HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do you find an expert?

5 points by blunte ↗ HN
How do you find an expert? Your car has a strange sound. Your DNS over HTTP is rejecting you. Your CI pipeline is fragile and seems non-deterministic.

It feels like there's a business opportunity here to somehow connect the people who know with the people (like me) who are willing to pay for an hour or two of a proper expert's time.

In my most recent case, I have a pihole with cloudflared dns-over-https, and I get frequent rejections. Nobody likes being rejected, especially when it means your network is useless 25% of the time. But web searches lead nowhere. I would pay for proper help, but there's no obvious service to match the experts with the clients.

Is there one? If not, is there interest to build such a matchmaking service?

6 comments

[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 31.3 ms ] thread
atlasunshrugged
Totally depends on the industry. I've been called on as an expert a few times by GLG which seems to do this as a service https://glginsights.com but I don't think they cover everything and there are other companies in more specific verticals like tech support for companies (https://www.electric.ai/)
pid-1
I was contacted a few times by consulting firms to provide expert opinion to hedge funds and other investment business. But generally they didn't want to solve a particular problem, just an overview of some industry or technology.

For more specific stuff, I think that's sort of what AWS IQ does in their domain.

> I would pay for proper help

Out of curiosity, how much?

blunte
I didn't know about AWS IQ. That could be useful, but that is likely targeting more lengthy engagements (1 week and beyond). I was thinking of shorter term, such as hours or few days.

As for how much to pay, it would depend on the problem and the buyer. In my case, since my need is semi-hobby, I would pay $200 or less for someone who could answer my question. The challenge is finding someone who actually knows the problem and scenario. For that magical person, they can probably spend 15 minutes and earn $200. Someone who doesn't immediately recognize the problem will spend more time, and then it will obviously be worth less to them.

So the challenge is in identifying the need and providing the matchmaking. Especially for the HN crowd, we are likely to have exhausted the obvious web search solutions already; so we need someone who really knows the narrow domain. Like in my case, I know there are probably 20-100 people in the world who have setup a pihole with cloudflared succesfully. The trick is finding them :).

pid-1
Personally, I'd have a hard time accepting this sort of offering. What if your setup is more complex than what you're describing? What if you don't accept my solution? I might end up embarking in a stressful multi hour / day rabbit hole for a fixed price.

More generally, I wouldn't be keen at accepting to support random internet strangers whose environment and reputation I know little about.

I think the real challenge is finding the right set of incentives for both parties* to accept the risks for this type of service.

*Likewise, you would be risking being played by a random internet conman

blunte
These would typically be short, time-boxed engagements (like one or two hours or less).

For example, some years ago I was trying to setup a Stellar (cryptocurrency) node, but I was having some problems with configuration. I asked on the Stellar slack or discord group and found someone who was willing to help. We negotiated $100/hr, and then we arranged a time to meet online. In the end, I paid for 1.5 hours of time, and it was well worth it. If he had solved my problem in 5 minutes, I would have still paid for a minimum 1 hour; win-win.

It seems like there could be a matchmaking service to facilitate exchanges like this. It's a bit like how you can go to stackoverflow, and if you happen to see a question you know the answer to but which has no answers, you may choose to take 5 minutes (for free!) and answer it.

In this case, however, requests would expire after a specified time. Solution providers could setup notifications for certain topics so they know when there's a need for their expertise.

jryb
Many of my colleagues have gotten messages on linked in from consulting firms where they basically offer $300 for an hour long phone call with a client. I'm not sure how they're getting picked, but they all have PhDs and papers in the field the client is interested in.

I definitely think there's something to the idea of making the discovery process easy. I would pay to chat with a doctor about a bunch of things that aren't related to my personal health, and to someone who works on industrial electrolyzers, just off the top of my head.