Interesting thought. Try invoking the Blub paradox here[0]. Who knows who the best hackers are? In some sense, only the best hackers do. On the scale of hacking ability, you can only look down and truly understand what is beneath you. When you look up at people beyond your ability, you have no idea whether or not they are crackpots or 1337 haxors. So, for this website to be effective at all, the people judging and deciding the hackers need to be at the top of the hacking scale to offer any sort of guarantee as to the quality of the hackers listed.
Dipping into personal experience and anecdotes, I don't recognize the names of any of the people organizing the site. To me, this means that the site probably doesn't have the very best hackers running it and so cannot guarantee that they have some of the very best hackers on there. But, I suffer from the paradox/curse of Blub as well, so I have no idea if the people running this are skilled in their hacking abilities or whether it is just a few grad students who put something together last weekend.
N.B. This comment falls into the same pitfall that the original essay does in that it only considers the field in question to have one dimension. Hackers come in all shapes and colors just as programming languages do.
Hi Zack, this is a really great point. I wouldn't claim to be the best hacker in the world and your insight is spot on as to the problems this introduces. I can say that, like most marketplaces, hackerlist will be ever evolving and dynamic. Our objective and our promise is to increase quality over time.
This means offering the right tools to help companies and freelancers make educated decisions (rating systems, reviews, programming tests, etc). It having dedicated staff to vett programmers and companies.
Specifically in terms of the Blub paradox, I can say that sabalaba and I have used a myriad of different freelance services and have a pretty good idea of the services they are missing. If we are able to curate and nurture a ecosystem with better hackers than any of our competitors, I'll feel proud that we've been able to at least offer our clients a superior service.
I really appreciate your points and I admit this is something we're going to simply have to prove. That's why we're not earning any commissions for our first batch and are keeping our network small enough that we can resolve problems one at a time.
As a hacker and freelancer I can tell you that I would not appreciate programming tests.
There are two reasons why I put up with computers and code:
1)I feel like it. I want to make something interesting
2)There is an incentive. Someone is paying me money for my skills and services.
Taking a test falls under neither of these categories. I see it as a waste of my time and there is nothing to show for it
Also, every single programming test that I have seen is just plain terrible. Not to mention there is no way to enforce against cheating. Therefore making the entire process pointless and a hassle for everyone.
Dipping into personal experience and anecdotes, I don't recognize the names of any of the people organizing the site. To me, this means that the site probably doesn't have the very best hackers running it and so cannot guarantee that they have some of the very best hackers on there. But, I suffer from the paradox/curse of Blub as well, so I have no idea if the people running this are skilled in their hacking abilities or whether it is just a few grad students who put something together last weekend.
[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
N.B. This comment falls into the same pitfall that the original essay does in that it only considers the field in question to have one dimension. Hackers come in all shapes and colors just as programming languages do.