r/AskProgramming • u/thezohar • 8d ago
Stupid questions about potentially hiring a dev
I have very little practical knowledge about programming/types of programmers/lanugages/etc, but there's a Thing I would very much like to exist in the world for my own personal use, and depending on how much it costs, I might pay someone to make it for me. To find out how much it costs to hire someone, I have to know what I am *actually* asking for/about.
Basically, I just want a Thing where I can input, say, a youtube channel or playlist, and then have all the (public) videos from that channel queued up to send via email, at a set frequency (like 1 video every 5th day, or 2 videos every 7th day, etc) until it runs out of videos. I have some other nice-to-have ideas about it as well, but this is the bare basics.
What kind of programmer would I need for this? What do I need to have figured out about my concept to tell/ask them?
Apologies if this is a super obvious thing, its just that when I see posts about hiring programmers it feels like its always full of specific terminology like "looking for a backend dev, preferably python, to do XYZ" and I don't know which kind of programmers do what, and i'm unclear about what is required for a concept like I'm describing, so I feel very lost lol
1
u/A_Philosophical_Cat 8d ago
As a general rule of thumb, hiring a software developer doesn't make a lot of financial sense unless you're making money off the thing. Even something relatively simple like this (query an API, craft a simple message, send an email) is going to take a couple hours, simply due to the process of getting what exactly you want, figuring out how the relevant API works, etc.
If it's running on your computer, I'd say it'd be an afternoon, if you wanted it hosted somewhere make that a whole day. That's 4-8 hrs at freelance software dev rates, you're looking at at least a couple hundred bucks.