Yes there are good programmers in those freelance sites. You need to find the needle in those haystacks. 1. Post a project on Elance or Guru or other freelance

Yes there are good programmers in those freelance sites. You need to find the needle in those haystacks. 1. Post a project on Elance or Guru or other freelance sites where you specifically ask them for their Github and stackoverflow profile. I believe every good programmers do not maintain regular Github profile. But most of them do and from their Github profile you can have an idea on quality of code they can deliver. I found a programmer from Russia who had a very high reputation score on Stackoverflow and arguable he came out as a proficient one. But convincing a programmer to work on your project is another challenge. They have enough projects under their belt. So your projects need to challenge/thrill them to work on. Else they will not stick for long.