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Ask HN: How to hire an awesome Contract Developer

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Ask HN: How to hire an awesome Contract Developer

#1

Post by WadeWilliams »

Our startup needs help on our tech team immediately. We have an Oct 31st deadline for a site overhaul; we've just lost one developer for personal reasons; and without an exceptional front end guy, we're going to be up a creek.

{If you want to send a resume, it's in the LAMP Stack + jQuery + extensive drag and drop functionality; email in my profile}

I don't have a lot of experience hiring, but I've been scouring the web, posted on Careers2.0 and Sensational Jobs, and to my shock and horror, haven't even received any impressive resumes. Read through all the JoelOnSoftware stuff and at this point time is a huge issue.

We're down to crunch time, thinking of contracting a developer as opposed to taking on a full time hire.

Please help. Any and all suggestions welcome

Re: Ask HN: How to hire an awesome Contract Developer

#2

Post by sixtofour »

(Suggestion at the bottom.)

This doesn't help you at the moment, sorry, but awesome people have jobs, usually jobs that they chose and like, and are usually not looking. When they want to move, they look to their network more than job sites.

The best way to hire an awesome developer is to have been working with awesome developers for years, building up your network. Then you contact those awesome developers directly when you need someone, rather than hoping for a random awesome response.

I know that it doesn't help you now, but your post is a relevant time to mention this reminder.

For you, I'd recommend continuing what you're doing (you never know) but augment that with actively contacting everyone you and your team (including investors) know to see if they know anyone who's awesome and wouldn't mind a cold call. In other words, use your network, regardless of how sparse it might be at the moment.

As I saw recently, the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

Re: Ask HN: How to hire an awesome Contract Developer

#3

Post by WadeWilliams »

sixtofour wrote: post #2

(Suggestion at the bottom.) This doesn't help you at the moment, sorry, but awesome people have jobs, usually jobs that they chose and like, and are usually not looking. When they want to move, they look to their network more than job sites. The best way to hire an awesome developer is to have been working with awesome developers for years, building up your network. Then you contact those awesome developers directly…

Nice post :) Unfortunately I've been mostly solitarily hacking for the past 10 years while in school and then while solo-operating my own web business. While the web is a huge part of the business now, a lot of the employees are not within the tech team, so network resources have already been exhausted.

"As I saw recently, the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago" :D

HN Community, reaching out to you!!

Re: Ask HN: How to hire an awesome Contract Developer

#4

Post by trussi »

If you have clear technical requirements defined, use oDesk.

Put out a $25-50 test job. Make sure to invite as many contractors as you can (the oDesk UI is absolute garbage, so this is a slow, painful process). Pick the 10 best for the test job.

Look for ability to communicate, quickness of turnaround, level of hand-holding and the quality of their work.

Pick the best 2-3 and get busy. I personally prefer to use hourly workers because my requirements tend to change all the time.

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