Back when I was a dev manager, a site appeared that really intrigued me: Rent A Coder. I’ve been keeping tabs on for a while now, and finally joined up. I’m actually surprised its not taken on more prominence, but I do see quite a bit of activity on it. The most interesting stat is that they have plateaued to having on 5-6% new buyers, and 94%+ of the work is done for repeat customers.
Quick primer on how RAC works: Buyers post up requirements for a project, and developers bid on them. Once a bid is accepted, the payment for the project is put into an escrow account, and the developer is paid from the account once the project is delivered and tested. RAC acts as the third party to both buyers and sellers, taking a 15% fee for their services. Its kind of like ebay for dev projects.
Anyway, I really think this sort of thing is not used enough. Just the work I do, day to day, mirrors this sort of task-oriented approach. And if you have a solid enough set of requirements, you should be able to farm out discrete ‘units’ of work and just piece them together.
(note: funny that this post languished in my Drafts for over a month – I really need to check this more often)
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