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Discord usually works like this for me although occasionally it makes sense to do a voice chat or screen share. But honestly your question makes me suspicious,
by ilaksh 5y ago
Discord usually works like this for me although occasionally it makes sense to do a voice chat or screen share.
But honestly your question makes me suspicious, because I have had a client bring on a few people into a project (who I was not able to check beforehand) who abused this asynchronous thing.
One was just QA person who just had multiple jobs and would literally have a different and creative reason she did not have time to finish her work every day. It could take a few days for her to get back to you even if she appeared to be idling in the server. Then with the excuses.
Another was an American scammer who claimed experience with just about every technology, and pretended to be working on "wireframes". When we complained too much that he wasn't available to discuss things, he supposedly started showing up in the chat room. But strangely his answers were quite short and sometimes somewhat broken English.
I sort of tolerated it for a week or so because I was really busy doing my part. But then we were supposedly having a call to discuss the actual details and amazingly he seemed to have no problem talking about the project for several minutes without ever actually saying anything specific to the project.
So on that call I insisted that we discuss it, and asked him a specific question about the core technology. He could not think of another way to evade the question so he left the call.
Anyway he eventually admitted to hiring some overseas person to "work" on it, and that was the person who was sitting in the chat room. (Although not really saying or doing anything useful).
Having said all of that, I think video calls are usually unnecessary, and text chat should be sufficient 95% of the time.
- uhxvt 5y agoIt is harder to build trust when you don't see and hear the other party. I totally get that and its fair honestly, a lot depends on facial and verbal cues. So I assume someone in my shoes would have to make extra sure to build trust by being responsive and delivering reliably. It would probably also be beneficial to have some kind of proof that the work I claim to do currently is actually done, maybe invite the other party to the git repos or something. So if they wanted to, they could check on the status any time. I guess that might reduce some uncertainty.
- ilaksh 5y agoRight I mean you said you can't respond immediately but that doesn't mean you can't be relatively responsive as long as it's within a few hours or a day and you read and reply thoroughly and show evidence that you are making progress. I normally do give people access to the git and also regularly deploy. Also I pre-authorize X days or a week of work and don't continue until I get paid for the last chunk. That way both parties are seeing real things happen routinely -- software delivery and payment. Rather than for example having a two month long project with one payment and the website only really does anything useful at the very end.