Come for the Ride!

It’s not easy to find a good team that you know you can trust to build your business on. Early in our companies creation, we had a few discussions that developers have a mindset (I’ve felt this before in my past) that we are the center of any computer / online based startup. Without our coding ability, the company is nothing. We’re irreplaceable and how dare you question our methods for coding? I’m recently realizing that developers are a, for the most part, a unique group of people. They are used to doing things their own way. They often program for their own enjoyment and answer only to themselves for a majority of their coding career (when younger). They have only themselves to rely upon for learning all their programming skills and thus they aren’t used to being led by others.

Going through various sources to find a developer or development team has given me some insight into what the positives and negatives are in going to various sources to find a team of developers.

1. Craistlist – This is where I came from Craigslist is full of a ragtag bunch of developers who are a bit of hit, miss or guess talent. Some people just want some small side projects. Some people are advertising their development companies. Due to the large number of spam messages, Craigslist has a high signal-to-noise ratio though. If you find someone who fits, consider yourself lucky.

2. Guru.com / oDesk.com – Selections are plentiful and you have a lot of great feedback from previous people. They have “tests” that can give you an idea of how good the technical skills are, but then again, there’s only so much a test can tell you about a developer. Right now, our top developer choice is off Guru.com. Though it sounds cliche, they are an offshore development team from India. We started out a bit rocky, but we’re still on target. There were some people who were very flaky from Guru and oDesk about communication and contact in reasonable times. Quotes were all over the place, but they all averaged to a reasonable number that we had projected in our project description. I’d recommend this for anyone looking to hire a freelancer with high reliability.

3. Forums – I’m still getting responses from this source. I believe this is the source that could yield the best deal. The talent here ranges from newbies to actual PHP creators. You’ve got people who are coming to a forum of their own volition to offer advice and get help. The potential for finding talent here (and people who can vouch for them as well as being able to search the forum for their posts, communication skills and others who can recommend them) is immense. I wish we would have come here first, but we’ll see how everything turns out. In the future, I will use this source more to find new talent as well as a source to change and edit code we do ourselves.

4. Friends – Greatest potential to save money here. I really wish I had a few friends who knew PHP. I have no less than 3 friends I would trust without fail to do work with us. However, two of them are more high level developers who work with lower level languages. two of them are steeped in .NET development (we need a neutral platform that we know how to code ourselves in a pinch: PHP) and all three don’t have a high degree of PHP experience. Two friends in particular went through the same software engineering classes at Purdue I did and I would trust them implicitly, however a lack of PHP knowledge seems to be my main stumbling block in using them. Bummer.