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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: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 14 2015, @01:39AM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday December 14 2015, @01:39AM (#275949)

    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.
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