Helping others in exchange for altruistic karma points and bragging rights while others make money off of it is all nice and dandy (@StackOverflow: we still think you rock), but what if you could make money solving other professionals’ problems with your expertise?

It turns out, some designers and coders have indeed figured out a way to use OPP–Other People’s Problems–as their own ticket to freelancing bliss.

Whether you strive for a higher productivity working all by yourself or want to draw synergy effects in teamwork with outer people, you may want to give some of these services a shot.

hack.hands()

A service calling itself hack.hands() has two things to offer:

• you can use your skills to troubleshoot other people’s code on-demand while getting paid for it per minute;
• you can hire an expert to fix your own code.

How’s that for a novel way to get things done?

Should you still want those karma points, you can always grace hackhands.com with a blog post of your own, but beware: their CMS will mark outgoing links with the nofollow attribute so that none of the backlink goodness is any good for anyone else.

An overview of alternatives

Alternatives to hack.hands() include the micro-consulting network AirPair and Codementor, an open marketplace for both live one-on-one help and/or long-term mentorship, and Maven, the privacy-aware knowledge marketplace.

Currently, only Maven seems to understand that in no way are you interested in jeopardizing your current job by volunteering your hourly rates and other information that’s nobody’s business but yours and your clients’.

Maven, the knowledge marketplace

The all-encompassing consulting platform Maven supports phone consultations, electronic surveys, and what they call “extended consulting” (workshops&seminars, research&analysis, and in-person engagements). Maven even pays for referrals so you can earn a commission on OPCGs, or Other People’s Consulting Gigs.

It might be about time both designers and coders discovered the new universe of emerging opportunities.