Hi Kevin,

Unix administrator for 15 years? Wow, you've got some experience then!

What do you need the programmer for?

If you need someone to work full time with you, I recommend that you hire someone from a company (not a solo freelancer). You can specify how many weeks/months you want to hire the programmer for, the required skills, how many hours per day/week/month you will need and so on. If it's an ongoing, long term project then make sure you hire someone from a company with low staff turnover.

However, if you need someone to occasionally do some programming tasks for you, you might find it easier to set up a project management tool and then invite freelancers as well as companies to bid on your small projects one by one. You can find freelancers on sites such as rentacoder, scriptlance and so on.

Without knowing your budget, I suggest that you hire someone who has the same kind of massive experience as you do.

From my experience, communication will be the key to your success once you've hired someone with the basic set of skills that you need.

Think about all the different ways to communicate with them: visually (powerpoint's, mindmaps, sketches), with audio and video to enrich the experience for both of you, chat (chat history is a great way to keep a log of what kind of decisions you made), email and more. Set up alternative routes as well: "If email is down, go to Skype. If Skype is down, send me an SMS." And so on... that will save you a lot of time and frustration.

Well, I could write a 100 page ebook about this and it would still only scratch the surface

I wish you luck and all the best with hiring and managing your programmer!

PS. Invest some time in learning a good online project management tool, there are a lot of them (free ones as well). You might like Redmine.

If you want to take work from a programmer remotely you may manage with the following ways:

GENERAL MANAGEMENT
1. A programmer may send reports on daily basis about the work (at the end of the day)

2. Can have contact from a Skype

3. You can give a domain to the programmer and he can upload the work parallel with the development process.
DEVELOPMENT MANAGEMENT

Strickly follow the SDLC for the development of the application

1. Preliminary Investigation
2. Analysis
3. Design
4. Development
5. Implementation
6. Testing
7. Maintenance

For the System design make the proper Design of the proposed system like you can perform UML modeling of the website ( if you system requirements are complex enough)

Hi Kevin,

We can definitely help you out. We have an experienced programmer on board who is available for deployment. Most of our clients are working remotely with their staff. We have supervisors who will manage your employees and help out along the way. You have a single point of contact for any issues that may arise during the course of the project.

It would be a pleasure to further discuss the project details with you; see sig for live chat and additional info. Please check your PM as well. Thank you.