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Very valuable, much appreciate your perspective! Have you found any other regions with talent more reliable than India-- say Ukraine, Croatia, Colombia?

smt88 12y ago
I've worked with people from India, Ukraine, Croatia, the Philippines, Romania, and Poland. The cultures differ wildly between those places. The Romanians I worked with, for example, were very non-confrontational and agreeable to a fault. That made it really pleasant to work with them, but it also screwed us over many times because they wouldn't admit that they were going to miss a deadline or that they disagreed about something important. The quality of work also differed. On the low end of the quality spectrum, the work was so bad that it was actually laughable. I wondered how someone could write code that bad without trying. On the high end of the spectrum, the code was organized semi-logically into objects, but without any consistency or rationale. It wasn't much better than spaghetti code, and it was still utterly unusable.
- JSeymourATL 12y ago
  Great stuff, thanks again! Just one more question (if I may)-- How do you scorecard these guys? If I find someone, who looks good on paper, comes across well during a Skype interview-- is there anything you look for, probing questions? Or can you only know by giving them a 2-4 week trial run?
  - smt88 12y ago
    I've never found a reliable way to identify a good developer vs a bad one. At an individual level, you ideally want someone who has written an entire application many times. With shops, you often get junior guys/girls who have only written modules to fit into other people's architecture. How to find, afford, hire, and retain tech talent is probably the hardest and most common problem for startups, and there's nothing close to a repeatable, universal solution.
    - JSeymourATL 12y ago
      Agreed, Thanks! :)

smt88 12y ago

I've worked with people from India, Ukraine, Croatia, the Philippines, Romania, and Poland. The cultures differ wildly between those places. The Romanians I worked with, for example, were very non-confrontational and agreeable to a fault. That made it really pleasant to work with them, but it also screwed us over many times because they wouldn't admit that they were going to miss a deadline or that they disagreed about something important. The quality of work also differed. On the low end of the quality spectrum, the work was so bad that it was actually laughable. I wondered how someone could write code that bad without trying. On the high end of the spectrum, the code was organized semi-logically into objects, but without any consistency or rationale. It wasn't much better than spaghetti code, and it was still utterly unusable.

JSeymourATL 12y ago
Great stuff, thanks again! Just one more question (if I may)-- How do you scorecard these guys? If I find someone, who looks good on paper, comes across well during a Skype interview-- is there anything you look for, probing questions? Or can you only know by giving them a 2-4 week trial run?
- smt88 12y ago
  I've never found a reliable way to identify a good developer vs a bad one. At an individual level, you ideally want someone who has written an entire application many times. With shops, you often get junior guys/girls who have only written modules to fit into other people's architecture. How to find, afford, hire, and retain tech talent is probably the hardest and most common problem for startups, and there's nothing close to a repeatable, universal solution.
  - JSeymourATL 12y ago
    Agreed, Thanks! :)