Comments on Coding Aloud: A Programmers Guide to Outsourcing

Generally this article looks at outsourcing as a b...

2010-11-12T11:00:36.717+02:00

Generally this article looks at outsourcing as a bad thing, which certainly isn’t always the case.

I put together a blog on some of the challenges of hiring an individual candidate for a software project:

http://www.customsoftwarebypreston.com/software-development-team

Thanks,

Brett

I have had 70+ projects done at RAC with scores of...

2009-03-09T12:56:00.000+02:00

I have had 70+ projects done at RAC with scores of 10/10 but I’ve got to warn you - as a buyer that if coders don’t want to let their code be tested Rentacoder seems quite happy to let them simply refuse and even threaten violence (so don’t choose anyone physically close to you) or hacking without penalty .

I was horrified about this but rentacoder seemed to accept the coder’s statement that there is nothing illegal about issuing threats of violence over the internet and even penalised me for complaining (politely).

You should consider the contract clauses carefully...

2009-02-05T23:37:00.000+02:00

You should consider the contract clauses carefully when hiring a programmer. There are 9 clauses in custom software development contracts that you must take extremely seriously or risk losing a lot of money, time, and even your most valuable information. Visit http://www.1stcustomsoftware.com/articles/programming-contract-clauses/ for the full article.

Gil, Kevin,

I'm sorry for your previous bad...

2008-12-16T13:22:00.000+02:00

Gil, Kevin,

I'm sorry for your previous bad experiences. I work for an outsourcing company in Argentina; we've been doing business with several companies in diferent countries and we did really have very good success in our client satisfaction. I think that the language barrier is important, but mostly it's because of the business model that some companies use. Most of the outsourcing companies only cares hirign "coding monkeys" (please forgive me if I'm offending someone, my intention is to be as straight forward as I can be) and feeding them with bannannas. They don't care about the quality of the source code or the released product. We took a different approach and it's working very good; we always look for our customer satisfaction and sometimes (well, mostly) we go beyond our contractual obligations to ensure the success of the project. Maybe you can try us and have a better experience in outsourcing!! :)
Thanks for the post, it really help us to avoid mistakes and behaviours that will tear down our jobs.

Well, in the organization where I worked we outsou...

2008-12-15T13:26:00.000+02:00

Well, in the organization where I worked we outsourced most of the Java programming work to a large Indian company in Chennai and it was not only 70% cheaper, but the code was better quality compared to what we got from the original developers in the US. And they speak perfect English, available 24 hours a day, willing to work hard.

Outsourcing may seem very profitable from a busine...

2008-12-14T21:38:00.000+02:00

Outsourcing may seem very profitable from a business point of view, but from a programmer's perspective it's a nightmare. Usually the code that is produced is hard to maintain and often times it needs to be re-written completely.

In my opinion, the money you save by outsourcing programmers, you end up losing, because of the time it takes for the team to hack/rewrite that code.

Outsourcing code is only a good idea if you absolutely do not care about scalability or performance.

Can you give some collaboration related tips ? suc...

2008-12-14T12:02:00.000+02:00

Can you give some collaboration related tips ? such as:
how do you receive your sources ?
how do you integrate with them ?
do you give them an ftp to a staging site ?

what about scheduling and penalties ?

That's a very good question. I have my own bag of ...

2008-12-13T22:21:00.000+02:00

That's a very good question. I have my own bag of tricks I use. Not only the things you wrote, but what happens if somebody takes the code she wrote for you and launches a competitor? Then what?

I'll let others comments and then collect all the questions for a follow-up post.

Thanks!

there is a very important aspect of outsourcing th...

2008-12-13T21:24:00.000+02:00

there is a very important aspect of outsourcing that should be covered here - can you really trust freelancers?
When you outsource, in many case you need to tell a programmer you never met and never saw what is your business logic, what are your tricks, the things that you do better than your competitors. not mentioning giving some guy the password to your server so he can install the code he wrote, test it and see the logs.
How can you trust people that you don't know?

Yair.