How To Hire Outsourced Developers

Is anyone else tired of being assigned homework when applying for jobs? In both this and the author&#x27;s previous article on hiring, he mentions giving people tasks to complete by a certain deadline as part of the hiring process. For someone that&#x27;s just starting out as a programmer then maybe that&#x27;s reasonable, but for those of us that&#x27;ve been in software for years, what&#x27;s the point?<p>You wouldn&#x27;t ask a carpenter to make you a closet before you decide if you want to hire them, you look at the other houses they&#x27;ve created (at least, you should. There&#x27;s a lot of crappy carpenters out there, and it feels like I&#x27;ve worked with them all). You don&#x27;t ask your mechanic to change your oil for free, and then MAYBE you&#x27;ll let them fix your car. So why is this just the status quo for software developers now? I have a job and family, why the hell would I want to spend my free time jumping through hoops for you when you could easily look at all the work I&#x27;ve already done?<p>I dunno, just my $0.02. I&#x27;ve been asked to do a lot of dumb programming challenges before job interviews, and I&#x27;m over it. I&#x27;m a professional and my time is valuable, why would I want to waste it figuring out how many ways you can turn a string of numbers into math problems?<p>&#x2F;rant. Whew.

Side question: don&#x27;t other people also have <i>serious issues</i> with the practice of using tracking software that take screenshots, or even worse, webcam shots?<p>When I was freelancing I quickly refused a lot of potentially well paying jobs because of the requirement to use such monitoring software (their loss imho...). I don&#x27;t have a problem with video-chatting with an employer about anything, or even with a temporary screen-share during a testing task or interview process, but having my actual work <i>monitored</i> like this felt like a total invasion of &quot;my space&quot;.<p>I don&#x27;t know about you, but doing it this &quot;big brother-ish&quot; way feels very demeaning and I refuse to work for people that treat me like that and I hate it that it&#x27;s starting to become a &quot;standard&quot; nowadays, at least for &quot;low level&quot; work.

&quot;Cut anyone who’s English (or whatever your chosen 5&#x2F;5 language is) is terrible and very difficult to read&quot;<p>Oh the irony!

+1 for no ~foreign people are dumb~ undertones I&#x27;ve seen in other posts. I&#x27;m brasilian and I&#x27;m sure my skills could punch the skills of some developers elsewhere in the face, even if I make less. If you don&#x27;t respect people who you work with, what are you? That&#x27;s why, also, I&#x27;m at my last remote job, after this one goes, I&#x27;m getting back to local and corporate stuff.. Current one is great, but I&#x27;ve had enough bad experiences

We do something similar if we are hiring a remote freelancer. Although first thing we look for is github code, then we do a short call, and then if that all looks good we do a 10 hour paid task. We then scale the work up from there with larger and larger tasks as our trust in them grows, because, as we&#x27;ve found, the hardest part of hiring freelancers is getting people that can reliably deliver. You don&#x27;t want to give someone a too large task initially because the risk of them not delivering is too high and you need to know that you can cover the work if necessary.

This post doesn&#x27;t contemplate one of the biggest problems on Odesk. The best of the &quot;team&quot; will perform the test. Then they put one of their low level team members on after the team leader passes the test.<p>The only way I have learned to work around the problem is to require use of the odesk time tracker with WEBCAM. Can&#x27;t hide who is doing the work with the WEBCAM taking shots of the person. :)

Do people go through this much to hire from oDesk?<p>A while back I would just hire 3 people for the same project. One would always stand out pretty early and I would stick with them after the first week. After a few projects I had a list of great people which I still use today.

A couple of transcribed episodes from &#x27;Startups for the Rest of Us&#x27;:<p>How to Hire and Manage Virtual Assistants<p><a href="http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-68-how-to-hire-and-manage-virtual-assistants" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.startupsfortherestofus.com&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;episode-68-ho...</a><p>How to Hire Like a Bootstrapper with Special Guest Laura Roeder<p><a href="http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-143-how-to-hire-like-a-bootstrapper-with-special-guest-laura-roeder" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.startupsfortherestofus.com&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;episode-143-h...</a>

Nice insights. Thank you for sharing.<p>This is simple. If you are hiring an engineer you should be one too. This way you can hire faster and fire faster. No bullshit.<p>Outsourcing work overseas is 5x cheaper than local try-and-see-how-it-goes. Not a long term solution but a short term one to get stuff done. Hire fast, fire fast. So if you make a mistake move fast to get another one on the job. You wont bleed as much money from a mistake of outsourcing to the wrong candidate.<p>I have been through this a number of times over the years and documented my learnings on outsourcing pros &amp; cons here: <a href="http://www.theroadtosiliconvalley.com/technology/outsourcing-work-overseas/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theroadtosiliconvalley.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;outsourcing...</a>

&quot;Something interesting happens at this point in the process. An average of 50% of the candidates never continue past this step. The reason is not exactly known but I suspect it is because they simply do not know how to perform the task that is given to them&quot;<p>If you&#x27;re picking 10 candidates and only (initially) asking them for 1 hour&#x27;s work, they&#x27;re probably dropping off due to lack of interest in your project. They might not be taking you seriously.

Hijacking the thread...<p>I&#x27;m from Brazil and would like to get jobs elsewhere (the rates here are just sad). I&#x27;ve looked into oDesk and Elance, but the jobs &#x2F; conditions suck. I&#x27;ve also tried getting in touch directly with companies when I see job postings, but it seems there&#x27;s a barrier to hire from this side of the hemisphere.<p>Does anyone know any good site focused on remote job postings?

A challenge that involves creating a small app in just an hour or two, with tight guidelines to follow? Sure it&#x27;s doable, but this says to me - I&#x27;m not looking for someone creative. I just need a code monkey that can follow instructions.

What do people think of the OP&#x27;s test repo?<p><a href="https://github.com/donnfelker/example-rails-challenge" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;donnfelker&#x2F;example-rails-challenge</a><p>This is a sensible test, I guess, but the OP is just satisfied that the devs know basic syntax and conventions? Would it be more productive to ask more open-ended questions...such as, instead of telling exactly what tests they should write, ask them to write tests that verify the system is working.<p>Hell even if they did it in Minitest, that ability to conceptually prove how systems in Rails work would seem more valuable than knowing RSpec convention

In a somewhat related question... remember the guy[1] who worked at Verizon who out-sourced his job? I&#x27;d sure love for him to write up exactly what&#x2F;who&#x2F;when&#x2F;how he did that and got it to work out so smoothly; except for the part where he got fired.<p>1. <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/01/16/169528579/outsourced-employee-sends-own-job-to-china-surfs-web" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;thetwo-way&#x2F;2013&#x2F;01&#x2F;16&#x2F;169528579&#x2F;out...</a>

In the android app the line &quot;Create a ListView that groups the recent commits by author in a custom view.&quot; is confusing to me. What I get from that is something of this form:<p><pre><code> author1: commit1 commit2 ... author2: ... </code></pre> however the example jpg doesnt look like it.

Does anybody have an idea about how to stand out in the crowd where many remote developers disappear, replace themselves with somebody else in their team without telling you, and so on?<p>This is my biggest problem now. I&#x27;ve been freelancing for about a year, and so far I got every single one of my jobs through friends and ex-colleagues. Currently I live in Hungary and there is an obvious demand for the things I do (mainly Android and back-end Java stuff), so I&#x27;m pretty sure there is somebody out there who could use somebody like me with a better rate than back home.<p>But it&#x27;s not easy to build trust, especially over the internet, if the default position of the client is that you must be doing something shady unless proven otherwise.

This works if you already know how to code, and can come up with a quick 1 hour problem for them to solve. And it is a lot of work on your side as well. Filtering the list, checking the code, making sure they didn&#x27;t cheat by checking github logs, pay someone else to review the candidates.<p>It would almost be quick to post the job online, break it up into stages, hire someone, check their progress, and move to the next person if their work is not satisfactory.

I am right now trying to score some freelance work, I found a gig at elance and put in a proposal. That gig had almost 200 proposals, how would the job poster even filter these out? It sounds tough and tedious job. Your guidelines makes sense and also tells me how my prospective clients might be thinking.<p>Thanks for the article, it was a great read.

If you&#x27;re doing a fixed price project, how can you get oDesk to let you hire the candidates for just one hour?