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posted by martyb on Sunday December 13 2015, @01:12PM   Printer-friendly
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."


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Sunday December 13 2015, @03:40PM

    by dyingtolive (952) on Sunday December 13 2015, @03:40PM (#275779)

    I don't think the job market is that bad, really, for qualified people. I know I have friends working at companies so desperate for people that they regularly badger me to come worth with them. I also have clients that I've helped that sometimes forward me listings for jobs at their companies, strongly recommending that I apply. I'm doing okay, at least. Thing is, I work on enterprise level software. My friends do too, some on military contracts as well. No one is starving for work.

    Now, lets look at the 'case studies' from the Gigster website:

    - There's a fantasy football app that looks like it has social crap in it. (iOS)

    - A goal tracking app that claims the use of 'AI' somehow. (iOS)

    - An e-commerce front end for a company selling an earwax removal product. I'm not making that up.

    - An ad management portal that gives you click counts and other metrics.

    - A financial planner that also claims 'AI', that they built in two weeks, at that.

    - And then, my favorite, an app that describes itself as "Craigslist meets Pinterist". I've never used Pinterist. The further description suggests that the point of the app is, "Ever wanted to see the best items for sale on Craigslist in a social, visual interface that doesn't suck?" I actually laughed out loud at that one.

    I think that the problem here isn't that software development is an unhealthy market. I think that the 'problem' is that app development is an unhealthy, oversaturated market. Most of these things sound like navelgazing stuff that doesn't really serve any real point, written by people who are good at that kind of thing. They're all the "me-too" apps you mentioned previously. No one is going to go to this service for anything real.

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    Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 13 2015, @04:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 13 2015, @04:03PM (#275787)

    I don't think the job market is that bad, really, for qualified people.

    The problem is the definition of "qualified". Oftentimes companies will assume that you're unqualified if you have no degree, even when your skills and experience are demonstrable. One person isn't necessarily more qualified than another merely because they have a degree and the other doesn't. As employers and/or HR drones become increasingly lazy and disregard people for arbitrary reasons, it becomes harder and harder to appear qualified in their eyes. College degrees become commodities to be bought and sold, and the value of real education (whether it's obtained formally or not) is downplayed. Furthermore, more and more advanced degrees are required in order to distinguish yourself from other candidates, making the degrees similar to high school diplomas. Maybe eventually you'll have to dig giant holes in the ground with a spoon before employers will even consider you. It's a race to the bottom.

    I recommend staying away from such workplaces if possible, even if you do have a degree. A shallow work environment is a bad work environment.

    • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Sunday December 13 2015, @04:14PM

      by dyingtolive (952) on Sunday December 13 2015, @04:14PM (#275792)

      I agree for the most part. I never completed my degree, and it took three interviews, a glowing recommendation from one of the current employees, and them finally telling HR to go suck it before I got my position.

      I almost didn't take the position for how irritated I was that it had to go to those extremes, but I don't regret it as a tactical move. For all the stress the job causes, it's done a lot for making myself more marketable in the future, and it DID get me out of a worse working environment.

      --
      Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 14 2015, @01:07PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 14 2015, @01:07PM (#276089)

      it becomes harder and harder to appear qualified in their eyes.

      I'm not qualified anymore for my own job, LOL. Due to the speed of technology drift, as new languages and tools and problems roll in, I'd never be hired today into my current job because some stuff we use didn't exist at all, or didn't exist at this workplace, when I was hired, so it didn't matter that I had to learn on the job, and giant bureaucracy being what it is, some of my position keywords they search for are stuff we got rid of long enough ago that I don't remember it well enough to honestly claim I'm a rockstar dev in that topic or whatever. Its been awhile since I wrote a new front end web interface using raw Perl CGI library. Its been a long time since anyone at my employer has used subversion. I'm told that "kids these days" graduate never having heard of rcs, cvs, svn, hg, nothing but git and git is all that ever was, sort of a creationist view of software development.

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 14 2015, @12:58PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 14 2015, @12:58PM (#276086)

    "Ever wanted to see the best items for sale on Craigslist in a social, visual interface that doesn't suck?" I actually laughed out loud at that one.

    I LOLed at the same thing, thinking of rusty worn out bald tired kids bikes for $5 less than new bikes, intermingled with escort and sensual massage service ads.

    No one is going to go to this service for anything real.

    Well they claim top tier grads and employees of famous companies are going there for employment, or contractor-hood or whatever.

    Someone's wearing a tee shirt "I survived Automata Theory at Stanford and years at google and all I got was a job writing earwax removal apps"