My startup is approaching our second birthday. Its been a wild ride, and I've certainly learned a lot, but something has always bothered me about the path we took...<p>We've worked with a good amount of technical contractors over the life of this company. These days we have a solid core of full time and part time workers, and we're doing well enough that we can start to hire some of our best. Times are good, and the world is looking up.<p>But I remember the 'dark days' that we were in only a dozen months ago. We were three young guys with a solid business idea, hunting for reliable, capable, and honest technical ability that would help us create the company of our dreams. We struck out with a few of our contractors - they simply ran away with the first one or two payments, or were completely incapable of accomplishing the task, and slowed us down because of their obvious incompetence.<p>Sure, in hindsight it might seem so obvious that you're going to get 'played', but the fact is I'm sure its happened to more companies than my own. I diligently researched our contractors as best as possible, and it just seems like a fact of life that there are wolves (or simply dumb-dumbs with a heavy dosage of confidence) out there.<p>Last week I was consulting a friend of mine who is looking for his own technical resources, and it really started to irk me - I wish I would have `known` about these guys, or had somewhere to go out to and ask about their character and reliability (aside from the always positive references <i>they</i> provide).<p>Is there a database for this stuff? An Angie's List for developers? If not, who wants to make one with me?
Angie's List --- which actually kinda sucks --- works with the grain of supply & demand in its market, not against it: homeowners always have multiple qualified choices for contractors or plumbers or electricians (along with many not- so- qualified choices).<p>Supply & demand for vendors and clients are flipped in software development. The best freelancers have no reason to participate in a tech "Angie's List", so the ones you do get will be selected adversely.<p>The problem you had wasn't technological, it was that you were hiring (temporarily) for a role that is simply very difficult to hire for in 2013.
I don't think this is a problem that can be solved via a technical solution to be honest. Personal recommendation can go a some way, but being able to vet developers for a specific role is something only the prospective employer can do.<p>Someone may be good at bashing out CRUD rails apps day and night and so anyone who uses them for this task is going to highly rate them, but that doesn't mean they're a good fit for your company, especially if you don't actually know what you need them for at the point of hire (especially true for non-technical founders).<p>Couple that with the fact that there's no motivation for 'better' developers to sign up to these services (as good devs are normally stacked up with work and have an existing network to hook into) and all you're left with is something similar to an odesk clone.