I would happily give up a percentage of my rate to someone who could get me ~15 hours a week worth of work at a market rate and insulate me from a lot of the overhead that I simply don't have time to deal with. Just like Hollywood stars focus on being Hollywood stars and leave the business of Hollywood to agents, I'd like to focus on my strengths and leave the business to someone else.

I'll warn you though that the type of arrangement you suggest does exist, it's called: 'a consulting house' as opposed to: 'a software bouse' and it is the worst kind of scam.

First off, your 'market rate' ...that you can forget. The Firm sees to its own needs and those needs are fat salaries and bonuses to (non technical I might add) management. You'll get a salary and a fancier title than 'contractor' something like... Say... 'consultant' yes! Consultant! That's gonna bump up the hourly rate... But not YOUR hourly rate of course, that of the Firm my friend.

I guess my bitterness in this regard is quite obvious but here in South Africa, this type of thing is utterly rife. You have a few managers who have swept in over time on the winds of apathy and who for some I fathomable reason have good, big contracts and a slew of underpaid 'consultants' who run around doing their bidding.

You seem to believe that this relationship will play out the other way round where you are earning that 'market rate' and for a small percentage of that you'll have in your employ not only someone who'll ensure you're always employed but who is also a personal assistant that runs your admin?

That's called: 'a boss.'

Please correct me if I'm wrong here but it seems you have the world (as I know it) bass ackwards and programmers are not Hollywood stars, not where I come from.

If they only did 15 hours a week the film would not get made.

I would be interested In knowing what gigs you do take on and how the code integrates with the work being done elsewhere

if you are doing maintenace and bug fixes on a codebase you know I can see how it would work.

My apologies if this seems overly aggressive I am just interested in how this could work - we could alll fit in 10 hours a week for beer tokens

So I amwondering what the actual meat of the work you do is? How did you land the work - is it maintenance from past fulltime gigs, is it real consulting where you are training g the in house teams,

I am honestly interested because I am at a bit of a loss as to how to get such gigs myself

thank you

right now i work with 2 startups and 1 large company, as well as do occasional consulting with another large company (this is usually less than 5 hours every month). i'm all about simplicity and breaking things down into small pieces, so on all projects i am able to deliver and launch features regularly with 10-20 hrs of work a week on each. my total billable hours for the week usually are in the 40ish range.

i've found all the work through referrals pretty much, so i can't say exactly how to find it for others. i will say put as much as you can out in open source, that is the best "sales" technique i've had (often "referrals" have come from someone i've only interacted with in the open source community). also, be consistent with your deliveries, and open and honest about scheduling, as well as when something is going to take longer than you estimated. surprisingly few contractors are good at communication it seems. often i come into projects for people who were abandoned by a developer and even when they were working together only got spotty communication from that dev.

good points on the communications side - something I can easily let slide

Altay from 10x Management here. Yup, we're doing this, and ramping up quickly. Feel free to get in touch (email in profile) if you want to learn more.

In the end I had to choose between two offers. They encouraged me to take the slightly lesser paying one because they thought I would be happier in that position.

Talent agency model is definitely the way to go.

I was a Contingent (third-party) Technical Recruiter for 2.5 years (and hopefully never again, sans a cool company such as the above) and would love to work in that model. I only had the opportunity with something similar when our sales (the folks who got the requisitions / open orders) had many openings in similar "verticals." E.G. five different companies all looking for Java SE developers, with slight variations, but, for strong candidates I/we could get them several interviews, sometimes multiple offers.

Would be much more fulfilling. In most markets, however, this is (if the relationships are not established with multiple companies (which it sounds like the case in your situation)) "skill marketing" or trying to gain a sales foothold into a company by "marketing" a candidate to the company. At one of my former employers, the relationships were solid enough to where we created a few positions for some great candidates as we understood the departments needs. This is not typical at all, so finding a few companies actually making this a standard model would be fascinating (I imagine boutique retainer-model recruiting).

Granted I am also relatively inexperienced. Self-taught and only worked in the field for 2 years. Maybe it would not work as well for someone with more experience. Their name was Jobspring btw.

So we started with them representing me -- taking care of the business end of my freelancing -- and it worked out so well that we've partnered to create 10x Management, to expand the model. I bring the tech experience, and they bring the talent agency experience.

Of course, that's not enough by itself, and it's a long process, but there are recruiters who do go through all the trouble of learning technology.

(The following refers to most, but certainly not all)

They're generally loathed by developers for a multitude of reasons, they charge ridiculous rates, they come back and poach their placements, and commit a plenty of other sins. Yet they're still out there, plugging away and jamming my LinkedIn feed...

The only reason they still manage success is because the alternatives have to be even worse. Despite the ridiculous environment we're in right now, there are still folks out there who are interested in leaving their current jobs for greener pastures. But Dice.com isn't getting it done for these folks, and even if it is their resumes are getting buried beneath piles of unqualified candidates and/or getting filtered out by terribly built filtering software or, even worse, HR folks who mistake Java for Javascript.

I think the way you disrupt the recruiting industry is by significantly improving the alternatives. That or providing a completely new alternative that's wildly better.

Word of mouth has always been the better alternative. It works like a charm until networks are exhausted. Maybe that's the place to start.

That's actually an interesting idea. Please write it!

So maybe one person is really good at sorting a pile of CVs into a shortlist. Maybe another is good at phone screening. The company can outsource (via the site) any or all of the parts that go into filling a position. Providers (which would be individuals or small companies) bid for these tasks in an open marketplace along the lines of elance.

Effectively it is taking the roles of the recruiter and busting them down into pieces, and allowing different people to specialise into different things.

It's no more fleshed as an idea than that, but the basic concept is that a recruiter is considered by many to be overpaid, but fulfills a necessary evil. By allowing companies to directly outsource individual pieces they can utilise what they need from a recruiter without having to pay for the whole amount. And a skilled recruiter can get good work under their own banner without all the overhead of having to get an office and form a company, and themselves become freelance agents for hire.

Overhead would be in:

1) Teaching ALL participants about job to fill.

2) Dealing with job seeker's frustration when he would need to answer the same questions to different people in the process.

3) Restricting access to potentially sensitive personal information.

As the tasks get completed the next step happens, and the site manages the whole process.

The job seeker would not have to answer questions at each step of the way. The information would be saved in the system so that each person managing the step (whether internal or outsourced) can see the output from the previous step.

The steps are something like : write ad, sort responses, initial screening, organise interviews, interview, negotiate offers. The company would choose which of these they want to handle in-house, and which they want to outsource. You could come up with a few templates to cover a large proportion of hiring in industries.

Restricting access is just done with the same types of legal terms that existing recruitment agents use. The site would include a reputational factor, the same as any other online marketplace. So someone who wants to have a at-home job sorting through CVs isn't going to start leaking the information if they want to get more work from a client.

Ideally the jobs would be listed on the site itself, but there's no reason it can't be used to manage jobs that are listed on existing (and popular) sites. The idea would be to leverage the network effect of other sites while building a base of clients for the site itself. So initially listings would be on the site as well as other popular sites. Over time, a strategy would be devised to drive the popularity of the site itself as a place for jobseekers to find work.

If so many users access your information - how do you know who leaked your sensitive data?

Outsourcing such small pieces could make sense only to the web site itself (which is fast, cheap, secure and reliable) - not to external human players.

Traditionally humans tend to manage computers, not the other way around.

5) Outsourcing the DNA of the company to the lowest bidder.

If your idea or your management team suck a recruiter can only do so much. Once you are worth your salt you can hire one full time recruiter and be done with it.

Recruiting is more important, not less important. Commoditizing it means you don't know how to build a company.

On (4) this is a fatal flaw unless the market can provide enough liquidity that there is fast turnaround on bids. Overall I think it is a killer of the idea.

On your (5) I would say that many organisations have no DNA worth speaking of. This is the market I would be speaking to.

I have done contracting work for many different companies over my years. Rightly or wrongly, it's seen as a cost centre rather than a strategic issue in many cases (despite the rhetoric, of course).

What you get then is a bunch of randomly selected people (essentially). They really could be random given the fact you could have many different "recruiters", without any true consistency on how they were chosen outside of process.

A hiring manager could use this service for a handful of hires. Individually all the employees look great on paper. But something weird will happen when you put them all on the same project, and you are going to wonder where you went wrong.

Personally, I wouldn't see a web application commoditizing the hiring process as disruptive (in any good sense, anyway). LinkedIn was already disruptive because it changed the recruiting industry and well-qualified highly-skilled people don't stay unemployed long because of it.

Recruiters jumped on LinkedIn because it was built correctly and it made their job easier. Trying to commoditize the process further is going to be difficult because any recruiter worth their salt isn't going to take a pay cut and fight for bids. Most recruiters I've worked with take a commission on the hiring salary anyway.

I understand that the concept is disruptive from a hiring managers point of view ("Great, I don't have to hire HR, recruiters, or pay out the ass!"), but my guess is its going to be difficult for them to take the jump into an untested service to literally have anonymous bidders ala ebay doing their hiring.

As a manager myself I wouldn't use such a service.