Ask HN: Why don't you hire Indian freelance developers? - googlycooly
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anandnair
One thing I've felt is that there are lot of freelance developers in India,
both good and bad ones. Most of them say "Yes" to everything but only few of
them have the capability to do what we need.

When I posted a simple task on Upwork recently (related to AWS server
configuration), I got 100s of requests, mostly from Indians. Now the problems
are

1) I'm looking for a freelancer, not an agency. Most of them are pitching on
behalf of their own agency, and we will never know who is actually doing the
work. (They might even outsource it) [This is the worst part]

2) Some of them won't even read the work description properly, and so we need
to spend a lot of time filtering the requests.

I got confused and skeptical about their capabilities because of all these and
finally hired a freelancer from Europe.

But I've seen amazingly talented freelancers from India as well. It's just
that, filtering through 100s of requests is painful.

~~~
smartis2812
We had the same experience at my last company. And the final result was very
disappointing. Also we found exact parts of the received code on
StackOverflow.

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PaulHoule
From the U.S. timezone is a big concern.

When I meet with people in India it is always around 8am or 8pm, it is kinda
fun the first few times but it gets old fast.

There are many people in CONUS, Canada and South America who are easy to work
with in terms of timezone. Particularly there are many people who can do data
science and other fancy work in Argentina, I have even had good experiences
with freshers from Brazil and Colombia.

~~~
googlycooly
+1 for the timezone issue.

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Porthos9K
I'm an American, and I'd rather hire my fellow Americans. They have a much
more sensible work ethic, and are more efficient; they put in a solid day's
work in eight hours or less and then get the hell out of the office. If they
leave at 5pm, then I don't have to stay all night to babysit them.

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manyxcxi
Primarily, it’s because I don’t know many. Most attempts at networking come
from body shop style companies in very spammy ways.

Second to that is the time zone issue. I’m on the US West coast, I’m an early
riser, but it’s still rough.

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catacombs
Build American. Hire American.

I'm not one to outsource work to people overseas to save a buck. That, to me,
is extremely problematic.

