Hey HN! After lots of dogfooding, we are now releasing Algora.io to help developers share bounties & easily meet new collaborators.<p>The problem: early-stage founders always have more work than people, tight budgets and no time. Hiring full-time engineers is often not an option, yet most founders would welcome contributions from new collaborators. Meanwhile, most developers welcome flexible work. However, today, all of this is hard.<p>Our solution: we built a Git GUI where you can pay developers and start collaborating with new ones, in just a few clicks.<p>On Algora you can share, reward and earn bounties right inside your code repositories. Algora also recommends developers/bounties that match your tech stack and makes it simple to start working together.<p>We are excited to welcome you on Algora, answer your questions and further improve our product and documentation with your feedback!<p>Thank you<p>- Ioannis & Zaf
This looks like a great way for delusional "entrepreneurs" to get terrible results.<p>Looking at one of the bounties currently available:<p>> We would like there to be a search bar in the middle of the navigation bar. The user should then be able to enter a query and filter questions in the database. The searching should be “fuzzy”, meaning that a search query such as “Issue with HTMA and firbase” should return the item with “firebase” or “HTML” in its body, title, or tags. There should also be the ability to filter by factors including date posted, author username, and whether the question has an accepted answer.<p>The amount offered for this is $100. That's the equivalent of two hours of someone making $100k/yr - which would be a relatively pedestrian salary for SWEs in the US. For that amount, you're asking someone to:<p>* Get into your codebase<p>* Add a UI element<p>* Wire it to a backend<p>* Set up a fuzzy-search implementation<p>I'd take more than two hours just reading documentation before I got started on a task like that. Even assuming the person filling the bounty is familiar enough with something like Firebase to be able to set up a pre-existing search implementation in a short timeframe, there's no way you're going to get anything functional in less than a day of work end-to-end, including tooling setup, implementation, basic spot-checking, and deployment. At that point, the person working on it is making roughly minimum wage in most states.<p>Is this just supposed to be a stealth outsourcing/wage arbitrage play? I can't imagine anyone in the West doing this, other than maybe undergrad students looking to build a resume.
Uber’s model primarily converts mechanical asset depreciation into discount taxi fares. Much like early courier companies, it also relies on the desperation of indebted owner-operators, and an inability to calculate operational losses.<p>“Coding — Build product with bounties” Translation: contractors with zero long-term obligations, economic incentives to take the shortest/riskiest path, and 3rd parties privy to trade secrets.<p>Not the dumbest idea I have ever heard from MBAs, but maybe a close second. ;)
Posting names of employees with their company affiliation on your landing page seems like a questionable move. FAANG contracts typically include a clause that the company owns any work done in your free time unless you have explicitly gone through a process to transfer ownership. Whatever work these SWEs have done on your platform, if it's successful, it's entirety possible that a FAANG will come after you/the buyer to claim their IP. Or the employees might get in hot water for leaking trade secrets if their contract work is even vaguely related to their main job.<p>It looks to me like you are putting everyone involved at risk for the sake of your marketing.
I wish people stopped defining their products as _Uber, but in $DOMAIN_ tbh it rubs many people the wrong way, a couple of examples:
Am I as a developer going to get the same mistreatment uber riders get?
Is this platform running on red numbers and betting to become a monopoly in the long run so they can be profitable once users are locked in and they set a higher price?<p>Having said that, the idea behind it is cool, and applying that to open source contributions would be great
Sound concept, used <a href="https://bountify.co/" rel="nofollow">https://bountify.co/</a> over the years for small coding tasks, really good pool of engineers.
Feedback: You want users to both post bounties and solve bounties, so don't separate them. (when signing up I had to choose if I want to create xor hunt bounties)
For the microeconomics-inclined folks, the paper from Ronald Coase about why firms exist (to avoid extensive negotion/transaction costs) provides the argument for why this might or might not work. That is, this would make a great natural experiment to test the paper.
This is really cool. I haven't spent too much time on the site yet, but this kind of product will probably generate a ton of questions. It would be great to have an FAQ page, but I couldn't find one.<p>Some questions I thought off the bat:<p>1. Often, programming requires environment setup and access to sensitive connection details. Is this left up for each participant to decide or do you provide a solution to this problem?<p>2. I'd love to work on a bounty but I would prefer not to if several people are already attempting to solve it. Is there a way to find out how many people are actively solving a given bounty?
Congrats on the hard work and I wish you all the best.<p>Just one comment though: Looking at all what Uber is going through at the moment, I'm not sure you're doing yourself a favor with the comparison.<p>All the best!
I tried to launch something similar 9 years ago, rebaked.com. We sold the company 18 months later to a team that has since pivoted into a web3 offering.<p>If I were to do it again, I would pick a very narrow niche and have a few talented folks secretly working on the bounty side, full-time.<p>I do like that you have chosen to leverage GitHub for the collaboration operation. Best of luck to the team!
Much of this information is missing from the homepage. I did not really understand your product until I read the above description. “Uber for Coding” just doesn’t explain it to me; That sounds like a 1099 contract job? But clearly it is not that. So what is it?<p>Also: is the any way to use this if my code is not open sourced on GitHub?
Lot's of negative comments here, and no one complement the work done on the site. I love the look and feel of your site, nice job, solidly behind you.
I signed up and I will be checking from time to time for quick bounties.