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Comment by icey | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there are whole marketplaces I'm not aware of - where do people go to find offshore help? I've universally found poor quality, which ends up with me paying people I know personally a ton of money to grind out boring crap (or doing it myself), when I'd much rather pay them to work on the interesting things.

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A lot of it comes from experience. After outsourcing for a year, you can judge pretty accurately within the first paragraph what a person is good for. The way they communicate will tell you a lot.

I'd definitely be interested in hearing more about this.

I always felt like someone should write a quick, to-the-point ebook for outsourcing newbies on working through the outsourcing world. May be I'll pen that one day:)

One of the things that I really like about HN is that I feel like most of the people here have information worth sharing, and information that's valuable enough that I'd pay for a PDF of that information.

I'm kind of surprised we don't have an HN ebook marketplace going yet, to be honest.

Zaid - I love your blog so your future ebook will probably be good too. If you have extensive experience outsourcing, I want to learn from your trails. So please do it.

Here are some helpful links to get you started. I'm looking forward to reading your ebook.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/03/you_should_w...

http://www.squidoo.com/howtomakeanEbook

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/09/16/thirteen-steps...

Thanks for the encouragement Alex. I will start putting together my ideas and bring it together one of these weekends!

I'd most certainly buy it too!

Me too.

I have done freelance work through oDesk (at one point full-time for a couple months). I see postings looking for programmers where they are willing to pay max $4/hr. I try to move on and not get frustrated but it's difficult.

I would be really interested in hearing just what kind of programmers you hire. From the little you mention, it sounds like you need to treat them like kids/code-monkeys - spelling everything out, not wanting their creativity, etc.

I have thought sometimes to just spend a couple hundred bucks and hire a couple cheap programmers to work on a made-up project just to see what it's like. It would make for an interesting blog post at least.

A lot of it is also expectation control. I am always mentally ready for a programmer to bail out on a project. New folks who try outsourcing often give up after their first or second failed attempt. There's no secret - even after years of doing this, I pick the wrong guy every now and then.

Few days ago I made a full-time offer to a php programmer in India after extensive interviewing. Finally, I sent the contract. He went missing since getting the contract. Not a huge surprise - he probably used it to get a better offer at another company. I just went down the list to the next candidates.

Start at rentacoder.com(lots of individual coders). Another option is elance.com(better for larger projects; more companies bidding).

I was a top coder there in high school(early 2000). These days I use it exclusively to hire coders and designers for very specific projects.

The key lies in documentation. The better you explain it on paper, the better the result. Especially with India.

Bingo! A lot of my programming projects, I do the db schema design and post it along with the other specs. Dumb it down as much as you can.

Of course, at some point if a project takes off you would want someone longterm. That's a whole different game(hiring a full-time developer offshore).

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