4 ms·

If anyone is looking for tips on working with offshore programmers, read Max's few but timeless points! He nails his experience about getting designers from Ro

by zaidf 17y ago

If anyone is looking for tips on working with offshore programmers, read Max's few but timeless points! He nails his experience about getting designers from Romania. They have really great taste! And Russians for math-related complicated programming. And India for cheap average quality programming work(btw, Indian designers are in general pathetic). These have been my experiences too over 8 years of being on both sides of the outsourcing market(as a freelancer and as someone who has hired folks offshore). It is an art working with people offshore and if you can manage it, it can give you a real edge especially in starting phases. Curious, are you deep into affiliate marketing?

icey 17y ago
I feel like there are whole marketplaces I'm not aware of - where do people go to find offshore help? I've universally found poor quality, which ends up with me paying people I know personally a ton of money to grind out boring crap (or doing it myself), when I'd much rather pay them to work on the interesting things.
- catfish 17y ago
  The key lies in documentation. The better you explain it on paper, the better the result. Especially with India.
  - zaidf 17y ago
    Bingo! A lot of my programming projects, I do the db schema design and post it along with the other specs. Dumb it down as much as you can. Of course, at some point if a project takes off you would want someone longterm. That's a whole different game(hiring a full-time developer offshore).
- maxklein 17y ago
  A lot of it comes from experience. After outsourcing for a year, you can judge pretty accurately within the first paragraph what a person is good for. The way they communicate will tell you a lot.
  - icey 17y ago
    I'd definitely be interested in hearing more about this.
    - zaidf 17y ago
      I always felt like someone should write a quick, to-the-point ebook for outsourcing newbies on working through the outsourcing world. May be I'll pen that one day:)
      - icey 17y ago
        One of the things that I really like about HN is that I feel like most of the people here have information worth sharing, and information that's valuable enough that I'd pay for a PDF of that information. I'm kind of surprised we don't have an HN ebook marketplace going yet, to be honest.
      - allantyoung 17y ago
        Zaid - I love your blog so your future ebook will probably be good too. If you have extensive experience outsourcing, I want to learn from your trails. So please do it. Here are some helpful links to get you started. I'm looking forward to reading your ebook. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/03/you_should_writ.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/03/you_should_w... http://www.squidoo.com/howtomakeanEbook http://www.squidoo.com/howtomakeanEbook http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/09/16/thirteen-steps-to-write-and-publish-a-free-ebook-in-thirteen-hours/ http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/09/16/thirteen-steps...
        zaidf 17y ago
        Thanks for the encouragement Alex. I will start putting together my ideas and bring it together one of these weekends!
        maxklein 17y ago
        I'd most certainly buy it too!
- zaidf 17y ago
  Start at rentacoder.com(lots of individual coders). Another option is elance.com(better for larger projects; more companies bidding). I was a top coder there in high school(early 2000). These days I use it exclusively to hire coders and designers for very specific projects.
  - RACNicole 17y ago
    Hi, this is Nicole from Rent a Coder. I'd like to thank you for recommending our service. A couple of important points about Elance: 1. Elance workers can't make more than 3 bids a month unless they pay a subscription fee ($9.95/month for 20, $19.94/month for 40 or $39.95/month for 60). This could reduce the number of qualified bids you receive -- and workers may pass these fees on to you in the form of a higher price. (There are no such restrictions at Rentacoder.) 2. Elance charges $199 - $399 for each arbitration case, and its mandatory pre-arbitration processes allow an abusive worker to stall the start of arbitration (consequently preventing you from accessing your money for weeks... 21 business days in fact). Making matters worse, Elance's arbitration process is tricky with each part of the process elongated with 3 - 15 business days in-between. Rentacoder doesn't work like that because it places time limits on arbitration responses. As a result, 45% of Rentacoder's arbitrations are completed under a day. 75% under a week. What can be particularly frustrating is that Elance doesn't publish the detailed rules of its arbitration process. Rentacoder does, of course. There are of course, many differences between our service and Elance's. You can compare the 7 major services through this link to discover even more: http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/DotNet/misc/CompetitorInformation/WhyRentACoder_ForBuyers.aspx http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/DotNet/misc/CompetitorI... If you have any questions, please let me know. You can also call in to talk to a facilitator 7 days a week, or email us (see http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/Feedback.asp http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/Feedback.asp). Nicole www.rentacoder.com
catfish 17y ago
Philippines = best SMO posters in the world and cheap.
- zaidf 17y ago
  Interesting. What exactly do they do under "SMO" umbrella?
  - rantfoil 17y ago
    wince SMO = spam social networks with garbage posts to get better page rank. That's the kind of stuff we have to spend hours and hours banning. sigh
    - catfish 17y ago
      SMO != spam in every case. This is not the kind of stuff you spend one second banning since none of it is posted to your sites. It is strictly created by and for and posted on the sites owned by the clients. When you step out of the box and think, you can find plenty of legitimate ways to leverage low cost content providers, for profit. You can stop wincing now...
      - zaidf 17y ago
        I agree, there is a right way and a wrong way to do SMO. I think you'll agree that most people offering their SMO services are either selling snake oil or spam. Few seem to know how to do it right. You seem to be in the minority so I'd love to learn more, especially in the context of what the folks overseas do. Are we talking about them writing quality copy for your website that hit on specific keywords? That would be SEO territory but I know people using Mechanical Turk and other services to get decent-quality copy written for cheap.
        catfish 17y ago
        I graduated from Mechanical Turk to full timers about 2 years ago when our client load increased. Though SEO is a part of our work, the real money is in traffic. We achieve a better than 1/100th CPA cost with SMO as compared to PPC with Google. Think about it. Someone who clicks through to your page from Twitter/Facebook/Linked In is a known quantity. What do you know about someone that clicks on a paid link in google. Nothing. What does it cost for that click? Only your monthly publishing cost per account divided by total clicks per month. And when someone walks through the door from SMO, you got a @name, you can look up their bio, you got their thoughts in their tweets, and you know where they are from. And it cost a fraction of the price you pay Google for an unqualified, anonymous click. And with Twitter you have zero click fraud. I have cracked the code on CPA using Twitter and it begins with killer content. And I use staffing in the Philippines which cost 1/15th American dollars for same person, no taxation, no flooring cost, no legal issues. If I were Google, I would definitely figure out how to buy Twitter before it eats their PPC lunch. There are a whole lot of us X-PPC guys who no longer pay ridiculous fees to the search engines. As for the Turk, the cost is a little more than the PI and with your own staffing, you get the added bonus of continuity. You also get the benefits of knowing your staff, weekly quality review meetings, standardization of process, and a consistent quality that I found missing with Mechanical Turk. I would still recommend MT though for anyone running a few sites who needs less than full time commitment for projects.
shakedown 17y ago
A company I worked for used a relatively big web company in Romania, hiring a few developers over there to work full time on their site. The HTML and CSS they wrote were generated using Dreamweaver, and their PHP was a mess with tons of copying and pasting. It was impossible to get the company's higher level management team to understand why continuing to use these guys was bad idea, because they saw the front end 'just working', yet it was so hard for us to modify and understand any of their code. If you intended to have a site that one day has skilled programmers working on it and is actually maintainable, be careful about things 'just working' with outsourced code.
- zaidf 17y ago
  Yes, quality of code is a huge concern for me which is why I always have a growth plan: if a certain project takes off, I will quickly hire another proven full-time programmer to recode or completely understand the project. I also am not a huge fan of working with offshore companies. There is enough friction already in talking remotely. I don't like another layer of management in between developers. Though for bigger projects, you need a project manager of some sort.
- gvb 17y ago
  "...mess with tons of copying and pasting." I call this "ransom note programming." http://images.google.com/images?q=ransom+note http://images.google.com/images?q=ransom+note Nasty stuff, not even enough pride in their work to run an autoindent program on it.
- bad_user 17y ago
  Hi, I also live in Romania. > relatively big web company in Romania Little quiz ... what should set your alarm on? The "big" size of that "web company" or its location? For me it's a no-brainer ... simply because for a consulting company to scale to that "big" factor ... you need to hire a lot of third-rate, cheap code-monkeys ... that's business 101 ;) Second of all ... your company should've asked for a portfolio of the actual developers that ended up working for you, simply because the quality of the employees varies greatly even in well-respected organizations. Or was there some kind of manager acting as a proxy between you and those doing the actual work? And out of curiosity, in your country there aren't any "big software companies" that are doing consulting work of dubious quality? This seems to me that it was more a problem with your management. Blaming it on "outsourcing" is not really accurate. BTW ... in my small company that does consulting work, we aren't taking outsourced projects very often. We don't do it simply because those kind of clients that would outsource to us are of very poor quality, leading to poor communications, unmet deadlines, unmet payments and generally disastrous results.
petercooper 17y ago
People's personal experiences are interesting, but are potentially ridiculous generalizations.. like saying Jews make better bankers, the British are good tailors, the French are great chefs, or what not. I doubt all Indian designers are useless..
- zaidf 17y ago
  Accurate generalizations can be very helpful.

by zaidf 17y ago

icey 17y ago

I feel like there are whole marketplaces I'm not aware of - where do people go to find offshore help? I've universally found poor quality, which ends up with me paying people I know personally a ton of money to grind out boring crap (or doing it myself), when I'd much rather pay them to work on the interesting things.

catfish 17y ago
The key lies in documentation. The better you explain it on paper, the better the result. Especially with India.
- zaidf 17y ago
  Bingo! A lot of my programming projects, I do the db schema design and post it along with the other specs. Dumb it down as much as you can. Of course, at some point if a project takes off you would want someone longterm. That's a whole different game(hiring a full-time developer offshore).
maxklein 17y ago
A lot of it comes from experience. After outsourcing for a year, you can judge pretty accurately within the first paragraph what a person is good for. The way they communicate will tell you a lot.
- icey 17y ago
  I'd definitely be interested in hearing more about this.
  - zaidf 17y ago
    I always felt like someone should write a quick, to-the-point ebook for outsourcing newbies on working through the outsourcing world. May be I'll pen that one day:)
    - icey 17y ago
      One of the things that I really like about HN is that I feel like most of the people here have information worth sharing, and information that's valuable enough that I'd pay for a PDF of that information. I'm kind of surprised we don't have an HN ebook marketplace going yet, to be honest.
    - allantyoung 17y ago
      Zaid - I love your blog so your future ebook will probably be good too. If you have extensive experience outsourcing, I want to learn from your trails. So please do it. Here are some helpful links to get you started. I'm looking forward to reading your ebook. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/03/you_should_writ.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/03/you_should_w... http://www.squidoo.com/howtomakeanEbook http://www.squidoo.com/howtomakeanEbook http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/09/16/thirteen-steps-to-write-and-publish-a-free-ebook-in-thirteen-hours/ http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/09/16/thirteen-steps...
      - zaidf 17y ago
        Thanks for the encouragement Alex. I will start putting together my ideas and bring it together one of these weekends!
        maxklein 17y ago
        I'd most certainly buy it too!
zaidf 17y ago
Start at rentacoder.com(lots of individual coders). Another option is elance.com(better for larger projects; more companies bidding). I was a top coder there in high school(early 2000). These days I use it exclusively to hire coders and designers for very specific projects.
- RACNicole 17y ago
  Hi, this is Nicole from Rent a Coder. I'd like to thank you for recommending our service. A couple of important points about Elance: 1. Elance workers can't make more than 3 bids a month unless they pay a subscription fee ($9.95/month for 20, $19.94/month for 40 or $39.95/month for 60). This could reduce the number of qualified bids you receive -- and workers may pass these fees on to you in the form of a higher price. (There are no such restrictions at Rentacoder.) 2. Elance charges $199 - $399 for each arbitration case, and its mandatory pre-arbitration processes allow an abusive worker to stall the start of arbitration (consequently preventing you from accessing your money for weeks... 21 business days in fact). Making matters worse, Elance's arbitration process is tricky with each part of the process elongated with 3 - 15 business days in-between. Rentacoder doesn't work like that because it places time limits on arbitration responses. As a result, 45% of Rentacoder's arbitrations are completed under a day. 75% under a week. What can be particularly frustrating is that Elance doesn't publish the detailed rules of its arbitration process. Rentacoder does, of course. There are of course, many differences between our service and Elance's. You can compare the 7 major services through this link to discover even more: http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/DotNet/misc/CompetitorInformation/WhyRentACoder_ForBuyers.aspx http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/DotNet/misc/CompetitorI... If you have any questions, please let me know. You can also call in to talk to a facilitator 7 days a week, or email us (see http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/Feedback.asp http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/Feedback.asp). Nicole www.rentacoder.com

catfish 17y ago

Philippines = best SMO posters in the world and cheap.

zaidf 17y ago
Interesting. What exactly do they do under "SMO" umbrella?
- rantfoil 17y ago
  wince SMO = spam social networks with garbage posts to get better page rank. That's the kind of stuff we have to spend hours and hours banning. sigh
  - catfish 17y ago
    SMO != spam in every case. This is not the kind of stuff you spend one second banning since none of it is posted to your sites. It is strictly created by and for and posted on the sites owned by the clients. When you step out of the box and think, you can find plenty of legitimate ways to leverage low cost content providers, for profit. You can stop wincing now...
    - zaidf 17y ago
      I agree, there is a right way and a wrong way to do SMO. I think you'll agree that most people offering their SMO services are either selling snake oil or spam. Few seem to know how to do it right. You seem to be in the minority so I'd love to learn more, especially in the context of what the folks overseas do. Are we talking about them writing quality copy for your website that hit on specific keywords? That would be SEO territory but I know people using Mechanical Turk and other services to get decent-quality copy written for cheap.
      - catfish 17y ago
        I graduated from Mechanical Turk to full timers about 2 years ago when our client load increased. Though SEO is a part of our work, the real money is in traffic. We achieve a better than 1/100th CPA cost with SMO as compared to PPC with Google. Think about it. Someone who clicks through to your page from Twitter/Facebook/Linked In is a known quantity. What do you know about someone that clicks on a paid link in google. Nothing. What does it cost for that click? Only your monthly publishing cost per account divided by total clicks per month. And when someone walks through the door from SMO, you got a @name, you can look up their bio, you got their thoughts in their tweets, and you know where they are from. And it cost a fraction of the price you pay Google for an unqualified, anonymous click. And with Twitter you have zero click fraud. I have cracked the code on CPA using Twitter and it begins with killer content. And I use staffing in the Philippines which cost 1/15th American dollars for same person, no taxation, no flooring cost, no legal issues. If I were Google, I would definitely figure out how to buy Twitter before it eats their PPC lunch. There are a whole lot of us X-PPC guys who no longer pay ridiculous fees to the search engines. As for the Turk, the cost is a little more than the PI and with your own staffing, you get the added bonus of continuity. You also get the benefits of knowing your staff, weekly quality review meetings, standardization of process, and a consistent quality that I found missing with Mechanical Turk. I would still recommend MT though for anyone running a few sites who needs less than full time commitment for projects.

shakedown 17y ago

A company I worked for used a relatively big web company in Romania, hiring a few developers over there to work full time on their site. The HTML and CSS they wrote were generated using Dreamweaver, and their PHP was a mess with tons of copying and pasting. It was impossible to get the company's higher level management team to understand why continuing to use these guys was bad idea, because they saw the front end 'just working', yet it was so hard for us to modify and understand any of their code. If you intended to have a site that one day has skilled programmers working on it and is actually maintainable, be careful about things 'just working' with outsourced code.

zaidf 17y ago
Yes, quality of code is a huge concern for me which is why I always have a growth plan: if a certain project takes off, I will quickly hire another proven full-time programmer to recode or completely understand the project. I also am not a huge fan of working with offshore companies. There is enough friction already in talking remotely. I don't like another layer of management in between developers. Though for bigger projects, you need a project manager of some sort.
gvb 17y ago
"...mess with tons of copying and pasting." I call this "ransom note programming." http://images.google.com/images?q=ransom+note http://images.google.com/images?q=ransom+note Nasty stuff, not even enough pride in their work to run an autoindent program on it.
bad_user 17y ago
Hi, I also live in Romania. > relatively big web company in Romania Little quiz ... what should set your alarm on? The "big" size of that "web company" or its location? For me it's a no-brainer ... simply because for a consulting company to scale to that "big" factor ... you need to hire a lot of third-rate, cheap code-monkeys ... that's business 101 ;) Second of all ... your company should've asked for a portfolio of the actual developers that ended up working for you, simply because the quality of the employees varies greatly even in well-respected organizations. Or was there some kind of manager acting as a proxy between you and those doing the actual work? And out of curiosity, in your country there aren't any "big software companies" that are doing consulting work of dubious quality? This seems to me that it was more a problem with your management. Blaming it on "outsourcing" is not really accurate. BTW ... in my small company that does consulting work, we aren't taking outsourced projects very often. We don't do it simply because those kind of clients that would outsource to us are of very poor quality, leading to poor communications, unmet deadlines, unmet payments and generally disastrous results.

petercooper 17y ago

People's personal experiences are interesting, but are potentially ridiculous generalizations.. like saying Jews make better bankers, the British are good tailors, the French are great chefs, or what not. I doubt all Indian designers are useless..

zaidf 17y ago
Accurate generalizations can be very helpful.