4 ms·

Interesting.. Any experimentation with say, 2x 2500, 5x 1000 etc? There must be a sweet spot.

tluyben2 15y ago
We tried different prices, but they didn't seem to matter much. However we did not try with the same project, so it's not really the same case (we didn't have that much cash...). We did see the same with admins and even quite high up (in the rankings on freelancer) ones; the same thing applied. We had an admin team which had super rankings, but their prices were insane, but we thought ok, let's try. So 4 admin teams, 8 servers, 2 each. 2 had ratings and 1 high ratings. 3 were actual teams, 1 was 1 guy (spoiler: the 1 guy won). They all were priced about $50-80/month per server for everything (yes... everything, including monitoring, 24/7 calamity resolve, etc). During intake, the 2 rated teams performed very very well (spoiler: they do have 1 guy in their office who knows stuff who does only intakes all day, that's me presuming, but he), the other two less professional, but okish. The first hick up was the highest rated company not knowing what an ssh key was. Or GPG (me asking for the public key for gpg to send over the ssh key must've sounded like alien speak to them)... They kept asking me for the cpanel root password. I usually don't run cpanel as I don't like it, nor does it run on debian. This turned out to be the actual difference between the intake person and 'the rest' of the company (i demanded a total over these teams of 10 different admins) that they ONLY know cpanel. They absolutely did not know anything about linux but the sheer basics... Amazing. The one person (coincidentally also the only one not from India) did know debian and was actually good, asking very low prices to get good ratings. We gave them and he's still managing 2 servers. But how will ANY site trump this common trick for programmers OR admins. Yes using Odesk with camera works. But i'm not spending my time watching someone else, well actually a lot of someones, otherwise my scaling is limited to me watching someone, sit and write code. So usually the intake is with some person who is (very) good and when the cam goes off from the intake (or skype) you get some junior incapable of doing anything. How to prevent that and still enjoy the scalability of outsourcing? I mean if i have to check up on every person of my team, all day, I am better of putting someone next to me right?
- minikomi 15y ago
  Wow.. Thanks for the long writeup. Still seems there is an element of luck involved..

We tried different prices, but they didn't seem to matter much. However we did not try with the same project, so it's not really the same case (we didn't have that much cash...). We did see the same with admins and even quite high up (in the rankings on freelancer) ones; the same thing applied. We had an admin team which had super rankings, but their prices were insane, but we thought ok, let's try. So 4 admin teams, 8 servers, 2 each. 2 had ratings and 1 high ratings. 3 were actual teams, 1 was 1 guy (spoiler: the 1 guy won). They all were priced about $50-80/month per server for everything (yes... everything, including monitoring, 24/7 calamity resolve, etc). During intake, the 2 rated teams performed very very well (spoiler: they do have 1 guy in their office who knows stuff who does only intakes all day, that's me presuming, but he), the other two less professional, but okish. The first hick up was the highest rated company not knowing what an ssh key was. Or GPG (me asking for the public key for gpg to send over the ssh key must've sounded like alien speak to them)... They kept asking me for the cpanel root password. I usually don't run cpanel as I don't like it, nor does it run on debian. This turned out to be the actual difference between the intake person and 'the rest' of the company (i demanded a total over these teams of 10 different admins) that they ONLY know cpanel. They absolutely did not know anything about linux but the sheer basics... Amazing. The one person (coincidentally also the only one not from India) did know debian and was actually good, asking very low prices to get good ratings. We gave them and he's still managing 2 servers. But how will ANY site trump this common trick for programmers OR admins. Yes using Odesk with camera works. But i'm not spending my time watching someone else, well actually a lot of someones, otherwise my scaling is limited to me watching someone, sit and write code. So usually the intake is with some person who is (very) good and when the cam goes off from the intake (or skype) you get some junior incapable of doing anything. How to prevent that and still enjoy the scalability of outsourcing? I mean if i have to check up on every person of my team, all day, I am better of putting someone next to me right?

minikomi 15y ago
Wow.. Thanks for the long writeup. Still seems there is an element of luck involved..