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

224 points shinypenguin | 1 comments | 13 Mar 25 15:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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 :)

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limbero ◴[13 Mar 25 15:27 UTC] No.43354305[source]▶
I did this a few years ago and the winning recipe was a shameless (i.e. deeply shameful) linkedin post where I pretty much just summarized my skillset and explained that I was looking for a senior engineer equivalent of a summer internship, with no chance of extension.

Got me 3-4 offers. None of the offering companies had ads out for roles like this, so this was pretty much the only way.

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cushychicken ◴[13 Mar 25 15:54 UTC] No.43354550[source]▶
Why’s this shameful, exactly?

There’s no shame in saying you’re available to work.

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ForHackernews ◴[13 Mar 25 16:04 UTC] No.43354646[source]▶
IMHO selling yourself (selling anything, really) is a bit demeaning. But this is probably a class affectation on my part, not real moral intuition.
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jraph ◴[13 Mar 25 16:29 UTC] No.43354883[source]▶
Don't almost everyone sell themselves? Many people, as employees, sell themselves for 5 days per week, every week, except days off.

And everybody buys stuff, and therefore relies on people selling stuff.

The only way I see we could avoid being exposed to selling would be do have a different way to organize the economy / the society.

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ryandrake ◴[13 Mar 25 16:34 UTC] No.43354923[source]▶
I think it's the self-promotion part that's seen as slimy and shameful. Yes, as an employee I trade my time for money, but I don't write blog posts at the office about what kind of transformational and high-impact work I'm capable of, and about this week's top-10 coding life-hacks, and how I can single-handedly turn your project around from life support to on-schedule deployment.

Admittedly, the people who are good at this tend to get promoted and quickly end up as Directors and VPs... It just... ugh, turns my stomach.

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1. jraph ◴[13 Mar 25 16:41 UTC] No.43354987[source]▶
Oh, I see. Well, I guess I'm fine with the self promotion (which you do a bit to get hired even as an employee), as long as it's honest, polite, done a the right place and not annoying.

I'm not on LinkedIn (and I hope I won't need to be there the day I want to freelance) but I guess people are there for exactly this stuff, so posting an ad for yourself there is only fair, I suppose.