Closer To The Ideal

Yesterday, the WageMachine opened its doors to the public. I see it as offering competition to WP Questions, or rather, where we expect to go with WP Questions over the next month or 2. The WageMachine has decided to start with a broad range of languages, rather than take the niche approach that we are taking:

We’re now slowly opening WageMachine to beta users. WageMachine lets you hire great programming tutors at minimum wage($8.55 per hour).

Learn or get help with what you’re struggling with in:

- Linux
- Ruby
- PHP
- Python
- Javascript
- C
- C#
- Erlang

We’ve got a healthy set of skills represented.

There is no catch–these are smart people who like to teach and are happy to do it for minimum wage.

There are some limitations. You do have to pay using PayPal up front, and can only hire someone for 30 minute – 1 hour shifts. (These are people who can make much more than minimum wage but are willing to work a bit because it’s convenient, they like the work, and it’s fun to get paid with PayPal right away).

We’ve got a handful of workers now who you can hire.

WageMachine is a side experiment, and we have no idea if this will work or not. But it should be a fun learning experience.

EDIT: Thanks to the great feedback from HackerNews users, we’ve tweaked a few things.

We’ve reduced the max shift to 1 hour from 2. This means you can hire people for either 30 minutes or 1 hour.

People pointed out that if you make $100 an hour, it makes more sense to spend 1 hour working and 10 hours looking for a job than to earn $8.55 per hour for 11 hours.

What we’re trying to stress is that this is more of an “intro” tool.

We think it makes more sense to do small <1 hr jobs for 10 people.
That's 10 new potential future clients. and it's $40-$80 bucks in your pocket. And you helped 10 people. Basically, we're turning time spent job hunting into more productive time spent.

Darren Hoyt and I are starting off focused on the tiny niche of WordPress. If WP Questions works out, we plan to expand, one niche at a time, to the markets that WageMachine is targeting:

- Linux
- Ruby
- PHP
- Python
- Javascript
- C
- C#
- Erlang

The history of the WageMachine is something that I can relate to:

The obvious solution was to take the BART (the Subway for you non-San Francisco folks).

However, I had been working at our startup without pay for the last 3 months. I had literally 6 cents in my bank account. I could not afford a BART ticket.

Plenty of time, but no money to get home.

It just so happened that earlier in the month I had read about a sculpture the artist Blake Fall-Conroy had created called the “Minimum Wage Machine”. As a person cranks a handle on the machine, it slowly releases a penny every 5.04 seconds. That’s about 12 pennies a minute, or $7.55 per hour.

While I was watching the rain fall, I literally thought “I wish I had a minimum wage machine right about now”–I would have gladly cranked a handle for 20 minutes to earn the subway fare home.

Then I thought, “why doesn’t this exist?” Why do I have to choose between doing challenging programming work for $50-100 per hour or earning $0 per hour?

Thus, I whipped out the laptop and got to work.

I’ve often thought about that too. I’ve had stretches of $100 an hour work followed by stretches of almost no work coming in, and I’ve been left wondering, why isn’t there more in the middle? And why can’t my own wage vary up and down casually, depending on circumstances, including such trivial circumstances as:

Am I at a friends house, waiting on a friend?

Am I bored and trying to kill time?

At such times I often go on to forums and answer people’s questions. Such work isn’t worth $100 an hour but it is worth something. So why aren’t there more places where I could pick up some money for answering such questions?

This line of reasoning is what lead to WP Questions, and it is also, apparently, what lead to the WageMachine.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 9:25 pm and is filed under startups, wp questions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.