

Elven.io – Send an email to get any Python programming job done - bhsiao
https://elven.io

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giaour
$50/hour seems really low. It makes me think that the elves are inexperienced
or that this is just a thin wrapper around Mechanical Turk or oDesk.

EDIT: This was not meant to be a criticism of whoever built this, but a bit of
marketing advice.

As someone who might use a service like this, I would pause before using
short-term contract programmers that cost $50 an hour. Consultancies bill out
fresh grads at rates considerably higher than that, and if there's any slack
time at all between tasks then the elves are being billed out at less than
$50/hour. That rate seems more suspiciously cheap than like a good deal.

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escobar
Yeah, I do a fair amount of small Python gigs in my free time and $50 seems a
bit low to me as well. Just talked to a head hunter the other week, and was
told their Python devs are commanding much more than $50/hr. Makes me wonder
what was going on behind the curtains here as well.

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x5n1
Not just that it's low, it's also a fact that little jobs have more uncovered
overhead. It's a new domain that you have to wrap your head around, etc. No
body knows right off the top of their head to get everything done. I don't see
the pricing as viable.

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kwjoshua
Could be viable if you don't live in a first world country I think.

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x5n1
At 50 dollars your actual earnings will probably be 1/2 to 1/3 of that. So yes
I guess you can make a living in the third world at 25/hr or 16/hr.

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icebraining
Assuming the workers are employed full-time, $25/h is about $4000/month.
That's a pretty good salary for an average programmer in Portugal (Europe!),
even before taxes.

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dlitz
What about payroll taxes? In most places, your employer pays additional tax on
top of your pre-tax salary.

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icebraining
Apart from the withholding of income tax (which I was already counting), I
think they only pay social security (23.75%).

Considering that many professional programmers with a college degree in
Software Engineering make ~$1300/m (net), the remaining $2700 is plenty to
cover all taxes and expenses for both parties.

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stuaxo
I'd imagine for say, the dog app you had some exploratory code, otherwise if
that went wrong 1/2 hour seems like it could go over if there is any issue?

I'm curious if there is a market, as it seems nice to not have to bother about
sorting out requirements files, dealing with deployment, etc etc ... you get
to write pure code.. do people buy it ?

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hamiltont
If anyone knows a service like this for getting custom Dockerfiles, please
share. I run multiple containers on my home network and often have minor
complaints about the Dockerfiles without the time to fix them up e.g. "it
should have a bootstrap.sh that supports these additional 5 variables"

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austenallred
As someone who just lost a week worth of productivity dealing with Docker, I
cannot agree more

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Procrastes
Docker we can do. I'd be very interested in hearing about the kinds of things
you both need.

Contact info in my profile.

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vortico
Services like these seem to only be able to handle small standalone scripts,
rather than work in integrated codebases, which require time and dedication to
the projects. How is there a market for this, when most developers capable of
understanding what programs can do are also capable of writing prototype
implementations of them?

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icebraining
The programmers might just want to save time to work on more important stuff.
There are also technically-able people who can't program but might need a
script to perform some mundane task (like their dog image example).

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coupdejarnac
For the long tasks, like the example for a Pinterest clone, you could have a
tool/walkthrough/FAQ about how to break up large tasks in to manageable tasks?
Or perhaps the first task would be to create a development plan for the
smaller tasks?

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icebraining
Is this the new iteration of ilikerabbits.com, aka Magic for programming
tasks? The design is really similar.

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Gys
Great idea. I hope you will add other languages in the future ?

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free2rhyme214
I like Codementor.

