
Ask HN: Why is codemill not gaining momentum? - onecooldev24
If any of you are unfamiliar with codemill its a new market place for pull requests (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;codemill.io). It gained momentum and hit the front page of hacker news but  lost the appeal pretty soon. Do you guys have any thoughts on why people aren&#x27;t using it to complete their tasks.
======
afarrell
A third reason: when I go to the page, I see a single task with $20 offered as
the pay. From the description, There seems to be a reasonable chance that it
takes me 3 hours to complete from start to finish. Given that it is not
guaranteed that I get paid, why would I write code for US federal minimum
wage?

If I'm going to submit a pull request to the marketplace and I see that this
is the sort of thing on offer, I become skeptical that a skilled person who
can deliver solidly readable code on-time is going to spend their time on this
site. That means it is probably not worth the work it takes to package up a
task for a total novice. If I don't have many of these sort of easily-
packagable tasks, then I'd just do them myself. If I do, then it makes a lot
more sense for me to go and hire a junior engineer who can actually learn my
app/data model/domain and be 6x as efficient tackling them as a random person
who doesn't have an ongoing relationship with me.

Companies often lose money hiring interns who have a whole summer to ramp up,
but make up for it in the recruiting benefits. Why would they hire an intern
for 4 hours.

------
afarrell
A couple things:

1) This is a two-sided market problem. In order for a two-sided market to
succeed, you need to jump-start it with either a bunch of chickens or a bunch
of eggs. See
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html)

2) It takes time and effort for someone to package up a task such that a total
novice to the project can pick it up and work on it.

~~~
onecooldev24
I agree with your second point, but in case of codemill, the stats are that
2000 developers have already signed up to work on tasks.

~~~
afarrell
Meaning, that 2000 people have entered their email into a webform? How many of
those have github accounts which indicate they are active? How many of those
are regularly active on the site on a weekly or daily basis?

~~~
onecooldev24
I at least check it everyday and I am confident a few hundreds do so too.

------
wingerlang
Did it gain momentum before HN front page?

~~~
onecooldev24
I think it was launched from HN

~~~
wingerlang
If they launched on HN I would not call that momentum, just a curious spike in
visits. It seems like a normal thing.

Are you affiliated with the site? You're on a new account and it just kind
of.. feels like it. The reason I am asking is that if this is the case - why
don't you just email the people who signed up and ask them.

~~~
onecooldev24
No, but I was planning to build some thing similar with bitcoins. They also
have gitter
[https://gitter.im/CodeMillApp/support](https://gitter.im/CodeMillApp/support)

