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Ask HN: Have You Ever Hired Developers to Work on Your Personal Projects?

6 points by marktangotango ↗ HN
I've always had this idea in the back of my mind that I could find some talent on vworker or whatever to work on the miriad of personal projects I've wanted to do. I've never actually done it though. Have you done this? What was your experience like? Was it successful or a complete failure? What was the project?

8 comments

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drKarl
That depends on what kind of resources do you have in more abundance or are more willing to invest in those projects... You might have lots of ideas and some spare time but not much money, in that case you'd be better off working on some of those ideas yourself (obviously time is a very limited resource so if it's only you, what you can accomplish is limited by the amount of time you can put into it). Or you might have lots of money and very limited spare time (or maybe you want to use the time for something else, or maybe you want to tackle several projects at once and just managing them all would take all of your time), in that case, if you can spare the money, it would make sense to pursue some of your personal projects with some external help...
Eridrus
Hired a developer on UpWork to build a basic dashboard for a startup idea I was working on. Dashboard got completed, code was fine, but took far longer than I expected. I guess you get what you pay for. Startup idea flopped for other reasons. Will try and write it off on my taxes this year.
ashnyc
tried that on upwork and as you said it take a lot longer than what you planned for ..
franciscop
From my personal point of view, I've done many small-medium projects. I'd say on average 3-5 experiments per week (trying ideas out on JSFiddle, drawing pad or just an .html) and 2-3 finished projects per month. My main motivation is to keep learning and trying new things so it wouldn't make much sense for me to hire someone for this.

I've thought about it though for documentation and testing, but then again doing it myself and because I was a student (so no $) I also learned a lot.

BTW, What kind of projects are we talking about? I'm freelancing now :)

ashnyc
Franciscop, i have an idea that i am willing to fund. do you have a link of your work
franciscop
Sure, you can see some projects here (all pinned projects are mine): http://github.com/franciscop/ or in my needs-to-be-updated website http://francisco.io/

But it highly depends on the kind of project, I will start in Toptal soon so money is not such a big motivator as it is the kind of project/things to learn/tech.

le-mark
I hired a freelancer once, i had a program static analysis project and I paid some one to pull the parser out of an open source project and package it up independently. The project didn't get much further than that. The money was wasted unfortunately.
NetStrikeForce
Yes. So far it worked nicely for me and got to establish professional relationships with a couple of them.