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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: 0.29s | 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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toptal ◴[13 Mar 25 16:39 UTC] No.43354974[source]▶
CEO of Toptal here. If you like, I can ensure we review your profile and client matching history to see if there's anything we overlooked. I'm available on Slack or taso@toptal.com. We’ll see if we can optimize your visibility to clients needing backend/data optimization experts.

While we look into this, Opire (an open-source bounties site) has lots of short-term opportunities.

replies(4): >>43355206 #>>43355412 #>>43356930 #>>43365943 #
dep_b ◴[13 Mar 25 17:03 UTC] No.43355206[source]▶
I quit using Toptal because I was living in Western Europe and got extremely lowballed at a given point. As if I simply had to match the rates of people from Eastern Europe or Northern Africa.

I got a better hourly rate through the platform when still living in Latin America. Before Covid, it was amazing.

replies(1): >>43356626 #
hnisoss ◴[13 Mar 25 19:47 UTC] No.43356626[source]▶
I'm doing my last engagement on toptal rn as well. Will quit after. The company I m working for is awesome but toptal part not so much anymore. From staff to FUD. They cut down my rate to 1/3 of what I used to charge few years back. (They still bill client 2x what I get, of course).
replies(1): >>43450644 #
1. rnewme ◴[23 Mar 25 03:13 UTC] No.43450644[source]▶
Well, that ended well!