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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: 0.207s | 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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aaronbaugher ◴[13 Mar 25 20:44 UTC] No.43357065[source]▶
As one of the other replies (nested too deep to reply to directly) said, many of us were raised to be humble and self-effacing, especially about skills related to innate abilities like intelligence. So it feels unseemly to say, in essence, "Hey, you should hire me because I'm great at X, Y, and Z." It feels weird enough to list skills and accomplishments in a resume, but overtly selling yourself feels wrong.

Maybe people like us should team up in pairs and promote each other. I'd have no problem talking up a colleague I knew to be talented, far more forcefully than I'd ever do for myself.

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1. em-bee ◴[14 Mar 25 14:33 UTC] No.43363000[source]▶
that only works if we know each other very well. every time someone tried to talk me up i felt more awkward than if i had done it myself, because that person didn't know me well enough to actually judge that. the only talking up by someone else that i can tolerate is: "i have worked with this guy and i would hire him (again)"