

Ask HN: Hiring an overseas freelance programmer? - aspenbordr

Two cofounders and I are about 2/3 of the way through a version 1.0 of a web application. All three of us have full time jobs, so we have been coding the site in our spare time.<p>Right now, the site is entirely in Flash 9 because our main programmer was most familiar with it (compared to Ajax) and we were looking to get a working demo up as quickly as possible. Flash allowed us to build in a lot of features pretty easily, but obviously has drawbacks.<p>At this stage, we are looking to port the site to a wider audience by rebuilding it in AJAX-ified HTML. The lead programmer does not know his way around Ajax and javascript nearly s well as Flash.<p>The question is: in your experience, would it be better to hire someone overseas to recreate the site from the Flash template, or would it save hassle to just have our main programmer figure out  the necessary code himself? At this point, we would prefer to have someone else do the porting, since we all have limited time and there is more important coding to do. However, we do have some experience with outsourcing portions of the code, and know that it sometimes just leads to more headaches since the quality of the programmer and the reusability of the code can be suspect.<p>What are your experiences?
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gexla
Overseas? Overseas is not very descriptive of what you are looking for. I am
an American working as an overseas developer to people in Europe and it works
great. They are not outsourcing things to me though because I am a part of
their team. We all work together.

If you are talking about outsourcing to save money then this likely will not
live up to your expectations. Outsourcing can be to save money or it can be to
farm out work to people who have skills you cannot find elsewhere. A good pro
will charge what he/she is worth (probably not much different than what an
American/European counterpart will charge) and will likely give you a better
experience because an experienced pro is more likely to smell disaster before
it strikes.

A "warm body" who is filling a chair for you at much cheaper rates than you
can get anywhere else will be a mixed bag. Outsourcing is not fire and forget.
If you simply shove your work to someone and expect great results then you
will likely be wasting your time and money. Outsourced help needs to be
managed just as well as the rest of the team. Certain things (data entry)
might work well, but dev projects not so much.

Or you might get lucky. Again, mixed bag. YMMV.

