Good outsourcers for software building???

I'm a developer with 4 years of experience. I have had plenty of experience outsourcing to others on oDesk (don't use eLance personally since I like to have the power to snoop on employees).

What will the IM thing do and, from that, what language will it be written in? for example, a RoR programmer is more expensive than PHP programmer since demand is different.

Your OP is too broad to be useful. My guess right now is somewhere between $5/hr to $75/hr.

There are a lot of outsourcing for software developer, such as odesk, scriptlance, freelancer, forums.digitalpoint, and many more web master forums. You can find software developer section for each forums. Hope above information can help you to explore each forum.

Can you provide any more details about the project?
- budget?
- rough idea?
- time table?

My first recommendation is always Odesk, as you have more tools through which to interview and screen candidates (as opposed to a forum - not that there aren't good developers here).

You definitely find qualified programmers and developers on odessk, elance, guru, etc... But it can be a little tricky to sort out the fodder. A few tips...
1. Interview candidates live on Skype
2. Make sure you know what languages the program is going to be written in, and ensure that your programmer has successfully completed the odesk tests for that language
3. Only interview people with feedback of 4.5 or higher, and at least 20 hours or so on Odesk
4. Budget programmers can be had in Eastern Europe and sometimes the Philippines, but I would stay away from India and the rest of Asia. Cultural differences could make communication tough. Been there.

Good luck, buddy! PM me if you need any more help. I've done quite a bit of this. :-)

Thanks For the responses guys. Of course I don't want to give away too much detail about my project but I need software that can utilize the youtube api key, (possibly amazon and clickbank too).

I know there is alot out there that does this. I know because I have bought most of it unfortunately. None of it was up to my expectations. I want to vastly improve upon a few things. My budget is figured to be $1000 at around $15 hr, 70-80 hrs work. I have no clue what language it should be in. I want something simple and clean that does what I want. I basically want it to be able to dive into youtube and pull out videos that are set to certain perameters. Not a youtube scraper per say, but similar. I have a few offers on elance as of now but from India. I will try odesk and see what happens as well. Any more input anyone wants to throw at me would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

The best way its to get a recommendation from someone you actually know, and not from some random guy from internet, in most cases its self promotion of some way. I learn during the years most of the programmers are lazy, at least those cheep ones, and all those operating online are cheep ones. This make me learn programming, and now I'm working with one grate guy who is expert in 4-5 OOP programming languages, and he is a teacher as well, damn good one. PM me if you want to hook you up with grate programmer with grate manners, meaning - he's super precise and he respect your time, and of course he ask the same. Few times I got late on class, and he make me shame of myself with his attitude.

why don't you try find someone in your area?

In my experience,, the locals (software developer) has more advantages than any out there
you can always talk to them more personally, check their actual progress, and not being scammed (since we can meet them to punch their face if they did )

but it's depend on your locals capability of course...

I found all my programmer via Elance, I tend to go with Eastern Europe programmers as they have great skills, good attitude and fair price. No offense to other countries!

Highly recommend rightwaysolution.com. Used them for over 6 years for web and app development. You'll probably find a video of me on their site bigging them up, but don't let that put you off! They have a large, multi skilled development team, and are genuinely customer focused.

Odesk.com and Elance.com are the best places. get away from freelancer.com as scam and there are low quality service providers and their policies may not ensure the work quality.

I agree with System Wide Solutions.. I have multiple bad experiences with freelancer.com.. however little with odesk.com so can't say much about that one but it seems to be one of the better once..I'm going to find out soon...

Something to watch out for. I believe/fear some of the programmers are taking existing code/programs. They take the job then quit abruptly.

I have had several projects programmed. I have used Freelancer, oDesk and in the past, Scriptlance.

I recently had a small script that cost me $200, on freelancer. The programmer was from India. He completed the script and it seemed to work. I told him that I may need some tweaks, which he agreed to. Like a fool I paid him 100%. I needed a tweak and he messaged me back to use g@@gle to figure it out.

I tried to get other programmers to see if they could repair the script. Approx 6 'experienced' programmers applied for the job and then promptly quit telling me that they had no experience in scraping or using some other reason. Most of these 6 were from oDesk.

I can not imagine any other reason why programmers that applied to repair a scraping script, would then quickly quit saying that they had no experience with scraping programs.

Steve