Ask HN: Hiring a junion/mid-level developer to help with contract work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Hiring a junion/mid-level developer to help with contract work?

9 pointsaosaigh8 comments

I'm a freelance developer that has started to hit the ceiling with regard to the amount of work I can take on. Having gained experience over the years, I'm interested in hiring another freelance developer to help with contract work.

My thinking is that I hire a junior/mid-level developer with a good attitude and delegate specific tasks to them, leaving the higher-level stuff to me.

I was wondering if anyone had direct experience with this?

- How did you find suitable developers? - How did you bill their time out (do you take a cut)? - Did it work out? - Did it improve your overall output?

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I did so, at quite a profit. There are a lot of good programmers in India and Bangladesh happy to work for very low prices, and they love contracts with a straightforward "Build stuff, just copy from this example file".

Don't outsource the core. Assume that whatever they do, you're not going to touch the code and don't need to fix it. Cheap freelancers tend to be fast and messy, really ugly code. Don't ask them to make vital things like the API or database.

In general, the cheap ones from poor countries are terrible with design. They get fonts too big, too gray, etc, even when you give them clear instructions. Not judging, but it's just my general observation what to be careful about. But I find that fresh graduates and students can be very precise with design.

For me, the best thing to outsource was some R&D. Dragging a map marker on Google map. Integrating YouTube video into an app. Doing Facebook logins. You can probably get these done for as low as $15, especially with unproven freelancers who are happy to get a positive track record.

Upwork has been the best for me. It's a really bad environment for freelancers, which puts the buyer at an advantage. Be sure to test that they can read instructions - this can be as simple as asking them to repeat in their own words what the project requirement is.

The key to success is on how well you interview and filter people, so don't skimp on this.

When that happened to me as a freelancer, I subcontracted to other freelancers. Gives you much more flexibility and less overhead. I found them through the same freelancer sites I used to seek work through - though I understand the race to the bottom on those has accelerated.

In terms of billing, just look for someone who charges a lower rate than you do - whether it's because they're less skilled (in which case, account for the extra time they'll need to get things right) or they're in a location with lower costs but less opportunity to network with high-paying clients.

I also recommend raising your own rates. If you have too much work, that means you're in enough demand that you can afford to let some contracts go, especially if it means you'll be paid more for the remaining ones. It also gives you more room to work with in hiring subcontractors.

You can appease your existing clients a bit by announcing a significantly higher rate for new clients and then reassuring the old ones that they're grandfathered in for the next N months at current rates and then you're only subjecting them to half the rate raise that applies to new clients, or something to that effect.

I've had good luck hiring Juniors and renting desks in a coworking space so I am available for their questions. I find them tasks that are super repetitive and which cover a small API surface, and then integrate their work into the app myself.

For example, in an app with lots of different forms, I'll have them build all of the forms. Or in an app with many different charts, I'll have them build the charts. I provide them with sample code to work off of so there are fewer things which can go wrong.

This way they only have one or two libs to learn and the questions won't go on forever. They are also mostly copying, pasting and tweaking so it's relatively starightforward for them.

I encourage them to leave the higher level abstractions for myself when I integrate their code into the codebase.

I pay the going rate for junior work which is a fraction of what I'm billing per hour. I'll bill the client for a few hours at my rate for a full day of the Junior's work. This leaves me with a small profit and together we provide more value to the client than I could have provided myself for the same price.

As for finding Juniors, I recommend getting to know your local University's career centre.

It doesn't sound like you want to turn your freelance business into a body-shop of contractors/freelancers where you are the manager meeting with customers and you have a staff of developers. So here's a counter idea - hire a really experienced developer that is looking to do some side work for extra money.

Hiring a junior (or even a minion like junion) developer will have the overhead of mentoring the junior dev, extra time correcting work or explaining things about how you want them done. You probably want the least amount of overhead as possible because all of that overhead is your time, billable or not.

Hiring an experienced dev that already has a day job on an hourly rate will give you flexibility because they won't be relying on your extra work as their sole income. They should also be a manager of one type of person - get stuff done, little drama or overhead.

One suggestion is to throw them hourly work until you demonstrate a good fit. For example, agree to X hours at $Y over a certain time frame. Start off slow before committing. You don't want to deal with the overhead of hiring and firing someone until you are confident it will work out.

And yes, you should definitely take a cut of their time. If you are managing the delivery to client (quality) you can continue billing the client at your rate, while paying junior at a lesser rate. You have found all the work, managed the billing, done the hard stuff and handed it to junior on a plate. Depending on their level, I would say you taking 20-50% per hour is reasonable. Otherwise, why bother?

It's not a great solution as what you save in money, you spend in time on training, explaining design decisions, helping when things go wrong, and finally cleaning up their code/bugs once done. Since you are already strapped for time, this is not optimal.

If you do go the jr dev route, it's best to shy away from an hourly rate, simply because they can take so much longer to complete a task, they can end up costing as much as a senior dev, but for 10x the time and half the quality. Fixed bid per task/objective/milestone is the way to go.

I've had much better luck just finding offshore senior devs on Upwork.

I would be glad to talk to you on type of work you plan to outsource and to share more info on my capabilities. I'm interested in doing part-time work. You can find my contact information on my profile page.

Hey, I'm a very good mid level engineer looking for part time contract work. If you're interested let me know. I have a dual bachelors in math/cs and extensive backend/big data experience. I can code in other domains though

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