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Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?

224 points shinypenguin | 5 comments | 13 Mar 25 15:06 UTC | HN request time: 1.117s | source

Hello HN

In a short form question: If you do, where do you look for a short time projects?

I'd like to put my skill set to use and work on a project, I'm available for 6-9 months. The problem seems to be for me, that I cannot find any way of finding such project.

I'm quite skilled, I have 15 years of experience, first 3 as a system administrator, then I went full on developer - have been full stack for 2 of those years, then switched my focus fully on the backend - and ended up as platform data engineer - optimizing the heck out of systems to be able to process data fast and reliably at larger scale.

I already went through UpWork, Toptal and such and to my disappointment, there was no success to be found.

Do you know of any project boards, or feature bounty platforms, that I could use to find a short time project?

Thank you for your wisdom :)

1. sukiorigami ◴[13 Mar 25 15:19 UTC] No.43354229[source]▶
I think your network is the best place to look for this sort of work. Sometimes people will reach out to me with short term projects which is the best way to get gigs like this. Maybe start looking at your colleagues on linkedin, see what they are up to, and think of ways to contribute to what they are working on. The best people to contact in this scenario are leadership and decision makers. A SWE II isn't gonna help you much but a CTO at an early stage startup might be a good person to send a DM if they are friends with you (or even if they aren't!) :)
replies(1): >>43356949 #
2. thekevan ◴[13 Mar 25 20:29 UTC] No.43356949[source]▶
I've found when people ask this question, it's usually because they don't have a network to ask. Or, right or wrong, they just don't like the social aspect of going to their friends for work.
replies(1): >>43357658 #
3. Nextgrid ◴[13 Mar 25 22:01 UTC] No.43357658[source]▶
To be fair, there's a good argument for never mixing friends and business. You wouldn't want a project that goes wrong (which is a risk of doing business and somewhat expected and budgeted for on both sides) to jeopardize an friendship, and similarly you wouldn't want someone exploiting your friendship to get an unfair advantage in business (that they will often not reciprocate if the situation was reversed).
replies(2): >>43358424 #>>43362940 #
4. ghaff ◴[13 Mar 25 23:58 UTC] No.43358424{3}[source]▶
Well there are friends and friends and yes the categories merge. But since grad school interviews every job I've gotten has been through people I was friendly with professionally.
5. em-bee ◴[14 Mar 25 14:25 UTC] No.43362940{3}[source]▶
from one tech friend i learned this, after a failed project of his that cost him a friendship: make friends through business, but don't do business with friends.