RentACoder is amazing, but it only covers programming, graphics, and copywriting. Is there something similar for electrical and/or mechanical engineering? I know RAC has its copycats, but I haven’t found one that had this in its community.
On that note, how about general technical paper kind of stuff? It’d be amazing to let some Indian or Vietnamese do all the boring administrative parts of my job. Heck, I could work at home and pay the guy what I save on transportation.
Sure, there are plenty of consluting companies and temp agencies that will provide all manner of engineering services by the hour. The problem with most physical engineering problems, however, is that they cannot be abstracted the way software coding can, and require a lot of cross-team and cross-discipline interplay. Unless the problem is very small and explicitly defined, you can’t just toss it over the wall and expect to get a useful, or at least optimal, result.
For instance, let’s say that you’re designing a new rear stabilizer for an aircraft; you may know the general characteristics and estimated weight for the structure, but as it goes through design iterations the initial estimates may change (typically getting larger, heavier, and more complex) requiring a number of compromises between the design of the stabilizer and the fuselage design team, perhaps even propagating through other aspects of the design such as vehicle mass properties, predictive flight stability, et cetera. In fact, the common joke in aeronautical and aerospace engineering with regard to hardware compromises is “We’ll fix it in software,” that being the last part of any flight design to be completed, sometimes while the vehicle is sitting on the ground preparing to launch.
With (good) systems engineering principles and a consistent coding philosophy, a highly objectivized development effort can literally be broken into boxes with clearly defined interfaces that rarely change, and then you can pull the boxes and interface specs out of the control flowchart and parcel them off to (mostly) isolated teams. This is particularly true if you’re developing in some environment in which the actual hardware is completely isolated by an abstraction layer, i.e. programming in Python or Ruby. On the other hand, if you’re doing some major code development that goes directly to hardware control layers, i.e. embedded systems or C++ game console programming, then just trying to build apps piecemeal is going to cause major conflicts between module and object implementations. And when designing some complex real-world electrical system or structure you’ll find that fully abstracting a system just isn’t practical or even desirable; it will lead to substantial compromises that will undermine the functionality of the resulting product.
Stranger
(bolded for emphasis)
Was that intentional, or just an awesome Freudian slip?
I disagree that to make effective use of RAC, you need to have a very constrained task that is independent from any other. First of all, often you want someone to do the initial work-intensive step and afterwards you have the skills to make necessary modifications. Second of all, there is no reason you can’t keep working with the original author to make modifications.
The whole point of RAC (as distinct from all other solutions) is several: A) Obviously, you don’t need to be so well-capitalized as to hire a full-time engineering staff, but this can be addressed with any contracted engineering B) The RAC people compete, and you can evaluate them on their histories, you can evaluate them on their proposals (before you pay them), and {they’re so cheap, so easy to hire, and available to do such small jobs} that you can evaluate them based on their actual work for you with 0 obligations at any time. This is huge… far superior to full-time employees, and better than old-economy consultants. C) It’s easy to keep active communication with them, so you can keep asking them to redo the damn stabilizer. D) And, oh yeah, it’s dirt cheap. Which doesn’t mean you can spend less money. It means you can spend the same money and get a lot more done and use “inefficient” strategies like assigning the same work to multiple people to be much more certain you’ll get a successful outcome.
Like I said, RAC is amazing.
As a former c-slut myself, I assure you it was entirely unintentional. I would never denigrate consultants or in any way imply that they come in with promises of superior work, fantastic results, unbelievably compressed schedules, and free handjobs, and then leave after twice the original schedule duration and four times the proposed cost with little more than shoddy and poorly documented half-completed projects, frustrated and vindictive management, and a lot of ass-kissing.
Also, apropos of nothing, but Freud was badly wrong about nearly everything, especially nasal reflex neurosis and his interpretation of dreams. It just bugs me slightly when people refer to “Freudian” interpretations the same way it would if people invoked Lamarkism or Ptolemaic planetary mechanics.
Stranger
If it doesn’t, the idea makes me want to start one for other engineering tasks. Basic electronics is pretty black box stuff and would be quite amendable to this. emachineshop.com is something that I use for five-off parts and is really excellent but it’d be even better with a format like this, as I’m not particularly skilled in mechanical design, don’t have appropriate tool knowledge, etc. Really cool idea.
eta: oh, I see there is electronics there.
Consulting Engineering can be “rented out” in very short terms if you have the right people, the right manager, and most importantly a structure which allows efficient setup and close-down of projects.
I have much, much experience in this. I have successfully worked an 8-hour project, including contract setup/signing, invoicing, and close-out. To my knowledge, I am the only manager at my company to ever do that, however.
What venue did you do this with? A brick-and-mortar consulting company?
Oh yes. I manage a large number of very tiny projects, and in effect hire myself out to a variety of clients for projects from $2,000 to $2,000,000. While my 8 hour project was a famous exception, many of my projects are just 1-2 weeks. I’ve become a specialist in somehow making money off of these tiny projects via extremely low overheads.
When you put it that way, I guess I do too. The fees for some of my projects are less than $500 - for example, calculating runoff for a small office building or residence. I never thought of it as being a “RentAnEngineer” though.