Outsourcing experiences (Development)

I have a mixture of good and bad experiences on Odesk.
Three main issues I faced:
1. Technical capabilities. I reckon an in-depth interview with the applicants will reduce this issue greatly.
2. Communication. You need to be patient with them. Some of them are not that proficient with English. However, they are usually keen to assist you on your need.
3. Deadlines. This is the worst of all. Often, you will need to have interim progress on the works. This is ensure works are in scheduled. I have freelancers gone missing after two weeks of works. I have to postponed my launch because of this.

My advice: take freelancing with a pinch of salt. Once you discover a good worker, treat/pay him well. He will stick with you for a long time.

Outsourcing is a good way to expand your business. But make sure before assigning tasks to freelancers you clear everything that what you wanted to get done. I outsource most of my work that I am not capable of doing or I don't want to do so I outsource it and I most of the times I get what I need.

I used Odesk to hire a wordpress website designer from Kenya. he was hard to reach and spoke poor English and ruined the site. Odesk refused to give me my money back and now the site is still down. hat is most alarming about the whole situation is that he had such a good odesk profile, over 1000 hours of work, great test scores etc....

I am a former technical arbitrator at vWorker, so I have seen many people's outsourcing horror stories. Having said that, the freelance job sites can be a great way to get work done, you just need to make sure that you are setting the freelancer up for success.

1. Make sure that you are posting a good, detailed project summary. A detailed project summary helps the freelancer know what skills are needed up front and all the work involved.

2. Do your due diligence when hiring. Talking on Skype is a very good idea. The overall rating for a freelancer is a useless metric. Better metrics are number of projects completed, actual tests (not self ratings), ratings and comments on previous projects, and # of projects in progress.

3. Make sure the freelancer has everything they need before starting.

4. Communicate often.

5. If changes are made (by either party) during the course of the work, make sure that both parties understand and agree to the changes.

6. Test, test, test the work.

Hope this helps.

Some great information here, one of the greatest challenges is in communication, use multiple methods, Video, Images, Screen shots, mock ups and anything else that helps communicate what you want to do.

Avoid the middle man or woman, we call them brokers, they bid on jobs, but are not technically talented, they will bid on your job and try to talk the talk, but when it comes right down to knowing programming they usually do not.

If you ask a technical question and they cannot answer it or the English usage gets noticeably more difficult to understand Red Flag Time.

You will find many that will bid and promise you that they can do the job but when you try to pin them down with a question they usually will not be able to answer it.

Avoid those people, also watch out for the malinger, people that have jobs where they bill out 400 hours for a project that should have taken no more than 30 hours.

Its a big problem, use the team tools, they can make or break you.

You can rely upon outsourcing through Odesk without any hitch.
But, while you choose the company, make sure to make a back check on the company to whom the you are assigning the work. You can do so by checking the portfolio of the company.

Deadlines is always a problem for me. Other than that, they usually pretty good. Ask their sample works and read their review. If they have done similar work in the past, it is "usually" very safe to hire them. Communications is not a huge issue, some dont speak english that well but can do the job well. Make sure you do your part like design/project brief in easy to understand english.

I just came to know about this oDesk and thanks for sharing about it.Overall I understood that language is given prior imortance.