| Gigster has found a sweet spot in providing experts in fields like machine learning and blockchain, where talent is hard to come by — and so too are full-time jobs, Dickey said. I think that's where it breaks down a bit. Full time jobs seem pretty plentiful even for mediocre devs. Gigster's model (based on their site) is to have top-tier talent that can easily get a very high paying, stable job. What I've yet to find is the pull of Gigster for someone that has options. There are so many full-time jobs for these devs if they are what Gigster is selling. So, why Gigster? They don't have any mention of compensation levels for devs. They do mention that you only get paid when milestones are reached. What determines if a milestone is reached? I'm not saying there isn't a "why", but they certainly aren't selling it. "Work remotely on your own schedule on new and interesting projects from top firms while making top money and without having to worry about the business side of things - we'll take care of that for you." That's a pitch. But they seem to have the attitude of "We're Gigster, of course everyone should want to work for us." Their job page doesn't have anything about why one should want to work for them, but mostly about how great the applicant should be. Even Google tries to sell applicants on working at Google and that's coming with a steady, large paycheck. As a dev, there are certainly concerning parts of Gigster: Fixed Price: Your project will cost the same amount regardless of who builds it and how it’s built. Once we quote you a price, we’ll stick to it no matter what. . .Guaranteed Work: During the course of a project, our team will gladly make necessary revisions to ensure that you’re going to market with the best product possible. So, if the client requests major revisions that doubles the workload, am I the one that's working for free or does Gigster cover that? Who determines if it's the dev's fault for building something crappy or the PM's fault for not getting things right or the client's fault for wanting something other than they said they wanted? If there are major revisions, do I not get paid because there aren't milestones set for revisions? I'm not saying that there aren't answers to those questions, but if they're serious about attracting top talent, I think they need to sell why a dev should work for them. Are they just looking for people who have big names behind them like Harvard and Google, but have been having trouble finding a full-time job? |
Freelance world is brutal, milestones are hard to quantify and the constant churn of a project from dev to dev will almost certainly result in poor architectural decisions.
I think there is a small amount of top engineers who might like this option if they wanted some time off but also wanted to work from time to time. Take a few months off, pick up a project, repeat.
However, as someone who works at a big name tech company I see no reason to leave my job and more specifically stocky equity unless they were paying 2x or 3x my base salary.