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Comment by bilekas | Hacker News Reader

This might get a bad rep but I've had this experience too. It's not a blanket statement though. Outsourcing is fine but you definitely have need to do your homework. That's why you see a few of the outsourcing companies being bought over by their employers, because they're good.

Out of curiosity and related to another HN topic, have you ever hired freelancers directly?

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I tried to on the Upwork. But it is really hit or miss there.

1. I got hardware electric engineer to help me with a design of PCB. Guy was worth every cent.

2. Got embedded developer on separate project. Guy pretended that he can do a lot. I tried to explain to him, that I need a USB CDC device driver in MCU which has USB PHY and I want Windows to recognize and use usbser.sys (generic COM driver) or something similar. He told me that he understand what he is doing, I sent him the dev kit and then he ghosted me and I have ended up doing it myself with TinyUSB.

So as I said, really hit and miss on Upwork. Some people are writing lofty skillset so they can get more per hour and then failing miserably.

You have to know people personally or have contacts to people who do to reliably get the good ones, I would never rely on outsourcing websites like Upwork for exactly the reason you stated.

In that case, I’d like to chime in and say that I have the opposite (or at least better) experience. Our contractors in India are fairly decent. We sometimes hire them directly from the company that sources them to us.

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