I’ve been outsourcing a lot of programming work for a while now. It’s always challenging when working with technical people. Not because they are difficult to work with, but unlike regular VA work, unless you are pretty competent with the programming yourself, its difficult to ‘check’ someone’s work.

Also, there are many, many decisions a developer has to make on their own so the end result may or may not be what you want. Sure, you can always tweak it and work it till you get what you want, but sometimes a small tweak on a user interface requires countless hours of work in the back end. Because of that, sometimes, your job will end up being ‘out of scope’ and your developer may end up asking for more money. This is where tension always arises because both parties feel they’re ending up with the short end of the stick.

This is actually a problem with the pay-per-project system. Most of the more established places you hire developers work on pay-per-project. Recently, I decided to switch to ODesk. ODesk is primarily a place you hire qualified programmers by the hour. But that’s not all, you can always log into your project workspace and see actual screenshots of what your guy (or gal) is working on.

Every minute is logged and you can even set a limit for number of hours you want to hire someone. This is very useful if you are new to working with this person or on a tight budget. It also takes some getting used to budget wise because ODesk bills and charges your credit card weekly for the hours worked.

At first, I was apprehensive over this, but now I really dig it. For one, I no longer worry about what’s in scope or out of scope. I can get someone to check out something small without costing me a bomb. Also, because ODesk bills me automatically, I don’t have to worry about payments.

In my last project job at a popular site, I was caught in a position of having to force the developer to do certain things before I would release payment (or relinquish all rights to dispute if I paid him early). This is sound business sense but on the other hand, I didn’t want to be given a bad feedback for being a bad paymaster either. This problem is taken off my hands with ODesk.

Finally, I really like the screenshots, being able to see all the different times the programmer logs in and how much time they spend on it each time they log in. Pretty neat. Worth giving it a try.

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