

Ask HN: how was your experience with hiring developers on Odesk or Elance? - csmt

Any tips/advice? I am a technical person but need some help with finishing up some projects. TIA!
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fooandbarify
I've had decent luck on Odesk with Wordpress stuff. (Tangent: I enjoy using
Wordpress less every day. It's time for something better.) I only outsource
easy/boring work. I found a couple developers for the first job that were good
enough for me to continue hiring them for subsequent jobs without looking
elsewhere.

The way I did it (I was taught this by a friend who does it more regularly)
takes a bit of extra micromanagement for the first job, but it will pay off
for subsequent jobs because you should be able to re-hire the same people.
Post a job, wait until you have about 15 offers and then pick the top 5
(filter them on their English and whether or not they specifically respond to
your post). To those 5, assign different pieces of your total job as a test
job (less than 3 hours of work each, and limited by the hours/week setting).
The _most important_ part of Odesk hiring is communication - use middle school
English and make it clear that they are to ask questions immediately if
anything is unclear. Be friendly and be sure they know that you are happy to
help.

Of the five people you hire for a test job, at least one of them will probably
not even start it. Another couple might start but not finish. You will almost
certainly have a few that do decent work, though, and even if they represent
different skill levels you can leverage them across different projects. (I
have a contractor from India who inserts content really nicely, but she can't
edit themes very well. I hire her regularly for page content, but I pay her
less than my contractor in Kenya who takes care of editing themes for me.)

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chris_dcosta
I tried using oDesk because I thought it would speed up my development. It
didn't.

I'm sure that the people I engaged had the skills, but unless I had a daily
conference call the project just got way off-track. It started off as bi-
weekly, conf calls - I'm not an obsessive micro manager, besides I don't have
the time for that, but it was quickly apparent that they were doing the
absolute bare minimum, and actually not strictly following spec.

I gave them a bit of leeway to fix the stuff, until I realised I was being
taken for a ride, nothing was really being delivered.

I think I spent about 250 euros, nothing really, and I ended up taking the
project back and finishing it myself, in a week.

I'm not saying my experience is everyone's, but my advice is only give very
small tasks, specify _exactly_ what you want them to do, don't expect them to
do any thinking, and they only seem to work if you have the time to micro
manage them. Check the screenshots _very_ carefully. That will tell you if
they are working or not, and finally make sure they actually deliver something
to you at the end of each week.

Lastly, make sure they are in a similar time frame as you. I'm in Europe, and
had Indians. Half their day was over by the time I got up, which meant I lost
a day when they'd gone off track. India works for the states because they are
beginning their day during the US day.

~~~
chris_dcosta
and one other thing... that's why I think a co-founder is so valuable. They
share some of the load, meaning that at early stages you can move quickly on
development.

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byoung2
I've had experiences all over the map with Elance. I had an amazing experience
outsourcing a cost-benefits analysis to a freelancer from Pakistan. For $48 he
did the most amazing job, with spreadsheets, Powerpoints, graphs, etc. On the
other end of the spectrum, I hired a lady from Texas to write simple blog
posts, and she started out great, and then she started missing milestones, and
then giving outlandish excuses. I mean, if you can't do the job, just say so,
but a power outage, a hurricane, a death in the family, and a computer theft
all in one week? (ok, so the hurricane I was able to verify). In the middle, I
hired a designer to do 6 variations on a standard portfolio website design and
html coding. His portfolio looked great, so I went with him. The results I got
back were beautiful, but horribly coded. I had to have my team in the
Philippines recode them. It was as if the portfolio was done by a
designer/coder duo, but the coder quit and the designer tried to code it
himself.

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helen842000
I like Elance. I've posted projects & delivered them & I feel the system works
well from both sides.

However now when getting anything technical produced basically you're swapping
dev hours to product management. That's fine if you don't have certain skills
but you have to keep track of it all and write such specific instructions this
can take longer than you'd have ever have thought.

I ALWAYS pick someone with a similar project in their profile & point to that
as their starting point.

You've got to be sure you like their style before you pick them.

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dlf
Sorry to be spammy, but if you're interested the startup I'm a part of is
working on something (not yet launched - will launch in approx 1 month) to
help product managers know exactly how each member of their development team
is progressing, as well as building reputation profiles of freelance
developers.

We'll be looking for feedback and beta testers, so if you're interested you
can sign up for our early beta at www.mindcrimp.com or email me at derek [at]
mindcrimp [dot] com

