

Ask HN: Where to find short deadline, senior-ish, “emergency” gigs? - jMyles

There are plenty of places to find full-time jobs, contracts, internships, and so on.<p>Where, though, do people post when they have a same-day (or at least same-week), urgent need?<p>We (a little team of friends) really enjoy cranking a few all-nighters and helping people hit their deadlines.  Sometimes people have a great codebase but aren&#x27;t ready to figure out how to deploy it.  Sometimes people are already in production but they have bugs that they can&#x27;t nail down.<p>Are there gigs around like this?
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jspiral
one thing i've always liked to have in my rolodex is someone who can figure
out really difficult ops problems, like odd server behavior or database
performance issues and take whatever steps are needed.

I used to work with a contractor who knew linux inside and out, used very low
level tools to watch packets, OS behavior, etc, and could just about always
solve vague questions like "our db is occasionally taking 1 second to pick up
a connection, and our dba has been looking at it for a week with no results".
Sadly, he got a (great) job and stopped contracting.

If you can accomplish that sort of thing, its worth a high billing rate.

That said, when i've needed that kind of service, the last thing i would ever
do is put up a post on stack overflow or something that says "for some reason,
our cluster in europe is hozed and we're missing client SLAs. the US one works
fine. we already tried rebuilding it. etc etc

Thats because if the problem is that hard, we're not going to realistically
get help from the public. we probably won't even be able to provide enough
detail to make it solvable via post. and its potentially embarrassing.

I think you'd have to do your some selling to get into people's backup plan.

Maybe put together a portfolio of detailed stories of doing this sort of
thing? The more technical detail the more credible, at least for me as a
buyer. maybe optimize for searches like "intermittent timeout" :)

maybe a physical object that you mail to VPs of engineering that they stick on
their desk until they need it? "Break glass in case of unfixable server issue"

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jMyles
This is a wonderful and well thought-out answer. Thank you so much.

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taprun
I would imagine that items that are very important and have short deadlines
would be the least likely to be farmed out by a company. Certainly, they would
be the least likely to be made available to companies with no shared history.

If I wanted to pursue jobs like these, I would come up with a pitch and
introduce myself to small contracting companies. You'll probably have more
luck if you can provide evidence of your prior successes and can demonstrate a
very niche skill.

