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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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1. scottLobster ◴[13 Mar 25 18:07 UTC] No.43355842{3}[source]▶
Only when you're trying to sell bullshit. If I can actually solve someone's problem, and they don't mind my price, then we're helping solve each other's problems and everyone benefits!

Where things get sleezy is when you're competing with applicants that will bullshit, so you have to bullshit as well just to keep up, or when customers have unrealistic expectations and waste your time.