5 ms·

I've had experience using online sites to source jobs, and I think this advice is right on. Here are some summary points, generalized away from rent-a-coder:

I've had experience using online sites to source jobs, and I think this advice is right on. Here are some summary points, generalized away from rent-a-coder: * don't hire Americans to do commodity work (i.e. PHP CRUD) * be clear but not ominous in your job description, and include visual mocks if at all possible * don't try and be secretive - no one wants your dumb idea anyways * make sure someone has a decent reputation on the site you use * keep track of the progress of the product and keep in touch with the coder, but don't be overbearing * be somewhat flexible with the deliverable - aim for perfect but accept done * test the code thoroughly and request fixes in one shot, but don't conflate new features with bug fixes or no one will be happy The only points I would modify are: * Job requests can include bullets, but don't be overly fine-grained. * You can in fact build relationships with outsourcers via rent-a-coder (MTurk, 99Designs, etc), and you should - this will lead to much better long-term work. A good way to get this started is an unexpected bonus. * Don't ever screw someone on work. This is just karmically bad. They live in Eastern Europe and are poor. You live in America and are rich. I think the best way is to give someone a piece of work (5-10 hours worth), ask them for a bill, and proceed from there. If the work sucks or is over-billed, you pay and move on. Otherwise, you can give them more work.

fnid2 17y ago
don't hire Americans to do commodity work (i.e. PHP CRUD) This is why Americans are saying they are from overseas to get the jobs. If the price is the same, what does it matter where they are from? Speaking a common primary language and being in the same time zone has value. When I offshore work, I send an email and have to wait until the next day to get a response. When the worker is in my timezone and I get quick responses, the project success rate improves. I agree with the other points and have been on both sides of the payer/worker transaction.
- andreshb 17y ago
  You should try outsourcing to Latin America then, responses in realtime during office hours.
  - fnid2 17y ago
    I've worked with some from Mexico and Argentina. Both are good places to look, so yes, that's a good alternative to distant time zones.
- mrkurt 17y ago
  If the prices are the same, the American probably isn't as skilled/experienced.
  - lsc 17y ago
    have you hired anyone from overseas? have you hired an American for overseas wages? I've done both, and the amount of money a person can charge has a lot less to do with skill and experience than you think. Several people who worked for me for sustenance wages now make more money than I do because other people noticed that they are pretty good. Selling yourself is a skill, and it has very little overlap with the skills required to be a good Engineer.
    - patio11 17y ago
      Amen to this comment. I have three engineers who I'm personally awed by. One of them was a graduate student at my university, two of them work for my current employer. You could hire all three for the cost of one definitionally average engineering employee at Google or MS. All three are well-educated, well-credentialed, experienced engineers from two nations that virtually define Rich First World Country. I'd be honestly embarrassed to tell you what I make at the day job. When I told my bosses I was quitting to pursue other opportunities, they tried to convince me to stay, and the insanity that is salary negotiation reared its ugly head: the value of my labor has increased by easily a factor of ten in the last three years, the best offer they could possibly give was +N%. This follows standard economy-wide employment practices where we pretend that almost everyone (with the exception of salesmen, finance professionals, and very few other white-collar jobs) is an 18th century water loom operator and pay them in, essentially, the same matter as we paid 18th century water loom operators. I think one of the major Big Ideas of this century is that the economy is being dragged kicking and screaming to where salaries converge closer to actual value faster, rather than being tangentially sorta-kinda arranged in rough proportion to expected value. That's exhilarating and terrifying at the same time.
      - lsc 17y ago
        I was going to become a headhunter or a body shop precisely because I believed that I was significantly better than the market at picking good but cheap people. But then I realised that the headhunter/recruiter job was more about selling (selling your services to the company, that is.) than it was about getting good people. Once they have the contract with the company, any warm body, it seems, will do. Large companies are heavily invested into this 'water loom' model. The problem with the 'end run' of just starting your own company is that you then end up with embedded systems engineers doing things like web applications, because it's easy to do the web application as an independent, while it's harder to properly utilize that Engineer's talent without a large corporate team.
Ygor 17y ago
"They live in Eastern Europe and are poor. You live in America and are rich." OK. I know it wasn't supposed to be anything like that, but this sentence sounds really bad. I actually got the idea that the coding business of any sort can get you in a pretty good position, financially. One of the reasons is the fact that you are not dependent solely on your local market. And there's also the lower cost of living.
- andrewljohnson 17y ago
  I should say "relatively rich." It's true some people in Eastern Europe are wealthy, but their wealthy is the equivalent of our middle class, so it's a different scale. And also, the people getting their start on rent-a-coder aren't the rich ones. I wrote this because of something I saw. A friend of mine has a popular iPhone app, and he was pressuring some overseas consultant to lower the final price for some work because he wasn't happy with the result. I don't think you should be leaning on your workers after the fact - it's up to you to ensure you hire quality worker, and pay them bit-wise so you are both happy.
  - viraptor 17y ago
    No - "people in Eastern Europe" aren't wealthy or not in any way that can be approximated to a whole region. "Middle class" is not comparable. It's just a different market. You earn more money and spend more money, but on average it's the same proportion. There are some differences because of country-specific issues - gas prices are completely different for example. Talking about "people in Eastern Europe" is just silly... Which country? Estonia is different to Ukraine, which is different to Romania, which is ... Talking about "people in Eastern Europe" is like putting Mexicans and Canadians in a "people in North America" bag (and trying to get some meaningful economic average out of it) Why does this depend on a country: "he was pressuring some overseas consultant to lower the final price for some work because he wasn't happy with the result". If the result was not right according to the specification, then why not lower the price? If the result was correct, then changing the price is not right. But what does the country have to do with that?
    - 17y ago
jwr 17y ago
There is no such thing as "Eastern Europe". That's a silly cliche back from the iron curtain era. Stop using it, as it doesn't make sense in any way. Not economically, not politically, not even geographically. The rest of the advice is pretty good, though.
- cryptnoob 17y ago
  You think there's no difference between Western and Eastern Europe? Really? You insult both regions, and your pomposity is making me a little nauseated.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - mantas 17y ago
    There IS difference between Western and Eastern Europe. But Eastern is too complicated to be seen as a single region. Some countries (Slovenia) are quite rich, even more rich than some Western countries. While some other countries are doing quite bad (Latvia) and there're many countries in between. As of culture, South-Eastern Europe is very different from North-Eastern Europe. And Mid-Eastern Europe is totally different thing as well. Some are slavs, some aren't, some has more relations w/ russia, some w/ italy or germany. It varies from country to country A LOT.
- roam 17y ago
  ... then why are businesses in Western Europe outsourcing to Ukraine, Romania and Estonia? There's still a divide.
fragmede 17y ago
* You can in fact build relationships with outsourcers via rent-a-coder (MTurk, 99Designs, etc), and you should - this will lead to much better long-term work. A good way to get this started is an unexpected bonus.* We found a good developer on RaC, and now they do part-time dev work for us and we haven't gone through/used RaC with them for at least a year.

fnid2 17y ago

don't hire Americans to do commodity work (i.e. PHP CRUD) This is why Americans are saying they are from overseas to get the jobs. If the price is the same, what does it matter where they are from? Speaking a common primary language and being in the same time zone has value. When I offshore work, I send an email and have to wait until the next day to get a response. When the worker is in my timezone and I get quick responses, the project success rate improves. I agree with the other points and have been on both sides of the payer/worker transaction.

andreshb 17y ago
You should try outsourcing to Latin America then, responses in realtime during office hours.
- fnid2 17y ago
  I've worked with some from Mexico and Argentina. Both are good places to look, so yes, that's a good alternative to distant time zones.
mrkurt 17y ago
If the prices are the same, the American probably isn't as skilled/experienced.
- lsc 17y ago
  have you hired anyone from overseas? have you hired an American for overseas wages? I've done both, and the amount of money a person can charge has a lot less to do with skill and experience than you think. Several people who worked for me for sustenance wages now make more money than I do because other people noticed that they are pretty good. Selling yourself is a skill, and it has very little overlap with the skills required to be a good Engineer.
  - patio11 17y ago
    Amen to this comment. I have three engineers who I'm personally awed by. One of them was a graduate student at my university, two of them work for my current employer. You could hire all three for the cost of one definitionally average engineering employee at Google or MS. All three are well-educated, well-credentialed, experienced engineers from two nations that virtually define Rich First World Country. I'd be honestly embarrassed to tell you what I make at the day job. When I told my bosses I was quitting to pursue other opportunities, they tried to convince me to stay, and the insanity that is salary negotiation reared its ugly head: the value of my labor has increased by easily a factor of ten in the last three years, the best offer they could possibly give was +N%. This follows standard economy-wide employment practices where we pretend that almost everyone (with the exception of salesmen, finance professionals, and very few other white-collar jobs) is an 18th century water loom operator and pay them in, essentially, the same matter as we paid 18th century water loom operators. I think one of the major Big Ideas of this century is that the economy is being dragged kicking and screaming to where salaries converge closer to actual value faster, rather than being tangentially sorta-kinda arranged in rough proportion to expected value. That's exhilarating and terrifying at the same time.
    - lsc 17y ago
      I was going to become a headhunter or a body shop precisely because I believed that I was significantly better than the market at picking good but cheap people. But then I realised that the headhunter/recruiter job was more about selling (selling your services to the company, that is.) than it was about getting good people. Once they have the contract with the company, any warm body, it seems, will do. Large companies are heavily invested into this 'water loom' model. The problem with the 'end run' of just starting your own company is that you then end up with embedded systems engineers doing things like web applications, because it's easy to do the web application as an independent, while it's harder to properly utilize that Engineer's talent without a large corporate team.

Ygor 17y ago

"They live in Eastern Europe and are poor. You live in America and are rich." OK. I know it wasn't supposed to be anything like that, but this sentence sounds really bad. I actually got the idea that the coding business of any sort can get you in a pretty good position, financially. One of the reasons is the fact that you are not dependent solely on your local market. And there's also the lower cost of living.

andrewljohnson 17y ago
I should say "relatively rich." It's true some people in Eastern Europe are wealthy, but their wealthy is the equivalent of our middle class, so it's a different scale. And also, the people getting their start on rent-a-coder aren't the rich ones. I wrote this because of something I saw. A friend of mine has a popular iPhone app, and he was pressuring some overseas consultant to lower the final price for some work because he wasn't happy with the result. I don't think you should be leaning on your workers after the fact - it's up to you to ensure you hire quality worker, and pay them bit-wise so you are both happy.
- viraptor 17y ago
  No - "people in Eastern Europe" aren't wealthy or not in any way that can be approximated to a whole region. "Middle class" is not comparable. It's just a different market. You earn more money and spend more money, but on average it's the same proportion. There are some differences because of country-specific issues - gas prices are completely different for example. Talking about "people in Eastern Europe" is just silly... Which country? Estonia is different to Ukraine, which is different to Romania, which is ... Talking about "people in Eastern Europe" is like putting Mexicans and Canadians in a "people in North America" bag (and trying to get some meaningful economic average out of it) Why does this depend on a country: "he was pressuring some overseas consultant to lower the final price for some work because he wasn't happy with the result". If the result was not right according to the specification, then why not lower the price? If the result was correct, then changing the price is not right. But what does the country have to do with that?
  - 17y ago

jwr 17y ago

There is no such thing as "Eastern Europe". That's a silly cliche back from the iron curtain era. Stop using it, as it doesn't make sense in any way. Not economically, not politically, not even geographically. The rest of the advice is pretty good, though.

cryptnoob 17y ago
You think there's no difference between Western and Eastern Europe? Really? You insult both regions, and your pomposity is making me a little nauseated.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- mantas 17y ago
  There IS difference between Western and Eastern Europe. But Eastern is too complicated to be seen as a single region. Some countries (Slovenia) are quite rich, even more rich than some Western countries. While some other countries are doing quite bad (Latvia) and there're many countries in between. As of culture, South-Eastern Europe is very different from North-Eastern Europe. And Mid-Eastern Europe is totally different thing as well. Some are slavs, some aren't, some has more relations w/ russia, some w/ italy or germany. It varies from country to country A LOT.
roam 17y ago
... then why are businesses in Western Europe outsourcing to Ukraine, Romania and Estonia? There's still a divide.

fragmede 17y ago

* You can in fact build relationships with outsourcers via rent-a-coder (MTurk, 99Designs, etc), and you should - this will lead to much better long-term work. A good way to get this started is an unexpected bonus.* We found a good developer on RaC, and now they do part-time dev work for us and we haven't gone through/used RaC with them for at least a year.