You might have missed the strange but growing phenomenon of watching coders code as if it was a game, but a new development might make this more important than a passing fad. 

Live Coding is a site that lets users follow the progress of programmers solving real problems over a live streaming feed. The idea is that it is educational and entertaining. Users can interact with the "stars" of the show and join with their own live feed if they are brave enough. There are also some off-line videos, but the key idea is that you watch a code in the same way you might watch a gaming competition. 

Now things have moved up a notch. "Hire a Streamer" aims to sell the video star's coding abilities to anyone wanting a task completed. The announcement suggests:

"You can hire a streamer for code review, backend architecture review, solving technical issues, preparing for exams, helping on homework, building modules or new products from scratch."

To hire a streamer you go along to their channel and click the Hire Me button where you will then see a list of the things they specialise in - and their proposed hourly rate. This is where is gets a little odd. You can hire the programmer for a fixed number of hours, deposit your money with the site and wait for the job to be done. You also choose whather to have your streamer work in public view i.e. a public stream or a private stream. 

At this point you might be thinking "great idea" or you might be wondering about the problems that are going to arise.

The most obvious is "how long"?

If you book 10 hours and the task isn't complete what do you do? Presumably watching the video feed gives you some measure of how hard the programmer is working so you can judge if your money has been wasted or well spent - assuming you can tell the difference between working and just typing. If you go for a public feed presumably your work is by default "open source" even if you have decided it is proprietary. 

There are other ways of hiring coders by the hour but none of them add the "circus" element to the equation. In other contexts there can be more negotiation about the project and its details. Many an hourly programmer has ended up as a fixture for many a company. Hiring a streamer sounds all together different. 

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