I'm not the one who modded you down, but... I'm having trouble seeing how this would work. What do you do if the code isn't up to par? Are you willing to basically pay - with both cash and time - for the privilege of educating the programmers you're using until they're up to your standards? Or to throw away their work and look for better programmers, possibly ad infinitum? Rewrite parts of the code yourself?

I haven't outsourced any projects so far. I have, however, worked on a project launched with an off-the-shelf script - it definitely saved time and effort upfront, but the code is far from great, so it's been more frustrating over time. I still haven't decided whether the tradeoff was worth it.

Have you actually used this strategy yourself, and if so, how did you make it work?