HACKER Q&A
📣 nkmnz

Is There “Dev-Feedback as a Service”?


I'm the founder of a startup that is building cool things™ with web technologies. The dev team, including myself, is quite junior and we don't have the budget to hire a senior developer full time, yet. It would be great to get feedback on crucial design decisions and code quality from someone more experienced than I am (most senior person, but also responsible for most business tasks), even if it were only a couple of hours per week or 1-2 days per month. I went to freelancer market places (e.g. upwork), but this kind of job requires a lot of interaction with the client – in the end, it's almost teaching – and that doesn't seem to be in high demand. Are there people specialized not only in providing feedback and training to teams of junior devs, but also providing that as a service?

For what it's worth: mostly Vue, Node, Python, AWS, Docker, Postgres, Mongo (esp. migration to Postgres :D)

  👤 codingdave Accepted Answer ✓
I'm sure there are senior folk out there that would love to help. But the value most senior folk can offer tends to be specific to the organization - they know exactly how the tech stack works, they understand the business and the customer and what choices have been made in the product design.

You really need someone internal to fulfill this role. Otherwise you end up in a position where you are outsourcing your proprietary domain expertise, while having a staff of code monkeys. It should be the other way around.

👤 brudgers
To a first approximation, they are called "consultants."

They will work hands on because they charge enough to make it economically viable.