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Ask HN: Why is codemill not gaining momentum?

5 points by onecooldev24 ↗ HN
If any of you are unfamiliar with codemill its a new market place for pull requests (http://codemill.io). It gained momentum and hit the front page of hacker news but lost the appeal pretty soon. Do you guys have any thoughts on why people aren't using it to complete their tasks.

9 comments

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afarrell
A couple things:

1) This is a two-sided market problem. In order for a two-sided market to succeed, you need to jump-start it with either a bunch of chickens or a bunch of eggs. See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html

2) It takes time and effort for someone to package up a task such that a total novice to the project can pick it up and work on it.

onecooldev24
I agree with your second point, but in case of codemill, the stats are that 2000 developers have already signed up to work on tasks.
afarrell
Meaning, that 2000 people have entered their email into a webform? How many of those have github accounts which indicate they are active? How many of those are regularly active on the site on a weekly or daily basis?
onecooldev24
I at least check it everyday and I am confident a few hundreds do so too.
wingerlang
Did it gain momentum before HN front page?
onecooldev24
I think it was launched from HN
wingerlang
If they launched on HN I would not call that momentum, just a curious spike in visits. It seems like a normal thing.

Are you affiliated with the site? You're on a new account and it just kind of.. feels like it. The reason I am asking is that if this is the case - why don't you just email the people who signed up and ask them.

afarrell
A third reason: when I go to the page, I see a single task with $20 offered as the pay. From the description, There seems to be a reasonable chance that it takes me 3 hours to complete from start to finish. Given that it is not guaranteed that I get paid, why would I write code for US federal minimum wage?

If I'm going to submit a pull request to the marketplace and I see that this is the sort of thing on offer, I become skeptical that a skilled person who can deliver solidly readable code on-time is going to spend their time on this site. That means it is probably not worth the work it takes to package up a task for a total novice. If I don't have many of these sort of easily-packagable tasks, then I'd just do them myself. If I do, then it makes a lot more sense for me to go and hire a junior engineer who can actually learn my app/data model/domain and be 6x as efficient tackling them as a random person who doesn't have an ongoing relationship with me.

Companies often lose money hiring interns who have a whole summer to ramp up, but make up for it in the recruiting benefits. Why would they hire an intern for 4 hours.