Outsourcing Overseas

This would make a very good article. I’ve had a lot of work done for me by outsourcers for several (small) projects, and I imagine it’s very tempting for anyone building a startup to hire some ridiculously cheap developers.

The biggest pitfall of oursourcing overseas, in my experience is accountability. Although they will complete the initial project in order to get paid, overseas contractors can be difficult to get in touch with later, and may be unwilling to work on the code further as bugs and issues invariably crop up later. Also, the ease with which anyone can sign up at a freelancer site means that you often have no way of gauging the ability of the programmers- leaving you with potentially buggy or poorly written code, and little to no help once issues crop up later.

That said, if you want to go ahead and give it a try, the best sites for outsourcing hands down are rentacoder.com and getafreelancer.com. GetaFreelancer is probably the biggest,and has the most overseas developers who will work for ridiculously low amounts, almost always less than $10 an hour.

In my experience, the best use for freelancers is for small, self-contained tasks like a single piece of code, template, or logo. It will cost you very little(larger projects are snapped up by outsourcing companies who act as middlemen and pass the costs on to you) and will probably go smoothly. If you offload basic and time-consuming tasks to overseas freelancers and have your in-house developers put the whole thing together, you can potentially save A LOT of money. But always insist on frequent communication and accountability for bugs or mistakes.