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Ask HN: What do you do when you can't take on a dev project?

4 points by liammoore ↗ HN
I (and a lot of my dev/engineering manager friends) will often get approached with project ideas from people who ask us to "build this thing for me". Most of the time the projects are small enough for us to build ourselves, but for larger projects - which would actually benefit us the most financially - we generally can't take the work on ourselves given we have full time engineering jobs.

I'm curious to understand if other people have this problem and how they deal with it. Do you refer projects out to people who have time? If so, how do you make sure it goes to the right person?

I'm trying to build a tool to help myself and other people out with this problem, so any thoughts would be helpful.

9 comments

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JohnFen
I just say "no". If I know of someone else who I think would be interested, I'll refer the person to them, otherwise I don't. I don't think this is a huge issue requiring a special tool to address.
nicbou
This happens to me all the time. I am a software engineer, but I have my own (mostly unrelated business) that already fills my schedule and my coffers.

I just say no. I give my friends as much advice as I can, but I won't do any other work. At some point, you get diminishing returns on the extra work you do. Life is short and you can't spend all of it getting richer.

liammoore
If you are someone who gets a lot of projects coming your way, wouldn’t you rather help people get their ideas over the line and maybe get some additional credibility and networking from it? Maybe it means more to me as I’m a little earlier in my career, but I feel like I don’t want to pass up on these opportunities.

I’m looking for ways that I can take a management role on projects and have other devs do most of the heavy coding - is this something you have tried?

ihateslideshows
Like other posters I'd advice to say 'no'. I'm on the other end of the scale as I took such project knowing I'll have not enough time to work on it and now I regret making this decision. It's more difficult to drop it now that it's 'almost finished', and more importantly because of people I built it for. Sure, I got a % of venture, but any % of 0 is still 0.. I'd prefer to have clean mind over weekend and spend time with kids than worrying about stuff that needs to be done.
liammoore
Is there a reason you haven’t looked for other people to help out? Is it because you are being given equity rather than cash?
ihateslidesh0ws
I was the only one who was naive enough to take the project, I wanted to share it but everyone was like "pay me, I won't work for free". Back then I thought I'll just do it myself, that was a mistake- I should be in the "pay me" crowd :)
rl1987
Plenty of people have ideas, but not many of them have resources and skills to actually build even a lifestyle business. Just say no unless they are going to pay you enough to be worth the effort.
aosaigh
What is the problem precisely? You don't have enough time? You don't want to say no to the potential client? You don't know where to send the potential client?

These are all different problems and I don't think they'll be solved by building a tool. They're human problems.

- Don't have enough time? Change jobs or go full-time as a freelancer. Alternatively hire someone else to help you out.

- Don't want to say no immediately? Charge them for an initial consultation or roadmap phase that won't involve the lengthy commitment to build.

- Don't know where to send the client? Start networking - find some other developers or agencies that want the work.

liammoore
It’s mostly that I don’t have the time, and neither do the other developers in my network (most of the time).

These are really interesting ideas - I like the consultation idea.

When it comes to referring agencies, I feel like it’s a reputation risk to me if I can’t validate the quality of the work they will produce. Any tips for this?