The detriment of 10$/hr coders!

Spend Analysis

Prospects who are attracted towards such offers quickly find out that they are spending more on the $10/hr developer than a developer who could potentially be charging $20/hr.

The reasons vary.

Some of the key causes include:

• Deliberate slow coding to poor coding resulting in more expenditure of time to deliver
• The quality of programmers apart, there are bait shops that have far higher churn ratio than retention i.e. to say, if they gain 10 clients, they actually lose 11 at the same time
• Lack of resources or qualified resources. In good number of cases, the company has no intent to commit fraud or by design not deliver, rather it is a bad combination of poor decision making, accompanied with increased dietetics of employing low quality coders who can be hired for lower wages, if not using inexperienced developers

All of these and more attribute sustained failure of projects, delay in time to deliver, which increases your budget bleed, makes the business suffer and the list goes on…

A Lesson Learn is Sometimes Not Enough

Scenario #1: You hired a development team, found some work got done, you were satisfied… till you realized that quality was not there and it is not performing to meet the business demands. The team you used is unable to deliver.

Scenario #2: You hired a development team, which was not a team, rather a set of developers working from where ever they found place to operate in and after much wondering about what is going on, you did not delivery, you lost the money and are disputing with Paypal or such service method you used for making the payments. You might get the money back, but the time you lost… well if you could have afforded it, GREAT!, if not… Loss!

Scenario #3: You got swindled outright!

Scenario #4: You got billed 2x-3x times or higher and you got swindled again, but did manage to get the delivery!

Scenario #5: You hired a developer at a good price, paid them in good faith, still did not get what you need, made losses again! People who have gone through such scenarios and refusing to change their tactics, complaining that hiring developers out of India or elsewhere are conditioned to experience losses.

The Counter Criteria!

Key Indicators of a good company or development team include

• Use of experienced qualified companies or people with demonstrated skills; this can be determined through their domain age (yup, you can check the domain age), use or web resources like archive.org to determine if they had been in business for as long as they claim to be in and
• References to their customers, apart from the ones published on the websites
• Checking if they have case studies and if the case studies are matching the problems you are facing and solutions you would be expecting
• They charge you $20/hr or higher (yes, that is a good price for a decent developer regardless from India or Argentina)

The reason you should go for developers who charge optimal rates

• They spend less time, deliver better quality of code and deliver a comprehensive solution
• For cases that are difficult to articulate as a requirement, they are often unwilling to give a fixed price quote, but will deliver you a very good quality service and exceptional progress
• Plus, they have a sense of profit, value time spent. They are concerned about the health of their work, that includes your business

Key Indicators of Choosing the Right Team

• You might have a budget, but be sure you have the time to spend on the decision to hire and spend on the developers
• Considering that you will have to qualify the company, spend some time doing something besides just Googling and using the first 3 results
• Look for top spectrum of business players, use the keywords they have on their titles and do look for companies that seem to have gotten buried somewhere else
• Use +review+scam type combinations to ensure that there are no complaints about the company and others have not suffered a great by working with such company/developers
• Look for social media activity, it does not have to be smart, but it should be valid
• If observing indiscriminate postings and activities, you might be looking at poorly managed organization with poor marketing teams, but then… the list can be long

What Can be Quantified?

A small scoring system (assign 1 or 0 for each)

• Can produce more than 3 good references
• Can product more than 3 references that have been working for 2-5 years with same developer or company
• Can showcase work in terms of working websites, products or some other applications, that are
• In good condition, robust, works on different platforms and so & so forth (depending on what you are expecting)
• Can produce code base, showcase any form of project management tools and methods available with them
• Can discuss in detail about the estimation mechanism

If you are able to get some of these details and methods right, you just might have the right team to wonders for your business.

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Original Post – The detriment of 10$/hr coders!