

Ask HN: How to hire an awesome Contract Developer - WadeWilliams

Our startup needs help on our tech team immediately. We have an Oct 31st deadline for a site overhaul; we've just lost one developer for personal reasons; and without an exceptional front end guy, we're going to be up a creek.<p>{If you want to send a resume, it's in the LAMP Stack + jQuery + extensive drag and drop functionality; email in my profile}<p>I don't have a lot of experience hiring, but I've been scouring the web, posted on Careers2.0 and Sensational Jobs, and to my shock and horror, haven't even received any impressive resumes. Read through all the JoelOnSoftware stuff and at this point time is a huge issue.<p>We're down to crunch time, thinking of contracting a developer as opposed to taking on a full time hire.<p>Please help. Any and all suggestions welcome
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sixtofour
(Suggestion at the bottom.)

This doesn't help you at the moment, sorry, but awesome people have jobs,
usually jobs that they chose and like, and are usually not looking. When they
want to move, they look to their network more than job sites.

The best way to hire an awesome developer is to have been working with awesome
developers for years, building up your network. Then you contact those awesome
developers directly when you need someone, rather than hoping for a random
awesome response.

I know that it doesn't help you now, but your post is a relevant time to
mention this reminder.

For you, I'd recommend continuing what you're doing (you never know) but
augment that with actively contacting everyone you and your team (including
investors) know to see if they know anyone who's awesome and wouldn't mind a
cold call. In other words, use your network, regardless of how sparse it might
be at the moment.

As I saw recently, the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The
second best time is now.

~~~
WadeWilliams
Nice post :) Unfortunately I've been mostly solitarily hacking for the past 10
years while in school and then while solo-operating my own web business. While
the web is a huge part of the business now, a lot of the employees are not
within the tech team, so network resources have already been exhausted.

"As I saw recently, the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago" :D

HN Community, reaching out to you!!

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trussi
If you have clear technical requirements defined, use oDesk.

Put out a $25-50 test job. Make sure to invite as many contractors as you can
(the oDesk UI is absolute garbage, so this is a slow, painful process). Pick
the 10 best for the test job.

Look for ability to communicate, quickness of turnaround, level of hand-
holding and the quality of their work.

Pick the best 2-3 and get busy. I personally prefer to use hourly workers
because my requirements tend to change all the time.

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luckystrike
You can have a look at the HN Contractors List:
[https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clV...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clVJYi0yYVBka181Z0ZKRW9kQ0E&hl=en#gid=0)

