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from the and-when-they-increase-the-lease-rates... dept.
Josh Constine writes at TechCrunch that you send Gigster your app idea and it sends you back a fully-functional app. "No coding. No hiring. No wrangling freelancers. Just a fundamental shift in how software gets built." Gigster's artificial intelligence engine converts a client's product proposal into a development plan, and helps Gigster's army of remote developers plug in pre-made code blocks to efficiently build the app. Gigster has already helped build a dating app for muslim millenials, a way for citizens of the developing world to buy electricity, and has over fifty more projects in the pipeline.
Gigster finds top-notch freelance developers, designers, and project managers with pedigrees from MIT, CalTech, Google, and Stripe, and only accepts 5% of applicants. A sales engineer discusses proposals with clients, and using the AI engine, comes back with a price quote and production schedule in about 10 minutes. Then Gigster manages the entire development process through delivery of the fully-functional app. Gigster charges a flat fee, so there is no incentive for developers to work more hours and run up charges. Both developers and customers interact with a project manager, who insulates them from the potential hassles of dealing with each other. Gigsters who satisfy customers can earn karma points and qualify for higher-paying contracts, and the company uses artificial intelligence to learn from and assign every new project.
One caveat: Gigster will still own the code to the app it designs for you and "lease" it to you. The reason is that they want to be able to reuse certain components that they develop for reuse on other projects. "Software development that requires continuous recruiting and months of development time writing code from scratch is slow and costly, and not necessarily a consistent internal need of all startups or large enterprises," says CEO Roger Dickey. "Hiring talented engineers is hard – so don't. Instead, let Gigster be your engineering department."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Sunday December 13 2015, @03:00PM
This "gig" stuff only works for a short time when people who had jobs recently are out of work and desperate. You have your Lexus to drive for Uber, or your MacBookPro to code with. You paid for these with your old job that you no longer have. The problems start when you can't make enough money to replace your equipment. (Or get more training. Those quality "____ In Action" books aren't cheap, and the Amazon Kindle "Learn _____ in 2 Hours" books are cheap but garbage.) Then you realize you're working for subsistence pay, or less than that, and can't afford to replace your equipment when it needs replacing. And you have to drop out. So I expect this fad of "Uber for _____" to last another few years and implode. (At some point, there won't be enough desperate experts to take this bad deal any longer.) The real Uber knows this is the case, and has experimented with renting equipment (passenger cars) to people. (Will Gigster rent you a computer? Pay for your pay-to-play stuff like Apple's app store where you have to pay to publish apps?) The problem with renting your tools from these companies is that you're already working for less than subsistence wages, and once you rent your equipment you're making even less. Without the capital investments you made in yourself with your old job, which was a real job that paid a decent salary, you can't keep up.
I see "Uber for _____" going the same route as the HSA. At first, it's new and heavily promoted and people give it a chance without thinking it through, just like people took several years to figure out the HSA was an awful deal that harmed them. Now HSAs are a footnote in the history of insurance. By 2020, "Uber for ____" will be a footnote in the history of work.
BTW, we've already seen a high fail rate in the "rent-a-coder" style web sites. Everyone launches them, few succeed, and the few successful ones were merging the last I saw.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 13 2015, @04:08PM
Last time I was between regular jobs, I was on a $10K consulting gig, with potential extension for another $10K - so when my computer got flaky, spending $600 for a new reliable one was a no-brainer. Tax deductable cost of doing business.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Sunday December 13 2015, @04:30PM
Yes, a real consulting gig with real pay would be one thing. I'm taking about the "gig economy" and freelance sites where the pay is below subsistence level.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SanityCheck on Sunday December 13 2015, @06:53PM
Exactly, check out freelancer.com. Poverty wages do not describe it. You are competing with shops out of China/India, just good luck matching their prices.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 14 2015, @01:39AM
The thing is, what you see as desperation, upper management sees as efficiency. The idea that you should see your employer as anything other than a potentially hostile source of money is simply incorrect. And it doesn't even have to be your boss that's the problem - anybody above your boss in an organization can be just as dangerous to you as a bad boss.
I'll admit, though, as someone who makes a significant percentage of my income freelancing, basically the use of these kinds of sites is to locate potential customers who I might actually want to do business with. Those customers are typically not tech firms, and are never "idea guys" (with ideas that usually amount to "just like $FAMOUS_SITE, but for $500") - they're organizations and companies whose core competency is not technology at all but have a technology problem I can solve for them for a reasonable price. They aren't my best source of business, but they can in fact help a bit.
Of course, what these sites hate, and what Gigster is clearly trying to avoid by handling the project management and such, is that once I've gotten to know a customer and they've gotten to know me, we can continue to do business without the involvement of the site.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.