50 | answer | added | Suragch | timeline score: 17 | |
| Jul 11, 2017 at 3:28 | comment | added | BoltClock | @TylerH: He's a wombat, not a snake. I'm not too worried that he is making diamond-backed statements, but fuzzy ones ;) | |
| Jul 11, 2017 at 1:20 | comment | added | Nostalg.io | @SB2055 We've created something like this with SourcePanel. We match local, US-based software and IT consultants to short-term projects from vetted customers. There is a shortage of consultants, and I would love to advertise for short-term gigs on StackOverflow. | |
| Jul 11, 2017 at 0:45 | comment | added | Cloud |
@SB2055 I almost think it would be neat to have low quality garbage posts (i.e. "Here's a 200 line program. It doesn't work. Why") get migrated to gigs and the answer section becomes a contract bidding war. For once, garbage posts could be remotely useful.
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| Jul 11, 2017 at 0:39 | comment | added | SB2055 |
@DevNull that was an oversimplification on my part - the last thing I'd want to see is a rebirth of ExpertExchange. A place to post up small-to-midsized contracts within a somewhat self-moderating community (garbage gets flagged) would be great though. I just recently had a need for a self-contained, specialized demo of using Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive as storage providers from within C# and it took at least a couple hours of screening to find someone decent on UpWork. I would have preferred to drop $1k on gigs.stackoverflow.com or whatever to get quality work done.
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| Jul 11, 2017 at 0:18 | comment | added | Joel Brown | I'd like to see more contract positions, personally, whether they be full time or part-time. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 22:30 | comment | added | Cloud |
@SB2055 The two biggest problems I see going that route is: 1) Crummy postings on freelancer sites are the norm, not the exception. 2) This starts to create a motivation to withhold contributions to the site, and instead post "pay me for the answer". Kind of like Experts Exchange, but individuals reap the reward instead of the site owners...... Actually, I wouldn't mind that one bit. Someone posts a terrible question normally worth vote-closing, and I demand $500.00 on the spot to solve his/her 11th hour coding problem. SO can keep 10%.
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| Jul 10, 2017 at 19:51 | comment | added | SB2055 | I can just hear the execs saying that the overhead of managing a million smaller fish for an incremental gain just doesn't make business sense though, which is why there isn't a really successful, trustworthy, go-to marketplace for this kind of work yet. Only the big fish make business sense so far because of the cost we'd all incur through BS arbitration and liability. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 19:49 | comment | added | SB2055 | @DevNull just because there are shitty employers (or overeager employees) who don't know how to scope work doesn't mean the SO team should totally ignore an opportunity. This is what policies, reputations, and incremental milestones would address. After that it's just plain old risk/reward capitalism. As a new employer I could be forced to scope my work to <$500 milestones that are clearly defined. Potential takers could provide feedback on the specs until they're clear enough for someone to accept. It would effectively be StackOverflow on paid steroids - bounties just wouldn't be virtual. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 19:05 | comment | added | Chloe | Agree. I would participate. I'm cashflow negative in the early stages of a startup, so cannot commit to full time, but would like a smaller engagement. @SB2055 You had me at 'Upwork is terrible.' | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 18:24 | comment | added | user812786 | @TylerH You're proposing this feature is added as an option in the existing SO Jobs, yes? I think Bohemian is suggesting a completely separate site section for freelance gigs, and saying that the new section should have a distinct name. (FWIW, I agree with both of you depending on which implementation it would be.) | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 15:32 | comment | added | TylerH | @Bohemian No, it is clear what a job is. It's a measurement of units of work. Whether the unit of work is 'ongoing' or a finite number is irrelevant; they're both valid. You want a job? You go to SO Jobs. You want a full-time job or career, filter by that. You want contracts only? Filter by that. Interested in both? Don't set a filter. No ambiguity. It's fine if you don't care that you're wrong, but don't go confusing everyone else with diamond-backed incorrect statements. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 15:19 | comment | added | Bohemian Mod | @tyler your last comment supports my comment: in general it's not clear what "job" means. However, here at SO it has been used for "full time employment". For clarity I suggest a different word be used for freelance tasks. That's all. If you disagree, I don't particularly care. Time will tell us if this even gets off the ground, and if it does what terms will be chosen (including just reusing "job"). | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 14:00 | comment | added | Cloud | @NathanArthur I tried using those sites, and it was the same old garbage: $20k for 8 months of work, requests for help with LD_PRELOAD "tools" (i.e. viruses), requests to write entire masters thesis chapters so some criminal can buy a degree from a reputable university. More than half the jobs listed there are actively making the work worse, and pay terrible as well. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 13:51 | comment | added | TylerH | @Bohemian Where is that definition given? A job is a both a full-time, ongoing employment thing and also a single task (see "odd job", task scheduler "jobs", "The Italian Job", etc). There's no confusion in letting SO Jobs have both full-time and contract work. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 13:24 | comment | added | Nathan Arthur | I'm with @DevNull. I really don't want to see SO getting mixed up in the freelancing world. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 13:10 | comment | added | Cloud | Try looking through a site like FreeLancer.com, and you'll see the problem with this: too many low-quality offers with unreasonable terms, ethical concerns (i.e. students blatantly trying to get someone else to write his/her thesis for money), legal concerns (requests to help write rootkits effectively), etc. Better off keeping to full-time postings with reputable companies. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 8:58 | comment | added | ykay says Reinstate Monica | I think working 8 hours a day is not productive especially for a developer. I'm guessing most developers simply cannot focus for that long of a time. In general I think jobs should be less hours with more efficiency. Jobs on stackoverflow should have a searchable part time or freelance designation. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 6:25 | comment | added | Bohemian Mod | @tyler "job" in SO has the definition of "full time employment". The topic of is post is "short term employment" (akin to how you hire a tradesman to do .a specific task). We should name the kind of employment using a different word than "job" to make it clear. Actually, "job" was a questionable choice in the first place, because in IT a job is a discrete unit of work (a la a "job queue"), similar to the work this question is about. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 2:52 | comment | added | briantist | I'd love to see something like this, but it would be an entirely new business; it's only tangentially related to the current jobs/careers product. It would also be a constant battle keeping the quality up. All the crappy freelancers you see on upwork would flock to this as well, and so will the customers who are looking for bottom-dollar labor. If anyone could make this model work it'd be SO, but it won't be trivial. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 1:56 | comment | added | Paul | It would be nice to see SO create something that pays, but it is rumored part of the motivation of SO founders was to kill off Experts Exchange, which was for-pay Q&A. It would be interesting to see the site evolve into a place where expert Q&A is still free, but give-me-the-damn-codez and do-my-whole-project-for-me-as-I-change-the-question-requirements could be diverted into a for-pay site structured to reduce manipulation or provide escrow/referee-ing. Furthermore, this is a service where SO could collect a fee. I'd pay if it makes me money. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 1:17 | comment | added | TylerH | @Bohemian huh? your comment doesnt make sense. | |
| Jul 9, 2017 at 19:50 | comment | added | Bohemian Mod | Great idea, but for clarity don't call it a "job", call it a "Task", "Work" or a "To do" on a dedicated site such as todo.stackexchange.com or perhaps stackoverflow.com/todo | |
| Jul 9, 2017 at 17:26 | comment | added | SB2055 | I think this could be hugely beneficial to the software industry. UpWork is terrible and I don't know anywhere else to quickly outsource mid-size ($1k-10k) tasks to. This would likely require a new product but I can't imagine the dev costs would be too high, especially if payments are handled off-site with a friendly recommendation to pay per-milestone, with tiny milestones required for new participants. Take my money! | |
| Jul 9, 2017 at 16:16 | comment | added | Marco13 | That would indeed be great. I've also been searching for a while, and it's hard to find sensible freelance jobs. The fact that these jobs are far more volatile may make it difficult to handle them under the current "Jobs" umbrella, but it shouldn't be impossible. | |
| Jul 9, 2017 at 13:26 | comment | added | Cody Gray - on strike Mod | "All the ads on Stack Overflow seem to be for full-time, permanent jobs." That's because that's pretty much the only jobs that are listed on the Stack Overflow Jobs site. As far as I know, you are subject to being shown ads according to your preferences; you just won't see any if there aren't any listings to advertise. So the real feature request is getting the SO Jobs team to start soliciting these types of opportunities as well. | |
| Jul 9, 2017 at 9:12 | history | asked | Suragch | CC BY-SA 3.0 |