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Ask HN: How do you find good developers on oDesk?

61 点作者 basdevries将近 11 年前
What are you looking for if you are searching for a developer on oDesk or any other freelancing site? Do you post a job or do you go look for developers yourself and ask them to join you? How do you determine if they&#x27;re capable to work in a team? etc.<p>I&#x27;m curious because many startups hire remotely at first, and there&#x27;s still a lot of problems with that atm.

28 条评论

kator将近 11 年前
Good question. I have an associate of mine who is building a fairly large web based system with oDesk developers. He told me the other day he spent $100k &quot;figuring it out&quot; and has burned through some 100+ people. He now has a core of about 12 that contribute and a small core of about 4 people who are daily parts of his team.<p>His insight is that you want a process to bring people in and shoot them quickly if they don&#x27;t work out. It&#x27;s sort of sink-or-swim but with a rubber ducky that has a leak in it. If they figure out the system from documentation and start contributing good stuff the core team will start working more with them. If they&#x27;re slow to respond, don&#x27;t submit stuff that looks useful they just whack them and move on.<p>He has some pretty amazing people on his team, that said he&#x27;s dealing with the typical timezone and remote worker synchronization problem that all these teams have. Recent conversations have turned towards building a core team that is &quot;in an office together&quot; somewhere to get core work moving quickly and smoothly with stuff at the edges being worked on oDesk team members.<p>I personally haven&#x27;t done any oDesk projects yet but I imagine &quot;Hire carefully fire quickly&quot; is going to be the best advice I can give.
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arnvald将近 11 年前
I&#x27;m both freelancer and I had a chance to interview a few candidates found on oDesk. Here are my thoughts:<p>1. Reviews by clients are not worth much. I&#x27;ve had a situation where my client asked me to fix the project after previous developer, who&#x27;s code was horrible, but at that time my client didn&#x27;t realize it, so they gave him 5 stars.<p>2. Pay attention to the language candidates use - very often their summary&#x2F;portfolio is written in correct English, but during conversation they make lots of very basic mistakes. I&#x27;m not a native English speaker, I also make mistakes, but quite often these people just can&#x27;t communicate in English, and this , sooner or later, will become a problem for you.<p>3. It&#x27;s better to invite developers than to just post an offer - I&#x27;ve seen offers starting with &quot;ONLY DEVELOPERS BASED IN US&quot; to which hundreds of people from Asia applied. People don&#x27;t even read descriptions, they just apply everywhere.<p>4. Developers&#x27; summaries are overrated - I&#x27;ve interviewed people with &quot;more than 5 years of experience in web development&quot; etc. whose code was more like junior developer&#x27;s.<p>5. Having said that - ask people for samples of their work. The best is some OS project, because then you know it&#x27;s their code, but actually few people write OS. Anyway, reading the code, even just 2-3 simple files, helped me to reject a few developers who made good impression during the talk.<p>TL;DR: chat to see if they can use English, read their code, be sceptical about what they and their clients wrote about them.
noodle将近 11 年前
You don&#x27;t. Or if you do, you&#x27;re lucky and&#x2F;or you wait in line for them.<p>Good developers don&#x27;t use oDesk to find freelance work. They have a good enough reputation to find work through their professional network. oDesk is a race to the bottom where you compete on price instead of skills. Its a market for lemons (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Market_for_Lemons</a>)<p>I&#x27;m a contractor and I wouldn&#x27;t touch oDesk with a 10 ft pole.
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alexhoang将近 11 年前
I see a lot of &quot;luck&quot; in the comments. I have 6 years of outsourcing experience and I agree it&#x27;s part luck, but there are great ways to spot out great talent on outsourcing platforms such as oDesk. I usually set aside a few thousand (not $100k like kator mentioned, but around $2-10k), and post a project on all three of the major platforms; oDesk, Freelancer, and Elance. This project will only be a small portion of the whole project to gauge how the developer works and if that is in line of how I work, can be different for you. I found more success on oDesk than the other two, but I wouldn&#x27;t limit to just one source for talent.<p>Things I avoid:<p>- Groups where I have to talk to a Project Manager. Especially where the Project Manager is the translator to the team because this can cause a lot of misinterpretation and mis-communication.<p>- Non-English developers. This doesn&#x27;t mean the developer has to be fully fluent in English, but if they can&#x27;t convey their ideas via text&#x2F;email where they have as much time as they need then it&#x27;s hard vice versa.<p>- Yes-(wo)man. A Yes-man is a freelancer that just says yes on everything you say instead of coming up with other solutions. This is common when you deal with Project Managers.<p>Things I love:<p>- Talking to engineers and letting them know they can freely give any input.<p>- Engineers that provide feedback. I had two engineers say they can do the project in the way I wanted it, but also mentioned that they could do it a better way that&#x27;s faster, safer, and less expensive. I hired them for a few more projects after that and they kept saying the same thing. I ended up partnering with them with equal shares on future projects.<p>If you need any more help, feel free to message me
sparkzilla将近 11 年前
I am using oDesk for a couple of small PHP projects now (&lt;$500). I switched from Elance because it seemed that the developers were better. I had to cancel the first project on Elance because the developer wanted to go through the proposal line by line on Skype every day. It was too time-consuming. There&#x27;s no point in trying to get $10&#x2F;hr programming if it takes five times as long.<p>You must find someone who speaks excellent English -- it&#x27;s too frustrating otherwise. The number of hours a person has worked on other projects the most important. I&#x27;m sure anyone can fake reviews. Devs will also say they can do everything, so you have to track down their specialty. I was looking for experience with date functions so I made sure to ask for that and confirm with the devs I shortlisted.<p>I am currently working on oDesk with a guy from India. His English is excellent and the project is going well. I pay $20&#x2F;hr. I am very careful with the assignment of hours. Any extra hours are negotiated up front. If he doesn&#x27;t negotiate an extension on his side then he won&#x27;t get paid for it.<p>Another thing to consider is that you may have to work late in the night or very early in the morning, especially during debugging sessions, which can be disruptive to your life. Due to the time difference I would actually prefer to hire an American dev but I didn&#x27;t see that many on the site, and I guess they would charge much more.
mistermann将近 11 年前
I&#x27;ve found that different cultures tend to have distinctly different values, such as the acceptability of lying and deceit, so maybe it is sad to say but geographical location is a key consideration for me.
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sergiotapia将近 11 年前
Hi there,<p>I&#x27;ve been freelancing for about 2 years now on oDesk and owe so much to that platform. It&#x27;s allowed me to find great paying jobs with smart people.<p>Here&#x27;s what I look for when applying for jobs. My oDesk rate is usually from $30 to $45 &#x2F;hr - so this may not apply to the lower end of &#x27;cheap cheap cheap fast fast&#x27; developers.<p>* Well written job titles. Descriptive and concise.<p>* Clear information on where the project stands at the moment. Is this a greenfield project? Is this in the design phase? Do you have mockups? Specs?<p>* Client history. If I see a client has an average hourly rate of hiring at $10&#x2F;hr I don&#x27;t bother applying as I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;ll be a good fit. Likewise if the client is new with no feedback or previous contracts completed, I may be hesitant to apply.<p>---<p>These are the key things I look for to find good jobs on oDesk. If you want to attract great developers, keep them in mind, they&#x27;re a must!
JoachimSchipper将近 11 年前
Considering that tptacek, patio11 and many other experienced (ex-)consultants on HN don&#x27;t have many nice things to say about oDesk (basically, &quot;don&#x27;t commoditize yourself&quot;)... is oDesk a requirement?<p>If nothing else, HN job threads tend to be full of people looking for remote work.<p>(I have no experience with oDesk, on either side.)
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JacobJans将近 11 年前
I don&#x27;t have any experience with oDesk, or with hiring developers, but I do have a lot of experience hiring writers on such sites. I have had good successs, but it was a learning process. Here&#x27;s a little bit of what I&#x27;ve learned.<p>You have to be very careful about the type of job you hire for. It needs to be highly structured, with very limited flexibility. The instructions I post are often as long as the document that needs to be written. Because my instructions are so explicit, there is little room for error. They know exactly what they need to do, and how to do it. If they screw up, I take it as a failure in my instructions, and tweak them for the next time.<p>The job details also include something about how they should write their bid. I usually ask them to write a sentence that indicates their understanding. This is usually specific, and relevant to the job, such as a list of topics they&#x27;re able to write, based on the job description. You&#x27;d be surprised how many people don&#x27;t do this. It&#x27;s a quick and easy filter.<p>Once the freelancer has successfully completed an assignment with me, they&#x27;ve earned a little bit of trust. I&#x27;ll hire them again. Eventually, I&#x27;ll give them more flexibility, more pay, and more challenging work. Most freelancers won&#x27;t get there, but that&#x27;s OK. I&#x27;ve structured things so that it&#x27;s hard to fail. It&#x27;s also not particularly easy to get ahead. They&#x27;ve got to pass the filters.
dotnick将近 11 年前
I have to ask; why oDesk? (or Elance or freelancer.com?)<p>I moonlight on Elance but I&#x27;m trying to build a solid portfolio to get away, and I think most decent remote workers do the same, mostly because projects posted on these websites are a race to the bottom.<p>I would say stay away; you&#x27;re better of posting the position on the &#x27;Who is hiring&#x27; thread here on HN, careers.stackoverflow etc.<p>If you insist on hiring developers from freelancing websites though, my personal opinion is:<p>1. Have a realistic budget. You get what you pay for. Yes, there are differences between countries, and not everyone needs to charge $100 an hour to make ends meet but when you&#x27;re hiring a developer for $15 an hour (from anywhere in the world), you&#x27;re taking a huge risk.<p>2. Don&#x27;t bother with job posts, the signal to noise ratio is too low, especially when you specify a decent budget. Just search around for developers with solid portfolios. Don&#x27;t pay <i>too</i> much attention to reviews, all it takes is one bad client who&#x27;s not able to communicate to ruin your 5-star record.
bstar77将近 11 年前
I generally hire devs on odesk for front end work (css&#x2F;html). We&#x27;ll put out a request for work, interview the most promising candidates and hire 2. Both of them work on the exact same thing, we just choose the better implementation in the end.<p>This works for front end development to mitigate risk. Every time we get a very clear winner and it&#x27;s not always the one we predicted before hand.<p>I would never use odesk for architecture work, that&#x27;s what my job is for. Mission critical systems should be developed internally, or at the worst completely understood by someone internally.<p>odesk is also fantastic for advise or simple scripts on things I don&#x27;s specialize in. I can often get a script&#x2F;optimization in an hour that would have taken me a day to figure out myself.
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Mankhool将近 11 年前
In my experience using sites like oDesk was too detached from any community I consider myself a part of. Speaking only about my first (and only) app development, I found my dev here. And when he had to move on I toyed with Reddit, but in the end came back here for FsF and found another exceptional person very quickly. Both of my hires were remote, but because they were part of HN that gave them credibility - because they are interested in &quot;this thing that we do&quot; and don&#x27;t want the distraction of social or loss of time being on, FB for example, or being buried in the bureaucracy of something like oDesk. Just my 2 dirhams.
atlantic将近 11 年前
You can&#x27;t hire solely based on profile, as it may or may not be factually correct. Instead, the key indicator of competence is the number of projects a person has participated in, the duration of each project, and the kind of income they have made on oDesk. This should allow you to draw up a shortlist. Make your projects private, invitation only, and contact the people on your list. Start with a short Skype interview to get a feel for them. Forget tests. Start them off on one or two small tasks, which should indicate both their competence and their capacity to integrate with your team.
sogen将近 11 年前
Try Toptal<p><a href="http://www.toptal.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.toptal.com&#x2F;</a>
EugeneOZ将近 11 年前
Try to find a team-lead first, who will take care about architecture, will help you with interviewing candidats. You should be sure in skills of the team lead, so it will take some time to find 100% matching person. If you have tech guy&#x2F;girl already in team who really thinks he&#x2F;she can be team lead (and maybe even have experience), start hiring developers with she&#x2F;him.<p>Post a job - maybe somebody is looking for a job and you can&#x27;t see him&#x2F;her. And try to find them also - maybe they are working so hard that even don&#x27;t have a time break for job searching.
gbachik将近 11 年前
You don&#x27;t its as simple as that! Those sites are terrible!<p>I&#x27;ve tried multiple times over a span of 4 years and never once had a good experience or even got a single project done -.-
GnarfGnarf将近 11 年前
I&#x27;ve had some very good experiences on oDesk. One guy in Ukraine did a complete project in Flash for a really good price.<p>Review the applicants&#x27; portfolios thoroughly. They are a good indication of experience and ability.<p>The trick is to have very extensive, clear specifications. Also, oDesk is good when you need a specific technical problem solved.<p>Set some defined milestones, make sure they are met, bail if there are unmistakable signs the contractor can&#x27;t cut it.
chatmasta将近 11 年前
It&#x27;s very hit or miss. I&#x27;ve had success hiring people on elance, and actually not too many misses. If you&#x27;re a good judge of talent, you should be able to screen somebody on Skype and know pretty quickly whether or not they know what they&#x27;re doing. If you think they are okay, then pay them hourly on a small job. If it works out, give them a bigger job, and so on.
MortenK将近 11 年前
The broader topic for this is &quot;outsourcing&quot;. When work is done 90&#x2F;100% remote, to countries far away, it&#x27;s commonly referred to as &quot;offshore outsourcing&quot;. It&#x27;s a whole separate production discipline, with unique challenges all the way from staffing to day-to-day management.<p>Many business people and entrepreneurs try offshore outsourcing a couple of times, lured in by the seemingly low prices. They then fail and declare outsourcing as a non-viable solution for product development.<p>It can and does work, but it requires experience.<p>So while you are looking for specific tips for searching for developers, you need to be aware that the work doesn&#x27;t end there - there&#x27;s a lot more to it.<p>To get specific though:<p>1) Always create a private job and invite developers yourself. If not, you&#x27;ll be spammed with offers from the bottom of the barrel.<p>2) Filter for location first. If it&#x27;s your first time with outsourcing, you are best off with developers from countries that are as close as possible to your own culture. For Western Europe, a good bet is Eastern Europe and Western Russia. In the US, you&#x27;re probably better of with certain south American countries like Argentina and Chile due to the lower time difference.<p>3) Look for developers that has had long contracts (500+ hours) with 5 star feedback. You can&#x27;t base much off small contracts with 5 star feedback.<p>4) Apply same screening techniques as you would, were you hiring locally: Does the guy have an impressive portfolio, CS education, does he have some side projects &#x2F; Github profile etc, how many years of experience and so on. Don&#x27;t put too much stock in any single point: There is for example plenty of extremely competent people, who do not have a degree, who do not give a shit about maintaining a Stackoverflow or Github profile and so on.<p>5) Once you&#x27;ve screened them, invite them to the job listing. Get them on skype, either talk or chat. They need at least a very good written English, if it&#x27;s your first try with outsourcing. Ask for code samples and review them.<p>6) If not &quot;just&quot; front-end coding: Have a good, thorough specification ready, for the developers to read. Sometimes they will want payment just to read the spec, sometimes they&#x27;ll do it for free. Either way, it doesn&#x27;t show much about their competence.<p>7) Ask them to deliver a written deliverable of something reasonably advanced. Stuff like a suggested database model, or a very high-level overview of a proposed architecture for whatever it is you are building. This will usually be paid work, between 4 and 8 hours. The purpose is not to get the absolute right db model or architecture - it&#x27;s to see a written deliverable from the developer. This is invaluable, since it requires real skill, thinking and communication abilities, while still being relatively cheap. If they cannot deliver this, they are not good enough. An exception is if you are looking for some front-end guy, then just get a sample of their markup.<p>8) Monitor their work closely in the first period of time (first 2-3 weeks is usually enough).<p>9) Be ready for disappointments. Even with all the above work, you will still not hit a good guy every time.<p>10) If all else fails, drop me a line, I&#x27;ll be happy to assist :-)
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iroot将近 11 年前
In the project description, mention that &quot;only people who will provide a sample solution&#x2F;data for the project will be entertained&quot;. This is a decent filter to remove 90% of applicants. To decide between the rest 10%, check ratings, previous jobs, portfolio, cost etc and make a choice.
aytekin将近 11 年前
This method worked really well for me: <a href="https://medium.com/jotform-form-builder/today-i-hired-6-developers-on-odesk-409807ed0165" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;jotform-form-builder&#x2F;today-i-hired-6-deve...</a><p>The developer I hired worked out well and he is still employed.
aymeric将近 11 年前
I have blogged about this topic a while ago and it made the front page of HN: <a href="http://aymeric.gaurat.net/2013/how-i-hired-a-great-web-developer-on-odesk-for-12hr/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;aymeric.gaurat.net&#x2F;2013&#x2F;how-i-hired-a-great-web-devel...</a>
TimPC将近 11 年前
I think in general the experience on oDesk&#x2F;elance type sites is pretty bad. I don&#x27;t include it in my search at all because I have close to zero tolerance for being on webcam as a form of logging hours (Pretty much every contract I do has a bunch of work away from the computer). In order for me to put up with that you&#x27;d need to pay me a large premium. You also either need to not assign me any work complicated enough to want to do pen and paper&#x2F;whiteboard work on or pay an additional premium to make up for the unbilled hours (similarly if I have to start a webcam every time I reply to off hours e-mail or it&#x27;s free (especially if my off-hours e-mail responses are unbilled if I answer on a phone). I imagine a lot of senior contractors feel similarly, oDesk type sites seems to have a lot of bad experiences for contract work and a lot of joke employers enough so that it doesn&#x27;t become a part of your get work strategy if you have other good ways of sourcing work.<p>With regards to recruiting and the 20% good recruiters charge, most companies are set up to expect recruiting fees and don&#x27;t convert the extra cash into rates or wages when they don&#x27;t have to pay them -- in theory a company that spends $0 on recruiting fees should have 20% more to pay, in practice it almost never works that way so avoiding recruiting fees seems to be a one-sided benefit. If you&#x27;re good enough to get quality contracts through a good recruiter, you&#x27;re not going to make more money on oDesk and you&#x27;ll lose billable hours to managing site profile, and going through entire bid&#x2F;negotiation and in some cases estimation processes without getting paid. Assuming that most contract developers feel the same way, the site is likely to cater to the bottom of the market, which makes finding talent extremely hard.<p>Remote work has it&#x27;s own challenges, the things that I&#x27;ve found essential is:<p>- Great communication - Great documentation - Smart lightweight processes - At certain stages of company avoid outright remote (even 9 days remote + 1 day in office every 2 weeks is a very different animal from outright remote -- you actually meet everyone in the company in person in one of these two cases) - Personality and culture fit as well as general empathy are important: negotiation and responsibility under pressure with people you&#x27;ve never met in person is difficult. - Great management - Manage time zone differential if the product is subject to lots of change: (12 hour cycles for back and forth Q&amp;A on something that&#x27;s unclear is extremely expensive).<p>Note that by great in the above requirements, I mean higher quality than most early stage start-ups achieve.
WWKong将近 11 年前
You don&#x27;t
dyadic将近 11 年前
I&#x27;ve been an oDesk freelancer for the last few months so I&#x27;ll explain what appeals to me about a client &#x2F; job. My hourly rate makes me an outlier on the site however, so this is less applicable if you&#x27;re after cheap and good.<p>The easiest way to find good developers is have them come to you, and the best to way do that is to have a good job ad.<p>* Tag the ad with the appropriate tech<p>* Add a high level description of what the job is. Not just technically, but what is being made too. Also, whether it&#x27;s as part of a team or completely autonomous.<p>* Include links, to a company website if you are one, or to your own website &#x2F; twitter &#x2F; github &#x2F; etc if you have them.<p>* Post hourly jobs only. Fixed price jobs may be appropriate sometimes, but only if they&#x27;re fully specced out to avoid scope creep.<p>* oDesk allows you to specify the experience level you want (Entry Level - $, Intermediate - $$, Expert - $$$), treat this more as how much you&#x27;re willing to pay rather than the real experience level. Ideally, they should correlate, but they often don&#x27;t.<p>Tagging the ad with the tech is important, I have a filtered view on the job feed to remove all that isn&#x27;t relevant to me. I see only ~10-15 new jobs per week and may apply for one or two of them. If your ad is tagged and it&#x27;s something that I&#x27;m interested in then I&#x27;ll see it.<p>Next, filtering out the less good &#x2F; less interested freelancers by making the job application process a little more difficult. Many freelancers spam out applications without even reading the ad contents, you want to exclude them.<p>* I&#x27;ve seen some ads that ask freelancers to include a certain word in their application so the client can filter based on that.<p>* Even better (IMO), and the best way to find good hires, is to include a couple of your own questions in the application. oDesk allows you to set these in addition or instead of the standard cover letter approach. It will filter out a lot of freelancers that are solely spamming out applications and don&#x27;t have time for anything that doesn&#x27;t fit the standard template. Those that get through, you can filter them on their answers.<p>Once you have a few freelancers that you&#x27;re considering hiring, send them a bit of extra information on the job, maybe discuss it a little, set up a Skype meeting. Don&#x27;t go overboard here, it should be a short-ish process, not a free consultation.<p>Then, hire someone. If it doesn&#x27;t work out, we&#x27;re easy to fire.<p>--<p>An additional note on the job ad (from experience), be honest in it about rates etc. Don&#x27;t tick the &quot;expert&quot; box if you&#x27;re looking for someone at $cheap&#x2F;hr. If you&#x27;re a startup that&#x27;s looking to pay in equity that state that up front instead of after going through all of the above.
dominotw将近 11 年前
you dont.
binceipt将近 11 年前
avoid developer from india
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binceipt将近 11 年前
avoid developer in india