Grace and humility are sadly lacking here (though I don't find these to be common traits in executive types). I understand you built this thing and your identity is wrapped up in it, but at some point you have to respect that the mission has become bigger than you.
"Allegations from the board — reinforced by multiple interviews that TechCrunch conducted with former BGC employees — included Bryant misgendering a staff member and creating a toxic work environment. Bryant has denied these allegations."
Even if the allegations turn out to be false, is your paycheck and status so important that you're willing to risk all the momentum you've built in helping black girls get into tech? Jeopardizing a generational movement like this is so shortsighted it hurts. It feels like the Judgement of Solomon [1] except the real mother would rather the baby die than have it live on without her.
If you're reading this Kimberly, the right thing at this point is to let go. Relinquish the domain and other BGC assets. Let them live. The black girls your org was helping shouldn't be punished because of a spat between you and the board. All that legal shit can play out behind the scenes. From the outside looking in, your current actions are doing more harm than good and it's a bad look for you. You'll always be the spark of Black Girls Code and no one can steal that from you, but don't be the fire that burns it down.
Just relaunched after going dark for a couple months trying to figure out a way to make it work. As a solo dev project I was chewing off more than I could chew with trying to handle disputes between users when direct payments were involved so I replaced it with tipping.
Hoping after a bit of usage I can gather enough info to find out the value of another dev's perspective when you get stuck on some code and the unconsidered solutions they can offer.
I built this app and want to say first and foremost, thanks for checking it out! I also want to address a few common things I've seen mentioned.
> 75¢ a minute is not enough
I personally don't think it's too low for a job where there's no interview and the only requirement is > 100 rep on S/O. With a critical mass of question flow, answering questions on Call a Dev would beat working at your local gas station making $11.50 an hour.
The job market is ultra competitive for junior-intermediate devs. And there's not a lot of opportunities for them to make money b/w grinding leetcode, sending out resumes, and competing for contracts on upwork in a race to the bottom.
I made Call a Dev as a place to find a companion to help you while you are struggling with something. They may not know the exact answer to your question, but sometimes two heads are better than one and getting a little perspective from someone else is all you really need.
> 100 S/O rep is too high/low
For todays questions about whether aliens exist, where do babies come from, and why do my balls have sperm in them, it's admittedly too high. But until I get some real data points of people requesting refunds (which you can opt to do just by clicking a button after a call ends) it's seems okay.
> Letting people post anonymously/not having a report button
The first app I ever built on my own was all thanks to Michael Hartl and his rails tutorial from 7 years ago. As soon as I deployed that app I was eager to show him what his free tutorial had enabled me to build so I emailed him and he said, to paraphrase, "Cool. I can't really see it though because it wants me to sign up to use it."
Ever since then, I've been relentless about removing friction. That trade off means that a few troll posts are bound to get through and I'm ok with that. This app is still in the interesting project phase so adding a report button is a nice to have that I can add down the line, but after working on this for 3 months I had to get it out the door.
Appreciate all the feedback.
For anyone curious about the stack its an elixir/phoenix/liveview app.
The job market is ultra competitive for junior-intermediate devs. And there's not a lot of opportunities for them to make money b/w grinding leetcode, sending out resumes, and competing for contracts on upwork in a race to the bottom.
I’m not convinced that digging out a new, lower, bottom is the right solution to this issue.
If you were truly stuck on a problem at work, wouldn’t you be willing to spend $2 or even $5 per minute to solve it? That could be the difference between your service paying sweatshop wages versus actually providing a viable option for underemployed devs.
Thanks for the question! Your concern is justified. There are no guarantees. The only thing for certain is that if you don't get a ping within 60 minutes then your question will be deleted.
It's kind of a chicken/egg problem where there aren't enough questions because I don't have enough people to answer them, and there aren't enough enough people to answer them without a steady supply of questions to keep them busy.
I'm reconsidering the pay rate after reading a few of the comments here.
Thanks for checking it out! I could never guarantee that tho as Call a Dev is mostly self-service from the standpoint of the question asker and the question answerer. I wanted to reduced friction as much as possible for both sides of the equation.
If you're willing to pay more money for more guarantee you should check out codementor.io
Ideally you'd post a question and get a ping within the first few minutes. But there is a 1 hour max window for any question to receive a ping. Once the ping comes through, if you decide to accept it, then the dev has 60 seconds to answer the call.
As it stands, there isn't much supply of questions or devs to answer them (just launched today with no early signups). I was thinking one way to get around this would be to let devs subscribe to email or text notifications when a questions is posted with a specific tag.
A diverse notification setup seems wise - otherwise yea, I think solving the balancing problem is going to be an ongoing struggle. The one hour limit sounds pretty wise!
Devs ping any problems they feel capable of solving. They can ping with 2 messages, either they KNOW they can help, or they THINK they can help.
Once you receive a ping you can vet their S/O profile and if you like what you see you can start the call.
It's not so much for contract work or to complete tasks or projects like fiverr is. It's about getting personalized help with code your struggling with.
So instead of the customer finding the dev (as on Fiverr), here it's the other way around. Interesting. Lines up conceptually with the StackOverflow model of Q and A.
I liked what another commenter said about adding tiers for devs with higher S/O rep. So if the dev has a higher rep, they can make more $ per minute. Something I'll look into adding.
I don't think anyone is going to make much money off of it starting out since I don't have a large supply of questions coming in yet, but there are a lot of underemployed devs out there who would be happy to make an easy $15 bucks an hour just googling answers for people and telling them what to do.
I think a lot of poorly-received questions on S/O are the result of people not knowing where to look for their answer, or being intimidated by reading the docs or source code. So they post the questions hoping someone can guide them.
Call a Dev isn't a competitor to S/O. S/O is a wiki. Call a Dev is basically Clippy in human form that you pay per minute.
> there are a lot of underemployed devs out there who would be happy to make an easy $15 bucks an hour just googling answers for people and telling them what to do.
Maybe there's a reason they are unemployed
> I think a lot of poorly-received questions on S/O are the result of people not knowing where to look for their answer, or being intimidated by reading the docs or source code.
Isn't is the point of engineering? To know how to get information and what to search for? If the 15$/hour dev knows and the guy on my team doesn't, why am-I not employing the person answering questions? My company sure pays more than 15$/hour...
"Allegations from the board — reinforced by multiple interviews that TechCrunch conducted with former BGC employees — included Bryant misgendering a staff member and creating a toxic work environment. Bryant has denied these allegations."
Even if the allegations turn out to be false, is your paycheck and status so important that you're willing to risk all the momentum you've built in helping black girls get into tech? Jeopardizing a generational movement like this is so shortsighted it hurts. It feels like the Judgement of Solomon [1] except the real mother would rather the baby die than have it live on without her.
If you're reading this Kimberly, the right thing at this point is to let go. Relinquish the domain and other BGC assets. Let them live. The black girls your org was helping shouldn't be punished because of a spat between you and the board. All that legal shit can play out behind the scenes. From the outside looking in, your current actions are doing more harm than good and it's a bad look for you. You'll always be the spark of Black Girls Code and no one can steal that from you, but don't be the fire that burns it down.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_of_Solomon