Ask HN: Why don't you hire Indian freelance developers?

One thing I've felt is that there are lot of freelance developers in India, both good and bad ones. Most of them say "Yes" to everything but only few of them have the capability to do what we need.

When I posted a simple task on Upwork recently (related to AWS server configuration), I got 100s of requests, mostly from Indians. Now the problems are

1) I'm looking for a freelancer, not an agency. Most of them are pitching on behalf of their own agency, and we will never know who is actually doing the work. (They might even outsource it) [This is the worst part]

2) Some of them won't even read the work description properly, and so we need to spend a lot of time filtering the requests.

I got confused and skeptical about their capabilities because of all these and finally hired a freelancer from Europe.

But I've seen amazingly talented freelancers from India as well. It's just that, filtering through 100s of requests is painful.

From the U.S. timezone is a big concern.

When I meet with people in India it is always around 8am or 8pm, it is kinda fun the first few times but it gets old fast.

There are many people in CONUS, Canada and South America who are easy to work with in terms of timezone. Particularly there are many people who can do data science and other fancy work in Argentina, I have even had good experiences with freshers from Brazil and Colombia.

I'm an American, and I'd rather hire my fellow Americans. They have a much more sensible work ethic, and are more efficient; they put in a solid day's work in eight hours or less and then get the hell out of the office. If they leave at 5pm, then I don't have to stay all night to babysit them.

Primarily, it’s because I don’t know many. Most attempts at networking come from body shop style companies in very spammy ways.

Second to that is the time zone issue. I’m on the US West coast, I’m an early riser, but it’s still rough.

Build American. Hire American.

I'm not one to outsource work to people overseas to save a buck. That, to me, is extremely problematic.