Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How To Hire Outsourced Developers

donnfelker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 82 posts

Re: How To Hire Outsourced Developers

#71

Post by memracom »

buzaga41 wrote: post #25

+1 for no ~foreign people are dumb~ undertones I've seen in other posts. I'm brasilian and I'm sure my skills could punch the skills of some developers elsewhere in the face, even if I make less. If you don't respect people who you work with, what are you? That's why, also, I'm at my last remote job, after this one goes, I'm getting back to local and corporate stuff.. Current one is great, but I've had enough bad exp…

The problem is that English speaking people rarely learn other languages and therefore don't have much skill at communicating with people who are not fluent in English.

Communication is a two-way street. When I was working in the UK in multinational companies, the employer put a fair amount of emphasis in using International English in all communications. For those of us with an interest in literature this was a bit difficult because our heads were filled with flowery language.

If you have any second language skill at all, then you can probably deal reasonably well with 3/5 English speaking folks as long as you are careful to avoid slang and write your emails in clear International English.

Re: How To Hire Outsourced Developers

#72

Post by bryan_rasmussen »

SheepSlapper wrote: post #9

Is anyone else tired of being assigned homework when applying for jobs? In both this and the author's previous article on hiring, he mentions giving people tasks to complete by a certain deadline as part of the hiring process. For someone that's just starting out as a programmer then maybe that's reasonable, but for those of us that've been in software for years, what's the point? You wouldn't ask a carpenter to make…

Well this one is ok, since he is going to pay for that one hour. Then again, if you do know how to program in the programming language but don't know the APIs used it can be more than one hour to get something done..

I was interviewing with someone that wanted me to make an example sentiment analyzer for twitter and facebook to get hired. But he wanted someone to do it for free, I of course wanted money to do that.

Re: How To Hire Outsourced Developers

#73

Post by lzm »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #69

Hijacking the thread... I'm from Brazil and would like to get jobs elsewhere (the rates here are just sad). I've looked into oDesk and Elance, but the jobs / conditions suck. I've also tried getting in touch directly with companies when I see job postings, but it seems there's a barrier to hire from this side of the hemisphere. Does anyone know any good site focused on remote job postings?

HN's monthly "who is hiring" threads have served me well.

Re: How To Hire Outsourced Developers

#74

Post by unlimit »

I am right now trying to score some freelance work, I found a gig at elance and put in a proposal. That gig had almost 200 proposals, how would the job poster even filter these out? It sounds tough and tedious job. Your guidelines makes sense and also tells me how my prospective clients might be thinking.

Thanks for the article, it was a great read.

Re: How To Hire Outsourced Developers

#75

Post by tlogan »

JimWillTri wrote: post #48

This post doesn't contemplate one of the biggest problems on Odesk. The best of the "team" will perform the test. Then they put one of their low level team members on after the team leader passes the test. The only way I have learned to work around the problem is to require use of the odesk time tracker with WEBCAM. Can't hide who is doing the work with the WEBCAM taking shots of the person. :)

Actually Skype works quite well. As soon as candidate says "my mic is not working" and "camera is broken" you know that guy with name Ashish really does not exist - it is just imaginary person made by contracting agency.

However, odesk just recently started id verification process but I still relay on simple Skype calls and actually talk to person.

If it is agency I want to talk to manager/tech lead and actual programer.

Re: How To Hire Outsourced Developers

#76

Post by kranner »

nnq wrote: post #51

Side question: don't other people also have serious issues with the practice of using tracking software that take screenshots, or even worse, webcam shots? When I was freelancing I quickly refused a lot of potentially well paying jobs because of the requirement to use such monitoring software (their loss imho...). I don't have a problem with video-chatting with an employer about anything, or even with a temporary scr…

What would you say about an application-specific tracker? i.e. software that only takes screenshots of your work in a specific app, e.g. Xcode, and never of the desktop or any other window.

Let's say this is for personal use and not any big-brother scenarios. It periodically saves screenshots of a particular app, keeping only those screenshots that differ from the previous one and making in effect a compressed-time screencast of your work in that app.

This is something I've thought about making but I'm not sure how many people would find it useful. Any votes?

Re: How To Hire Outsourced Developers

#77

Post by ewoodrich »

FeeTinesAMady wrote: post #54
tonyarkles wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for context... This is for hiring a freelancer on oDesk, and he's paying them to do the homework. It seems like a pretty fair way to evaluate a candidate. If you have a look at his examples, they seem like reasonable questions too; they're not "turning a string of numbers into math problems", they're practical demonstrations of applications of the different technology stacks. If I were hiring a freelancer for a…

SheepSlapper, your most recent post is showing up as dead. Might want to check to see if you're hellbanned.

He's not hellbanned most likely. He used the forbidden "mast##b##ing" word, which will instantly kill a post on HN. For some reason.

Re: How To Hire Outsourced Developers

#78

Post by singingfish »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #37
mathattack wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A paid hour is a reasonable amount of homework if someone is actively looking for a job. You can't pull someone from a firm that isn't looking, but for contract work, it's reasonable. If I'm actively applying for a job that I am very interested in, I want them to do a lot of things that scare away other candidates and will allow me to shine. I've happily done 4 hours of unpaid homework. An hour is perfectly normal.

Exactly. Getting hired for a normal salaried job can easily involve an hour or two in phone screens, and then basically a whole workday in on-site interviews. An hour for a contract position seems completely reasonable.

Won't get much done in an hour. That's not even enough to reach the fear and confusion stage while coming up to speed on an existing codebase.

Re: How To Hire Outsourced Developers

#79

Post by candiru »

Does anybody have an idea about how to stand out in the crowd where many remote developers disappear, replace themselves with somebody else in their team without telling you, and so on?

This is my biggest problem now. I've been freelancing for about a year, and so far I got every single one of my jobs through friends and ex-colleagues. Currently I live in Hungary and there is an obvious demand for the things I do (mainly Android and back-end Java stuff), so I'm pretty sure there is somebody out there who could use somebody like me with a better rate than back home.

But it's not easy to build trust, especially over the internet, if the default position of the client is that you must be doing something shady unless proven otherwise.

Re: How To Hire Outsourced Developers

#80

Post by BSousa »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #69

Hijacking the thread... I'm from Brazil and would like to get jobs elsewhere (the rates here are just sad). I've looked into oDesk and Elance, but the jobs / conditions suck. I've also tried getting in touch directly with companies when I see job postings, but it seems there's a barrier to hire from this side of the hemisphere. Does anyone know any good site focused on remote job postings?

careers.stackoverflow.com has some remote jobs posts (they have an 'allow remote' flag, but a lot of times they actually don't, but some do).

There is also weworkremotly.com and some github.com ones, but you can check jobmote.com as it acts sorta like an aggregator for these sites.

Post reply on HN