Ask HN: how was your experience with hiring developers on Odesk or Elance?

I've had decent luck on Odesk with Wordpress stuff. (Tangent: I enjoy using Wordpress less every day. It's time for something better.) I only outsource easy/boring work. I found a couple developers for the first job that were good enough for me to continue hiring them for subsequent jobs without looking elsewhere.<p>The way I did it (I was taught this by a friend who does it more regularly) takes a bit of extra micromanagement for the first job, but it will pay off for subsequent jobs because you should be able to re-hire the same people. Post a job, wait until you have about 15 offers and then pick the top 5 (filter them on their English and whether or not they specifically respond to your post). To those 5, assign different pieces of your total job as a test job (less than 3 hours of work each, and limited by the hours/week setting). The <i>most important</i> part of Odesk hiring is communication - use middle school English and make it clear that they are to ask questions immediately if anything is unclear. Be friendly and be sure they know that you are happy to help.<p>Of the five people you hire for a test job, at least one of them will probably not even start it. Another couple might start but not finish. You will almost certainly have a few that do decent work, though, and even if they represent different skill levels you can leverage them across different projects. (I have a contractor from India who inserts content really nicely, but she can't edit themes very well. I hire her regularly for page content, but I pay her less than my contractor in Kenya who takes care of editing themes for me.)

I tried using oDesk because I thought it would speed up my development. It didn't.<p>I'm sure that the people I engaged had the skills, but unless I had a daily conference call the project just got way off-track. It started off as bi-weekly, conf calls - I'm not an obsessive micro manager, besides I don't have the time for that, but it was quickly apparent that they were doing the absolute bare minimum, and actually not strictly following spec.<p>I gave them a bit of leeway to fix the stuff, until I realised I was being taken for a ride, nothing was really being delivered.<p>I think I spent about 250 euros, nothing really, and I ended up taking the project back and finishing it myself, in a week.<p>I'm not saying my experience is everyone's, but my advice is only give very small tasks, specify <i>exactly</i> what you want them to do, don't expect them to do any thinking, and they only seem to work if you have the time to micro manage them. Check the screenshots <i>very</i> carefully. That will tell you if they are working or not, and finally make sure they actually deliver something to you at the end of each week.<p>Lastly, make sure they are in a similar time frame as you. I'm in Europe, and had Indians. Half their day was over by the time I got up, which meant I lost a day when they'd gone off track. India works for the states because they are beginning their day during the US day.

I've had experiences all over the map with Elance. I had an amazing experience outsourcing a cost-benefits analysis to a freelancer from Pakistan. For $48 he did the most amazing job, with spreadsheets, Powerpoints, graphs, etc. On the other end of the spectrum, I hired a lady from Texas to write simple blog posts, and she started out great, and then she started missing milestones, and then giving outlandish excuses. I mean, if you can't do the job, just say so, but a power outage, a hurricane, a death in the family, and a computer theft all in one week? (ok, so the hurricane I was able to verify). In the middle, I hired a designer to do 6 variations on a standard portfolio website design and html coding. His portfolio looked great, so I went with him. The results I got back were beautiful, but horribly coded. I had to have my team in the Philippines recode them. It was as if the portfolio was done by a designer/coder duo, but the coder quit and the designer tried to code it himself.

I like Elance. I've posted projects &#38; delivered them &#38; I feel the system works well from both sides.<p>However now when getting anything technical produced basically you're swapping dev hours to product management. That's fine if you don't have certain skills but you have to keep track of it all and write such specific instructions this can take longer than you'd have ever have thought.<p>I ALWAYS pick someone with a similar project in their profile &#38; point to that as their starting point.<p>You've got to be sure you like their style before you pick them.

Sorry to be spammy, but if you're interested the startup I'm a part of is working on something (not yet launched - will launch in approx 1 month) to help product managers know exactly how each member of their development team is progressing, as well as building reputation profiles of freelance developers.<p>We'll be looking for feedback and beta testers, so if you're interested you can sign up for our early beta at www.mindcrimp.com or email me at derek [at] mindcrimp [dot] com