Any advice about hiring an onsite developer?

[Erin]

I'm not a programmer, and I can't keep up with all the stuff I need and want to do, so I'm thinking about hiring someone full-time or part-time. I actually went so far as to place an ad already, but the vast majority of the people wanted to telecommute, which I'm not interested in. I really want someone who works for me, like a 'real' employee. (I'm in San Francisco, by the way.)

I'm aware of [s]all[/s] many of the problems of employing people, so I'm not really looking for advice about going this route or contracting out, but I would consider going with a temp agency first, if only to get a feel for what it's like to work with a coder.

What I really want is someone to fix small things. For example, say I want to change WSP to WP sitewide. I would like to tell this person to take care of it for me. Or I need to make a local backup of a database, I'd want her or him to do it. I figure I'd need an employee for this kind of thing because I don't think many businesses would want to handle such tedious stuff.

Any ideas?

[Cutter]

I would say go with part time for basic stuff, and outsource someone offsite for everything else.

If you are looking for a full-time programmer you definately want to outsource unless your ready to burn some serious coin for just an average programmer in the United States. I'm in the process of getting a fully-managed programmer for $2500 a month, should have 5+ years experience. Given the locality thats still pricey but I was willing to pay extra for all of the background work and management the outsourcer does. I imagine in the US the same programmer would cost $6000-$7000 a month along with all of the other hassles involved, not to mention employment taxes and government regulatory compliance costs.

If you are looking for a programmer to do really basic work you could get someone outsourced for under $1000 a month full time easily.

So, basically, hire some high school or college student part time to do the easy-to-learn jobs. $10 an hour should work, a few hours a week. Outsource a programmer to do anything that actually requires skill.

[s2kinteg916]

odesk.com

[Chris]

What perse is a "fully managed programmer"?

[Erin]

s2k, have you used odesk before? Any feedback on their service?

I've looked into a few services, such as guru.com, elance.com, rentacoder, etc. The first two are pretty expensive--about the same as I'd expect to pay for an onsite employee (up to $50/hour). rentacoder looks very cheap, but I get a little nervous about buying code from these places because I really don't know what to look for in my code (does anybody?). I worry about spaghetti code, recycled code, security holes, etc.

I've used elance for some projects in the past, and man, just managing the work ends up being as difficult as managing onsite employees--tons of monitoring and feedback, things not done right the first time, etc.

But I have a lot of functionality that I need to develop, so I actually pretty much have to choose one of these things.

Edit: I'm giving odesk a try. It looks promising. Thanks for the link, s2kinteg916.

[LiveTronix]

Craigs List is a good place. I posted an ad for a PHP Programmer interviews ten+ and hired the best one. Definitely, did not work very well.

Pay someone for experience, versus training someone...

[Erin]

Craigs List is a good place. I posted an ad for a PHP Programmer interviews ten+ and hired the best one. Definitely, did not work very well.

Huh? I don't get it...

[Chris]

Ya... I gave that comment a "what what" too.

[LiveTronix]

HEH - I guess I shouldn't post that late at night.

http://www.craigslist.org

They offer free job posting services. I got a lot of applications.

I was looking for the lower end developer as it was my vision to train them. Bad idea, I ended up paying a guy $17 an hour and having to babysit him.