Show HN: Uber for Coding — Build product with bounties

[zcesur]

Hey HN! After lots of dogfooding, we are now releasing Algora.io to help developers share bounties & easily meet new collaborators.

The problem: early-stage founders always have more work than people, tight budgets and no time. Hiring full-time engineers is often not an option, yet most founders would welcome contributions from new collaborators. Meanwhile, most developers welcome flexible work. However, today, all of this is hard.

Our solution: we built a Git GUI where you can pay developers and start collaborating with new ones, in just a few clicks.

On Algora you can share, reward and earn bounties right inside your code repositories. Algora also recommends developers/bounties that match your tech stack and makes it simple to start working together.

We are excited to welcome you on Algora, answer your questions and further improve our product and documentation with your feedback!

Thank you

- Ioannis & Zaf

[GeneralMayhem]

This looks like a great way for delusional "entrepreneurs" to get terrible results.

Looking at one of the bounties currently available:

> We would like there to be a search bar in the middle of the navigation bar. The user should then be able to enter a query and filter questions in the database. The searching should be “fuzzy”, meaning that a search query such as “Issue with HTMA and firbase” should return the item with “firebase” or “HTML” in its body, title, or tags. There should also be the ability to filter by factors including date posted, author username, and whether the question has an accepted answer.

The amount offered for this is $100. That's the equivalent of two hours of someone making $100k/yr - which would be a relatively pedestrian salary for SWEs in the US. For that amount, you're asking someone to:

* Get into your codebase

* Add a UI element

* Wire it to a backend

* Set up a fuzzy-search implementation

I'd take more than two hours just reading documentation before I got started on a task like that. Even assuming the person filling the bounty is familiar enough with something like Firebase to be able to set up a pre-existing search implementation in a short timeframe, there's no way you're going to get anything functional in less than a day of work end-to-end, including tooling setup, implementation, basic spot-checking, and deployment. At that point, the person working on it is making roughly minimum wage in most states.

Is this just supposed to be a stealth outsourcing/wage arbitrage play? I can't imagine anyone in the West doing this, other than maybe undergrad students looking to build a resume.

[jimrandomh]

There are a lot of platforms built on this premise, and most of them are plagued with stuff like this. In fact I'd say that, if you want real engineers on your market, keeping wildly-unrealistic-expectations listings out is probably the core problem.

[irf1]

This $100 bounty was shared by an undergraduate student founder at Harvard College who is looking for contributors / new teammates. There are likely classmates/peers/developers who may find it fun and worthwhile to solve this bounty and collaborate with Caine. Certainly, university students have thus far found Algora to be neat. You are not wrong, the amount is very low, but it's ok amongst students looking to hack things up.

Personally, with my co-founder Zaf we cannot presently afford a full-time engineer, but with bounties we are getting a lot of work done while sticking to our tight budget. It's a modular tool, you can do what you wish with it and award as much as you wish. So far, we have personally awarded $7,876.68 in bounties to our own contributors, and our bounty payouts will be higher as our budget permits.

Your analysis is not incorrect. Of course, people who contribute to open source (mostly without pay) may beg to differ, sometimes it's just fun to build stuff and help out.

We certainly also hope to see more, higher-paying bounties :)

- Ioannis

[drusepth]

These prices seem comparable to established platforms like Upwork for isolated features like this, even if you filter to West-only freelancers. I sometimes take small gigs like this to learn new tools and/or just help the community while earning a bit of extra spending money.

$100 feels a little low for this just because of the added fuzzy-search implementation, but it's important to remember that a huge amount of developers between the coasts make significantly less than $100k/yr.

[Joel_Mckay]

Uber’s model primarily converts mechanical asset depreciation into discount taxi fares. Much like early courier companies, it also relies on the desperation of indebted owner-operators, and an inability to calculate operational losses.

“Coding — Build product with bounties” Translation: contractors with zero long-term obligations, economic incentives to take the shortest/riskiest path, and 3rd parties privy to trade secrets.

Not the dumbest idea I have ever heard from MBAs, but maybe a close second. ;)

[rsrsrs86]

Plus there is a strong argument from Coase. Firms, he says, exist because negotiating jobs at this granularity would be to costly.

[synicalx]

This model seems to work well enough to have spawned many clones - Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer etc.

[capitalsigma]

Posting names of employees with their company affiliation on your landing page seems like a questionable move. FAANG contracts typically include a clause that the company owns any work done in your free time unless you have explicitly gone through a process to transfer ownership. Whatever work these SWEs have done on your platform, if it's successful, it's entirety possible that a FAANG will come after you/the buyer to claim their IP. Or the employees might get in hot water for leaking trade secrets if their contract work is even vaguely related to their main job.

It looks to me like you are putting everyone involved at risk for the sake of your marketing.

[paxys]

No large tech company contract actually says that, and if it did it would anyways be unenforceable. At most they can claim whatever you do on company time and using company resources. It's a myth that every side project you work on and every thought you have in the shower is automatically owned by your company.

Companies sometimes do require you to disclose the work that you do off the clock, but that's just so they can review it for conflicts. I have worked at multiple FAANGs and known lots of people who had side businesses or consulting gigs, all completely above board.

[c54]

Not sure about other FAANG but at microsoft the contract is explicitly that anything you do during work or with company resources is owned by the company, not just everything you do at any time.

Just do it evenings and weekends and don’t use your work laptop.

[matsemann]

> FAANG contracts typically include a clause that the company owns any work done in your free time

Is this for real?? What a dystopian hell hole. It's called "free time". Do you need to purchase from the company store and live in their approved housing as well?

And you constantly bemoan unions here, looks like you could need someone helping you out with worker's rights..

[irf1]

Thank you for your comment! All these folks on the homepage actually completed bounties while being college students (most of them at Williams College in Massachusetts, our alma mater) before landing their entry-level jobs. They were the first peps that tried out Algora while we were building it out. - Ioannis

[capableweb]

I don't think those people are real people. Searched Twitter and Google for their name + company (a sample of five of them) and didn't find anything, so chances are they are generated profiles.

Which, would make this section of the landing page even worse (I think?).

[metadat]

Yes - unless the employees get permission from $corp, they will end up in deep trouble. Alternatively, if this Algora company behind the landing page didn't get permission from said people to put them on the landing page, Algora will be liable and can expect to promptly receive a C&D takedown request from $corp legal.

Why? Because it's confusing to the point that it could seem like Google or Snap or whatever corporate entity is endorsing Algora.

[carlosdp]

Many commenters confused here by different contracts in tech that say differently.

In California, there is an appendix that is required to be included in employment contracts (and applies even if they exclude it) that states an exception. Any work done by the employee cannot be claimed unless it:

1) Is done on work time, or

2) on work property (the office), or

3) using work equipment (an employer-provided laptop, for example, or their IP)

This provision is a bedrock for why startups became such a huge thing in CA: people could work on side projects that turned into startups and not worry about ownership by their employer.

Tech companies will often include this provision throughout their work force, even if you don't work in CA or another state that has a similar provision.

TLDR: If you're in CA, your work on your own time/equipment/home is yours, no matter what your employer says.

Edit: some friends of mine have worked at companies where you need to get "approved" to do side projects. They can fire you for doing side work without permission, but point still stands that they can't claim it unless you touched the work during work hours, or with a work laptop, or used their IP.

[worg]

I wish people stopped defining their products as _Uber, but in $DOMAIN_ tbh it rubs many people the wrong way, a couple of examples: Am I as a developer going to get the same mistreatment uber riders get? Is this platform running on red numbers and betting to become a monopoly in the long run so they can be profitable once users are locked in and they set a higher price?

Having said that, the idea behind it is cool, and applying that to open source contributions would be great

[matsemann]

I don't even understand what "Uber for coding" is supposed to mean.

If anything, the uber parallel is hurting. Am I supposed to be underpaid, have no employee rights etc?

[CSMastermind]

All they really mean to say is "two-way marketplace". Aka "we're a platform used by both buyers and sellers of a service. We arrange the exchange of labor for a fee then the two of you work it out."

[stevage]

Yeah, for me "Uber" is shorthand for an unethical, poorly run company. Takes me a while to work out what the OP meant to convey in each case.

[monkeydust]

Sound concept, used https://bountify.co/ over the years for small coding tasks, really good pool of engineers.

[raybb]

It seems like that site is now overrun with spam.

What kind of tasks did you get done?

[z3t4]

Feedback: You want users to both post bounties and solve bounties, so don't separate them. (when signing up I had to choose if I want to create xor hunt bounties)

[stevenjgarner]

EMPHASIS

[rsrsrs86]

For the microeconomics-inclined folks, the paper from Ronald Coase about why firms exist (to avoid extensive negotion/transaction costs) provides the argument for why this might or might not work. That is, this would make a great natural experiment to test the paper.

[kevin_morrill]

But if you can crack the code in solving the transaction cost/friction, it would open up a tremendous amount of creative value. I hope this team succeeds.

[irf1]

Naval Ravikant discusses this with Joe Rogan (episode #1309) at min 25:20-28:20 youtu.be/3qHkcs3kG44?t=1520

What do you think?

[danielvaughn]

This is really cool. I haven't spent too much time on the site yet, but this kind of product will probably generate a ton of questions. It would be great to have an FAQ page, but I couldn't find one.

Some questions I thought off the bat:

1. Often, programming requires environment setup and access to sensitive connection details. Is this left up for each participant to decide or do you provide a solution to this problem?

2. I'd love to work on a bounty but I would prefer not to if several people are already attempting to solve it. Is there a way to find out how many people are actively solving a given bounty?

[zcesur]

Thanks for your feedback and questions! We actually have a FAQ section on the homepage, but yeah it's quite tiny and easy to miss, and we definitely need a standalone page where we address many more questions.

1. That's an interesting question that we haven't yet considered. We personally only store the config for the dev environment in our main repo and manage the sensitive production config using k8s Secrets (while version controlling them in a separate repo), so we haven't really run into any issues regarding that. Is there a particular solution that you'd like to see on Algora?

2. Yep! The issue page of each bounty also displays who started a solution (and when), e.g. https://app.algora.io/algora/challenge/bounties/1. We're actually not a fan of having multiple developers compete for the same reward ourselves (though there are some good use cases for that as well).

[cinntaile]

2. So it's one of those platforms that let participants compete for a tiny prize pool? Why do people voluntarily do this, the pay is almost always shit even if you win. And if you don't you just wasted a lot of time and money (since you worked while you could have gotten a paid gig instead).

[xcambar]

Congrats on the hard work and I wish you all the best.

Just one comment though: Looking at all what Uber is going through at the moment, I'm not sure you're doing yourself a favor with the comparison.

All the best!

[arcturus17]

This might actually turn out to be a really good idea...

Can people from outside the US request / hunt for bounties?

[irf1]

Absolutely, in fact they already have! We support bounty payouts from (and to) anywhere that Stripe does. - Ioannis

[toomuchtodo]

Could I use this to find and pay contributors for open source projects I maintain or consume? Seems so, just thought I’d ask!

[zcesur]

Absolutely :) Thanks for asking!

[crftr]

I tried to launch something similar 9 years ago, rebaked.com. We sold the company 18 months later to a team that has since pivoted into a web3 offering.

If I were to do it again, I would pick a very narrow niche and have a few talented folks secretly working on the bounty side, full-time.

I do like that you have chosen to leverage GitHub for the collaboration operation. Best of luck to the team!

[TedDoesntTalk]

Much of this information is missing from the homepage. I did not really understand your product until I read the above description. “Uber for Coding” just doesn’t explain it to me; That sounds like a 1099 contract job? But clearly it is not that. So what is it?

Also: is the any way to use this if my code is not open sourced on GitHub?

[irf1]

Re: the latter question, absolutely! You can create bounties both in your private Algora repos as well as private Github repos using our integration. You can share them privately (via email) or make them public on Algora - only the issue becomes visible and not your codebase. No-one can access your repo directory (codebase) unless you add them as a collaborator in the repo. People who discover your bounties can request to solve them, and you accept them by sharing the repos. You can also ask solvers to sign documents before accessing your repos.

As for the work classification, it is actually 1099 contract work! Every year, Algora Public Benefit Corporation makes an information disclosure to the IRS about users’ earnings from the previous year, summing up the money they have received. Users who made money on Algora also receive these 1099 forms, which sum their bounty payouts and come in handy when filing for taxes.

- Ioannis

[mmmuhd]

Lot's of negative comments here, and no one complement the work done on the site. I love the look and feel of your site, nice job, solidly behind you. I signed up and I will be checking from time to time for quick bounties.

[zcesur]

Thank you -- this is heartwarming :)

[krageon]

Why would you voluntarily advertise yourself as like a corporation known world-wide as exploitative, cruel and forceful?

[la64710]

The AI generated images for the bounties are really ugly in my humble opinion.

Also how is this different from freelancer or upwork?

[csmpltn]

What's the difference between this, and something like freelancer.com?

[elesbao]

Fiverrr did that, no ?

[stevenjgarner]

Actually tied into github, recommending contributors based on git focus?