You lost me at "Pay them to Code, not Think"<p>That is THE worse advice EVER.<p>You want a developer that can take your pseudo spec (and I say pseudo because if they are detailed enough, then you should be able to code them, since you are hiring a developer you don't know the devil that will be hidden in the details), interact with you, and give you what you asked OR BETTER.<p>Non-technical people need the counterweight. This advice is like telling the doctor "I don't pay you to think and figure out what I have, just to write the prescriptions, and is much cheaper"
This is a great article for people on HN to read because we more normally hear about start ups struggling to find developers. I get a whiff of arrogance from a many developers when they list their demands for employers. They criticize companies techniques or laugh and dismiss recruiters. I understand it, though, when your skills are in high demand you can afford to be more selective.<p>I'm also a developer, BTW, but I started out just at the first bubble burst and getting jobs wasn't so easy. I struggled to find work at first when only a few years before college grads were being given lavish signing bonuses. I feel a weird sense that karma will have it's revenge on me if I cross the line of enjoying some success vs being a greedy, selfish prick. I know it's not rational but I just feel that this could be a temporary gold rush and I don't want to burn bridges.<p>This story with developers fighting for cheap bids is a reminder that there is competition out there. Some of those guys are better than others, but companies have choices. We may continue to enjoy this demand, but things may even out too.
As a former contract web developer myself, these are excellent points Trevor. You need to find a way for every potential client for every freelancer out there to read this. :) Actionable feedback is so key for working with creative talent in general - we can't read your mind!<p>We actually built some of these ideas into the core of matchist (<a href="http://matchist.com/talent" rel="nofollow">http://matchist.com/talent</a>). Specifically, milestones and paying your developer quickly. All projects on matchist are milestone based and the client can pay developers in 2 seconds by just clicking a button.
Maybe I missed something but this sounds horrible.<p>The idea is to find developers on the "left" - low quality, hand holding and get them to churn out a market testin app for a small amount of money.<p>That seems crazy. Deliberately hiring low quality workers?<p>If the app is so trivial that low quality cannot break it then I guess it works. Does not sound like a sustainable solution though.
The good developers in developing nations are still going to charge more than $15 an hour. They tend to be more in the range of $40-$50. The $15 an hour guys in my experience are either:<p>1. good (quality-wise), but slow and don't speak much English,
2. or they are just horrible.<p>I have seen two projects coming out of the $15 an hour shops. The only way to have a sustainable product is to start over. The sad part is that I have also seen a lot of people throw a significant amount of money at these $15 an hour deals when they could have created a better product for the same amount of money with fewer high end devs.<p>One of my favorite outsourcing stories was when a guy wanted me to be his CTO and he was considering hiring a company that outsourced to China at $15 an hour. So I asked the outsourcing company if I could interact with the devs directly. Their answer was no, claiming that it was for everyone's protection. I won't even get into them describing a waterfall methodology and telling me that this is Agile. Let's just say that we didn't use these guys.<p>The bigger issue here is this. If you are doing a tech play and can't code, don't have a technical founder, and don't have the cash to hire good people should you even be playing in this space? I'm sure that there are a few exceptions that are able to do this, but that seems to be few and far between.<p>If you don't have a deep passion and understanding of your core business, which in a tech play means the tech to execute it, along with the market that you are going after......or gobs of cash to bring in the right ones I'll bet you there are some great stats on how successful they are. I know what my anecdotal experience is but would love to see some hard data to confirm or deny my experience.
How much is your own time worth? If you're hiring developers who need lots of hand-holding, you're going to burn up much more of your own time. You're also taking on more risk of wasting a month or two on a failed project.
I've got a client on a shoestring budget.<p>I told them... listen, we can get real expensive, really fast. So if you help me, I can help you. They build specs in powerpoint, excel, paper etc. We discuss them (in person typically at a scheduled meeting where we discuss these features as well as business consulting about where to take the business, how to grow it, what features have been requested, what to add, etc.). My team then develops what they want.<p>The customer then QAs the software to make sure it's good. This saves them a TON of money.<p>They're happy, I've got an easy client to work with and my devs enjoy working on the project because the requirements are well thought out. My client is happy because they're getting a good value (both in terms of less $ on dev and the money they spend on business consulting is put to better use since they've done their homework).<p>Contrast this with another of my clients (with a larger, but dwindling budget). They typically say "go develop x" with no real guidance. We develop X, but once they see it they say "that's not what we wanted." After a few cycles of this, and frustration from both sides, we simply now say "you've thought about X, why not tell us what you've got in mind so that we build the right thing first?" It's made things move a lot smoother... enough so that this client is now extremely aggressive in their release cycling (and it feels like a hamster wheel)... which we're working on... (including charging 2x for forced weekend work - "It's Friday at 3pm. If this must be deployed Monday, then we're going to have to work over the weekend and that is at $xxx rate." We've not worked weekends for them since :)
Oh my, Elance. These sites are horrible. Their goal is simply to turn programmers into sweatshop dwellers competing for tiny scraps. The signal to noise ratio at these places reaches 0 pretty quickly.
> "So I emailed him one day and said “hey, I want to do this right and I want you to know I appreciate your work. I’m raising the contract to $6,000 [from 4k].” He didn’t ask > for that, I just did it. Now, can I directly measure what impact that’s had? Not really. But personally, I feel better working with him."<p>For me, that's plain stupidity. As you say, your company is small and $4,000 is a lot of money. You didn't mention if it's for a bigger project so I'll assume it's for fairly similar one.<p>You show appreciation for someone by coming back to them rather than paying more for same service. It's one of the most important rules of business.<p>When you'll approach him for twice as big project, he'll expect $12,000 and a little more instead of $8,000 he deserves and with which he thinks he's paid enough. People tend to get comfortable too quick when giving them things they didn't ask for.<p>I'd advise a slightly different approach. Keep coming back to him and keep an honest relationship. If he isn't happy with something (attitude, finance aspect, terms or anything else), let him know you're open to discuss anything.<p>But that are just my two cents and if it's working for you, why not? I know it wouldn't work with me and my team.
There are a lot of people disagreeing, but you have to realize what the goal is here. The goal is <i>as cheap as possible</i>, and you should have a mediocre product out of that. For this scenario, the advice given is perfect. Obviously the advice doesn't work for many other scenarios.<p>In other words, you should very rarely be looking to hire a developer out of India for $5/hour, but if you are, hold his hand and he can't mess it up too terribly badly.
Totally not relevant but I got a good laugh out of it. When I first read title of the link it made me think that developers were a communicable disease! Kind of like some terrible 80's high school health documentary lol!
My reading notes:<p>- "almost a dozen developers", for the same project? Sounds like hell just to save a couple bucks...<p>- ...or do you want to "make something really awesome regardless if people use it"? what would anyone want to do that? Odds are if you're doing it for fun you have the money to hire a good developer and therefore not go they painful elance/odesk route (check this out <a href="http://giacomoballi.com/find-ios-developer" rel="nofollow">http://giacomoballi.com/find-ios-developer</a>).<p>- in your chart you're missing bad developers. plenty of those hanging out on outsourcing websites...<p>- if you're working with a good dev (I won't assume other scenarios) they will know more than you do. They can and should help you. You're limiting yourself if you just pay them to code.<p>- good for you for making the mockup that's way more work than most of my clients do (check this out <a href="http://giacomoballi.com/explain-idea-to-developer" rel="nofollow">http://giacomoballi.com/explain-idea-to-developer</a>).<p>- speak "good" english? Sorry, couldn't help it... :)<p>Good intro post regarding you experience.<p>Look forward to the next one!<p>G
I think you are receiving so much negative feedback because you are essentially referring to developers as a commodity that can be negotiated down to 'cheap'... You then posted to a site that is highly trafficked by freelance developers. As someone who frequently works with developers and handles a lot of the spec'ing, I thought your post was helpful.. and informative. That being said, it doesn't really tell people who to pick a good developer out from a bad one. What kind of questions do you ask to find a good developer for iOS?
Trevor, really appreciate the post. Any reason you chose elance over other sites (odesk, guru, etc)? Any additional tips (eg did you try encouraging certain freelancers with great credentials to bid on your work)?<p>Just to toss it out there, Go (Golang) is becoming increasingly popular, but still has a relatively small community (much of which is based outside the US). This seems like a potential good case for using freelance developers (when language experts are few and geographically distributed).
Milestones are great. However I like to have reasonably consistent prices. For a $4000 project you can have, say, four milestones with prices $500, $1000, $1000, $1500. This way the client can bail out after the first milestone if things aren't going well. And they won't lose too much money. Also the client gets the "carrot on a stick" with the hefty fourth milestone without being obnoxious (with a $3200 fourth milestone for example).
I find these comments amusing in the light of all the agile discussions I read. None of this sounds terribly agile, having to specify everything up front... yet the truth is a lot of people are not competent enough to handle iterative development form either side. I wish more people would explore how agile works with people who can't code without detailed instructions and managers who don't understand how to do anything else.