Crowdsourcing Software Development to the Masses 122
Lucas123 writes "Computer World is running a piece on Crowdsourcing. That's a catchy term for the practice of taking a job traditionally performed by employees or a contracted company and outsourcing it to an undefined, large group of people in the form of an open call on the Web. Article author Mary Brandel views it as a viable way to develop cheap but innovative software. Sites like TopCoder and their coding competitions are becoming more popular with big name companies like Constellation Energy because programmers who take on the job are global, offering many different perspectives on any one job. 'The creativity and innovation of how people are rationalizing these designs and building components enables us to interject a perspective and approach that normally we wouldn't have access to,' Constellation's director of IT said." Is there any potential here, or is this just a buzzword bad idea?
I call it... Let's not pay people... (Score:3, Interesting)
Two heads etc. (Score:4, Interesting)
Rent-A-Coder was a disaster (Score:4, Interesting)
I put a job on Rent-A-Coder once. The job was to take an existing GPL piece of Python code that understood how to query some, but not all, of the various registrar WHOIS servers, and make it understand the output from each of them. The existing code was years out of date, but did approximately the right thing. Each registrar has a slightly different format for the same WHOIS data, so you need a collection of parsing modules, or something smart enough to do it generically. It's not a difficult problem, just time-consuming.
The code, and a test file of 1000 test domains, was provided. The statement of the problem said that all the test cases had to work. The resulting code would be re-released under the GPL.
Four programmers in succession took that job, with bids from $200 to $500 and locations from Ireland to Russia, and none of them produced any working code.
Central Limit Theorem (Score:3, Interesting)
Were it so simple... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's deregulation. All utilities were basically "split" into generation and delivery. Generation owns the generators, and delivery is the wires and the customer base. The generation people sell their power to the grid - which there is the PJM power pool, and in turn the delivery side buys, for spot needs, from the grid at what's called location marginal price. The LMP is a calculated thing, it is designed to be a public price so that its transparent to all players.
What happens though, particularly in the east coast, is that, thanks to NIMBY, there's simply not enough electricity being generated for this to work. Particularly in Maryland, no one wants to build enough generation, and so, Constellation goes and buys the electricity from somewhere else across the country. Right now, this is commonly in Texas, because Texas seems to have no problem with building big coal plants, and so Texas makes a lot of money exporting electricity to the rest of the country.
So yes, Constellation is, in a sense, buying electricity from itself, but, it also has to pay a ton of middle men along the way, from ISO operators, energy traders, and even the rights to move transmission between ISOs.
The moral of the story is, if you want the cheapest possible electrity and best possible service, support legislation to recombine generation and transmission entities of various utilities, then, support the eminent domain and deregulation needed to allow these reconstituted utilities to construct enough coal plants to meet demand. If you want windmills, rats on treadmills, or other environmentally friendly generation, then be prepared to pay a premium on it.
Re:I call it... Let's not pay people... (Score:2, Interesting)
Probably depends on the size of the company. A small company with a single product that finds itself competing with a new free version of it, will tend to have to shed developers as the amount it can successfully charge for it diminishes. And job losses can depress wages, due to supply and demand dynamics. However, at a large company, it can act against job losses, the classical example here being MS having to update the web browser that they would have otherwise let linger for forever -- as long as competition (free or otherwise) forces them to maintain the IE product, they need to keep enough devs around to do it.
So free-as-in-beer software probably doesn't depress wages so much as has the effect of stifling smaller companies and reinforcing the larger ones.
i second that.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Some projects I recall off the top of my head:
-Write software that will take in a
- Create a solid state disk drive for somebody's extra RAM. Willing to pay $300. Har har. I, ahem, told them I could make a prototype for $50k, plus the cost of Xilinx tools.
I've done bits of consulting, and doing projects for small, clueless companies is by far the worst job you can do as an engineer. They are technically clueless, don't understand that engineering costs money and want it done yesterday. Rentacoder and its ilk only magnify these problems, because they troll for technical people who will work for relatively nothing.
Recently, I offered to hire myself out as an embedded systems engineer at $60 an hour, and that is pretty much whoring myself out compared to what other people charge for consulting, but the Indian dude who wanted to hire me only wanted to pay $20 an hour. F off.
All I can say is, if these site works for somebody, good for them. I have bigger fish to fry. It's quite hard for me to see how this attracts any real talented people.
Re:Tom Sawyer's paint-my-fence scheme reborn (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the "Tricks" to the Crowdsourcing phenomenon is to provide a way for users to create value without feeling like they are working. Slashdot has done that to the extent that you have created content (your posting) questioning whether anyone has done this. Tom Sawyer indeed.
Check out the Carnegie Mellon projects, The ESP Game, [espgame.org] Peekaboom, [peekaboom.org] and Phetch [peekaboom.org] for more examples where users are providing valuable services FOR FREE while playing a game. Similar to how you and I are creating value for free in this forum with our witty banter. It feels rewarding to post a comment. And it creates a valuable end product for Slashdot.
One "crowdsourced" concept that I find to be totally unethical is the archival of student papers. Force students to submit papers to your service, in the name of plagiarism-checking, and then hold them FOREVER, and build a database of content so that you can use other people's Intellectual Property. The McLean trial [washingtonpost.com] starts around January 23rd. Hopefully Slashdot will be covering it.
Caveat Emptor, but fair game. (Score:3, Interesting)
I tried it once and survived. My trick was to use it as a resource for non-experts looking to break conceptual logjams. I went into it knowing not to expect a clone to Yahoo for $1000.
All I needed was to fix an irritating spacing problem on a little website of mine. I made a point of going against the grain of the site and "overpaid" on purpose. For $100, I got 2.5 solutions (depending on if I wanted to use tables or CSS plus some tutorial PDF's so I could have a clue about how to muck around with it all afterward.)
I figured it would be something like 2 hour's work for the "warm-shots" here, so at a random $50/hr "Journeyman coder rate", $100 became my fee. I would like to be known for paying close to sensible value for jobs I post.
I'd use the service again because I'm sure I'll come up against another silly problem that I'm just not able to crack open. That's why I'm not a designer.