

You, the freelance programmer, would you pay someone else to write code for you? - constantinLG

Hi there, i am Constantin, software engineer, with a day job and many projects part time (i am looking for the way of entrepreneurship), i&#x27;m wondering: would you pay a freelancer to write some parts of code for you, to speed up your project delivery time?<p>For example, you are working on a project, you&#x27;re tight in time, and need external assistance. Would you willing to outsource parts of your code to somebody else? For example: the creation of a new payment gateway, a function that needs a complex RegEx you are not so familiar with, or any other independent part of your code that can be easily be done by someone else, to buy time.<p>Are you willing to do this? If yes, how often you think you&#x27;ll do it if price is good? What about the code quality or any other concern that might stop you to take advantage of such a service?<p>Any opinion is greatly appreciated. Let&#x27;s see how all of us think regarding the outsource of our work :)
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seyfulislam
It depends on the complexity of the task that the other is going to do. If it
is a straightforward but time consuming, than it will speed things up
massively. However, if it has connections with a lot of your critical/tricky
parts of your very own code, then you should provide enough background
information about your code, or it will just slows the process down.

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constantinLG
You have right, but this triggers me to the other side of a programmer
perspective. Thinking from a test driven development, and creating parts that
are easy to mock and test, couldn't be the outsource-process mindset be a one
more reason to better write code handling the dependency of the other parts of
the system? This way, i think that some critical parts can be easily mocked up
in the outsourced code, so the complexity gets easier to manage. What do you
think?

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seyfulislam
Mocking the behavior of your code may be as hard as writing the actual code. I
mean, you are right, you can feed an outsource code with fakey, but covering
all test cases in the mocked up code needs a lot of work which drives us to
the point I mentioned earlier: You have to teach them your code.

You are right, though, at some point that aiming to create parts that are easy
to mock and test is a good practice. But here we have a question about one -a
single freelancer- getting help by outsourcing at some point (which is
probably close to the deadline) some functionality. I don't think there are
plenty of freelancers out there who put modularity on top of their priority
list when writing code. They care about the time deadline, functionality,
robustness, error tolerance and at some point modularity shows up in the list.
Many one-guy-cares-about-all projects are black box whose features other than
functionality are not taken care of by the customer and the programmer.

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constantinLG
You have right. From what you are saying, i understand that in some ideal
conditions, meeting THAT coder might help you a lot. Otherwise, it will just
be a loss of time and money. Thank you for your thoughts!

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lastofus
I wouldn't mind outsourcing some of my work but there are usually factors that
stop me:

* Cost: Good experienced devs in a timezone I want to be awake for to talk with cost more than I can afford to pay (generalizing here)

* Management overhead: Good communication, writing good specs, etc such that a dev can complete the work in the way I want it done can be just as time consuming if not more so than doing it myself

* Establishing trust: Farming out work when in crunch mode to an unproven dev and hoping for the best doesn't sit well with me. I would want to establish a working relationship starting with code projects that are small and don't care if they come back crappy (which is almost none of my work at the moment)

* NDAs: Companies generally don't like you granting access to their codebase to people they did not vet/hire themselves

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constantinLG
You have pointed indeed real situations about outsourcing to a programmer.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

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CyberFonic
In my experience effectively outsourcing of work requires clearly written,
tight specifications with exacting testing criteria spelt out. In my
experience the combined effort of writing accurate specs and then handling the
communication with outsourced programmers is a bigger workload than just
writing it myself.

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constantinLG
I understand. So based on your experience, don't you think that writing down
the specs and the expected return, combined with finding a smart programmer
available to write code, could be a winning decision? I mean, there is nothing
in this process that can be done to improve your efficiency and still be a
win-win deal?

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CyberFonic
Finding "smart" programmers is very hard. As @lastofus points out
communication and management effort eats into the potential gains.

If you are really serious about leverage then look at MBSE/MDD/MDE/DSL
technologies. That is, tools that will take formal specifications and generate
code. The old 80:20 rule applies here too, as much as 80% of the code can be
generated automatically, the rest by either yourself or the very well paid
sufficiently smart programmer(s).

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constantinLG
Thank you for your thoughts. In fact, I am more interested into the how can i
make this process efficient in the real world, as a scallable service, without
competing with the other freelancing sites that offers full projects
development. I am more connected to a programmer to programmer service
perspective (getCode.org)

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jpetersonmn
I've been considering looking for a freelancer to help me on my current
project. I'm working on a web2py project and am fairly quick at the backend
development, but I am very new to js and am struggling with a lot of the front
end stuff I want to do. Part of me wants to just hire that done, but the other
part of me thinks I need to tough it out so I learn more.

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constantinLG
I understand. Well than, hope he will do a right job for you!

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collyw
I don't do any freelance yet (looking to though). I am very backend focused -
database design, SQL, Django, server administration. If I landed a freelance
gig, I would definitely consider paying someone to make a prettier looking
front end than I would (letting me focus on what i am good at). Obviously
depends on the requirements.

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smt88
I (and many others) do this. There are a ton of sites to help us do, but I
think the most popular are Odesk and Elance.

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constantinLG
Aren't oDesk and Elance more as a general complete project requests? I mean,
you really find them perfect fit for outsourcing parts of your code? Is there
any aspect of the process that you might want it different? Personally, I find
them a bit to crowd for an immediate need of some coding parts for my project

