Hiring experiment: hiring experts in 20 minute chunks

This guy is a genius, he keep coming with ideas about how to pay people less for their work. He must be very popular on the exec golf meetings.

Sounds a lot like <a href="http://anyfu.com/" rel="nofollow">http://anyfu.com/</a>

To me hiring a professional for 20 minutes might sound enough for some small taske, but I'm not sure how well this goes for more complex tasks (e.g. where the pro has to read and understand your code). I guess you can buy couple of chunks than but I'm not sure I see the benefit. Is it just so that you don't have to pay every starting hour?

What do you consider an 'expert' to be?<p>It's one of the most ambiguously defined and useless word when used in practice.

I love this. Not only will this be be great when you have those "stuck" moments, or you want to learn Ruby but wouldn't know to start by reading _why's Poignant Guide, but I bet you see some incredibly creative solutions because the expert knows he needs to deliver in a strict 20 minute window.<p><pre><code> "Man built most nobly when limitations were at their greatest." — Frank Lloyd Wright</code></pre>

Love this idea. There have been plenty of times when I wish I could throw a few questions at an expert in a given field. "Is this the best way to program an XYZ?" "Can you think of a better way to do this?" Is the price is right, throwing a small amount of cash at a problem is often a better solution than (a) doing something wrong, or (b) spending significantly more time figuring out how to do it right.

Interesting experiment.<p>Are you sharing the data?

So I'd assume 20 minutes of an expert's time is worth $500, right?<p>Edit: Seriously, I'd charge $500 if the client picked the time and $100 if I could pick any period during the day, on short notice.<p>I'd actually charge more for a client-picked 20 minute period than I would for a one hour period because a 20 minute period would be very unlikely to repeat since 20 minutes isn't really enough to demonstrate great expertise.

Extremely excited to see how this works out. This is an amazing idea.