I've never been on the buying side of some work for hire sites, but I'm sure that they offer the potential buyer the option of targeting to a single person a concrete job offer, because sometimes I get job offers that are not visible to the rest of the pool. Forgive me for the self promotion, I only can say in my defence that (a) I'm not making this up and (b) customer loyalty is one of the primary measurements of customer satisfaction and is something I'm quite proud of.
I suspect that they also offer additional options to the buying side to better target their offer to the individuals that look more likely to be a good fit for the job. It really makes sense, since those sites are crowded with hundred of thousands of potential candidates, and the prospective buyer knows in advance that most of those offers, while dead cheap, will not provide the services that they are looking for. One of those options has to be "send this job offer to the top 1%"
Being in the top ranks of some of those sites, I frequently receive job offers that seem to be targeted at that top 1% but unfortunately (or fortunately, see later) fall outside of my main knowledge domain.
The last one I received exemplary illustrates a lot of what is currently wrong with the perception that business types have of software development in general. The job description reads:
"h.264 codec implementation is not following standard specification including for AVCDecoderConfiguration record (you can find it in the specifications for H.264)...please complete that compliance.
if you are comfortable with x.264/ ffmpeg or you are a c++/vc++ expert, this should be a very easy task for you."
My first reading did not trigger any alarms. After all, if you're familiar with the H.264 specs, it should be easy for you to find the reference spec. A bit harder would be to find the place in the codec source code where this record is incorrectly generated, and fixing it with all the testing necessary to make sure you are not breaking anything else would probably be an order of magnitude more complex.
Still, if you're familiar with H.264 this should not be too hard. Not "very easy" as the job offer reads, but not too hard. Much harder is of course, to reach the level of mastery necessary to understand the H.264 standard and be able to program a codec for it. Let's see some of the barriers that someone that has reached that skill level has had to overcome.
- H.264 is proprietary, to have experience with it means having experience in a media related technical business. Unlike other fields where you can write the next Apache killer at home, usually involvement with H.264 means a paid job.
- H.264 is large and complex. I doubt that there is a single individual that understands everything in the standard down to the necessary details. Most likely, there are field experts in each area of the codec pipeline that understand completely each associated section in the standard.
- The skills necessary to write an optimal video codec in C/C++ go far beyond the intermediate level. It takes years to write a good video codec implementation. Nobody is going to come out with one out of a weekend hobby project.
The resulting profile is someone who has mastered the H.264 standard, which means experience in a commercial codec vendor, together with C/C++ skills well above average. Maybe someone that has devoted the canonical ten years to perfect and improve its skills in video compression.
Would you trust someone with that profile to fix the codec? I surely would. The next question is, how much this is worth?
This is the point where I usually read the offered amount. According to the job offer, the maximum amount that the buyer was willing to pay for this was $120. According to some sources, this amounts to less than two days flipping burgers in a fast food restaurant.
Remember: you're not paying for the time, you're paying for the experience.
